Originally, ogres were people just like us — but with one significant flaw: they were prone to anger and irritability, and even when performing acts of merit, they did so with ill temper and fluctuating moods.
For example, one might set out to make merit by offering alms — with a sincere intention to do good — and so rise early in the morning and hasten to the kitchen to prepare food. Yet if anyone comes to help, nothing they do is satisfactory, and one grumbles throughout. When the time comes, being a person of irascible temperament, if the monks arrive slightly late or slightly early, one grumbles again.
Going up to the pavilion to listen to the teaching, one grows irritated by others — that person is this way, this person is that way — finding endless cause for irritation and anger at every turn.
The mind has merit within it, yet its underlying disposition is one of chronic irritability. And so, although merit and generosity are practiced and merit is indeed accumulated, it is accumulated in a haphazard and incomplete manner. Upon departing this world, instead of being reborn as a celestial being, one finds oneself reborn as an ogre instead.
From the book “Ordained Without Wasting the Robe, Disrobed Without Squandering the Many Robe”, pages 49–50
