Buddhist Cosmology (9): Hell Realm

So it's quite a common assertion in the West that Buddhism, unlike Christianity, doesn't have heaven and hell. And in some ways that's true, in some ways it's false. It doesn't have an eternal hell. It doesn't have an eternal heaven. They are transient, just like all possible conditions in the universe. But there are places of great distress, and there are places of great pleasure. And I suppose the word hell, we're borrowing from Christian language, but it would be better to call it a type of purgatory because whatever one has done, one is not subject to eternal punishment. The punishments or the negative results can be very severe, but they're not eternal. And this is something missing, usually from the meditation course, is the descriptions which the Buddhists have of these both pleasure realms and negative realms. So today we're going to talk about this niraya, which is the general description of hell, and there are specific ones within that. Yeah, niraya is the generic term for the lowest type of rebirth, which we can translate loosely as hell. And it does have some superficial similarities to the Christian idea of hell, and that one of the common forms of torture is fire, for example. And maybe before we get into it, I will quote the Buddha who was, they were talking about hell. And this is an interesting brief saying by the Buddha that the ordinary person thinks hell is a place below the ocean or below the earth, but that is not where hell is. Hell, I say, is pain. And so the descriptions of the hell realms are some sort of graphic analogy for the kind of severe pain that can be experienced. So if that cheers you up at all, that's great. That being said, there's still the sense in the citizen, even more so in the commentaries, of hell as an actual destination of rebirth, that a being can experience hellish suffering on earth, but it's also possible to be reborn into a place of continual torment, forward rebirth. Yeah. The fact that it's pain does not mean it's not in a place, or it's not playing out in an experience. But the essence of hell is pain, and the essence of heaven is pleasure. It doesn't mean that they're non-existent, or it's just a fable. It means that that's the essence of it, is pain. So let's talk about these places and how one ends up there. One is reborn into niraya by committing very grievous kama in this life. There are five deeds that are said to result in a sure rebirth into niraya. Killing one's mother, one's father, an arahant, wounding a Buddha, or creating a schism in the sangha. And since the last one can only be committed by bhikkhus, it's said that, there's a saying that bhikkhus can go to hell more easily than laypeople. So interesting that such an emphasis on the sustaining of harmony and the non-producing schismatic types of ideas, because of the severe result, sangha needs to be in harmony and have consistent teachings. And it's said many times by the Buddha that wrong view can lead to hell. And I think it's not so much meant that the wrong view itself leads directly to hellish rebirth, but that it can lead one into committing grievous bad karma without understanding it. Yes. So many ways of justifying murder and all of these things for the ends justify the means. Yes. Turns out they don't. So let's talk about a few cases, descriptions of stories where somebody, the act which precipitates their arrival in hell. There is, for example, Devadatta, who was a cousin of the Buddha and tried to kill the Buddha several times. And when the end of his lifespan came, the earth opened up. This happens a few times in various stories. It's that the earth opens up and the being falls directly through a crack in the earth down to the hell realms. And it's said that because his crime was particularly grievous, he went down to Vichigal, which is the lowest and the worst of the hells. And he had a gigantic body there. He was reborn with a gigantic body so that his feet touched the floor and his head touched the ceiling. And spears pierced him from all directions continually. He's going to be there for an entire kappa. Yeah, severe and graphic negative results. Although it's also said that when his time there is finished and he's in the next world age, he's reborn as a human, he will become a Pachinka Buddha. Well, this is the cheerful side of Buddhism is that it's not eternal hell. And maybe we can say that whoever is watching this film has probably been there already on a number of occasions, and also to heaven on a number of occasions, considering there's a kind of a beginningless, the idea of samsara is beginningless. So you've pretty well been there, done that in the universe, except for one thing, enlightenment, because that terminates the round of samsara. But we've all been there, done that. But yes, there's a redemptive possibility. You're burning off, the sentence is being discharged. And it's not limitless. Yeah. And it's the existence in these hells is created by one's own kama. So it's not, there's a kind of a magical quality to it. Black magical, you might say, because they don't follow ordinary laws of nature. The flames in the Vichy hell are so intense that if an ordinary person were standing 1000 yojanas away, it would burn out his eyeballs to look at it. But the beings there are constantly burned by this flame, but they're not consumed. Yes, that's always a logical issue is like, how does this stuff go on without them dying, perishing? Well, it's the dimensions of psychological suffering are like that. The suffering just seems to persist and persist, the pain persists, but it doesn't seem to finish. The Vichy hell is said to be an iron cube, 100 yojanas across in all directions. And it's packed with suffering beings so tightly that any attempt to move, they end up poking each other. So that's an additional suffering. And flames shoot out from each wall to the far wall. So from the north wall to the south wall, from the ceiling to the floor, and so on. And this is located in one of the commentaries is located as being some distance below the earth, below Jampudipa, where we live. So that in this image, the foundation stone, as it were, samsara, everything is built on top of that. And it's relative, 100 yojanas is 12 kilometers. So it's a fair size, but on the scale of the world system, it's quite small. The island we live on Jampudipa is said to be 10,000 yojanas So you have this small, intense node of ultimate pain is right at the core, the root of conditioned existence. It's a bit of a black hole, isn't it? Like in astrophysics, a whole sun has collapsed into this intensely hypergravity kind of mode. There's speculation on what happens if you go into a black hole. Are there higher realms of how less intense? Yeah, there should have some care in talking about it because there doesn't seem to be a good coherent scheme as there is for the heavens. You know, we have for the sagas, the heavenly realms, we can map them out. There's six sensual heavens, 16 heavens of form and four formless, and they all fit into a neat scheme. The hell realms, it's really difficult, probably impossible to find a really coherent scheme in the source material. There are attempts in the commentary to make it orderly. But there's various texts that keep mentioning different hells that don't fit into the scheme. So it's not really possible. There is a kind of an overview, they talk about eight major hells, and each one has four subsidiary hells. But this is, I think, a late artificial attempt to make order of a rather chaotic scheme. It seems like almost on a case-by-case basis, whatever your particular karma is, it'll be a hell for you. Your karma will create some sort of a space. The essence of hell, as understood in the West, and even in the Greek myths and so forth, is chaos itself. It's the lack of organization. It's not surprising that it's asymmetrical and what we consider to be ugly, deeply ugly. Heaven is the opposite. It's highly symmetrical and beautiful. And then, therefore, the essence of the good, the beautiful, and the truth. And the mansions and so forth, and the beings there are described as beautiful, and they wouldn't be the opposite in the hell realms. Yeah, they're described as hideous. Hideous, deformed, and the other end of the spectrum. And that is the nature of evil. And from a Buddhist point of view, evil is just a folk term for unskillful. So a bad job of conduct, a bad job of life itself, produces this suffering chaos. It's intrinsic to the universe. Let's talk about that story about the sailor, Mandaka. This is a story from the Jatakas. There was a man who wished to make his fortune and wanted to go to sea as a trader, and his mother tried to talk him out of it. You're my only support, and you can't leave me alone, and you might get lost at sea. And he grew angry with her, and he struck her, knocked her down, and went out anyway. He went off to sea. They got out into the ocean, and the ship was stuck in a calm. There was no wind. So the sailors cast lots and decided that he was the jinx, and they threw him overboard. And he swam for his life, and he came to an island that had a crystal palace and four beautiful maidens. And he thought, I've got a maid now, and he stayed at this place enjoying devil-like pleasure for seven days. But these maidens were Wamanapetis, which we discussed in previously, the ghosts that enjoy devil-like pleasure for part of the time, and then they endure suffering after. So they turned into hideous petas, and he fled from there and went swimming again, and came to a silver palace with eight maidens, and the same thing happened. And then a golden palace with 16 maidens, again the same thing. On the last shore he swam to, he saw what looked like a beautiful city with four gates, and he thought, I shall enter this city and make myself its king. And he strolled through the gate of the city, and the first person he encountered was a man wearing a wreath of lotus flowers on his head. And he said, good sir, give me that wreath, I demand you hand it over. And the fellow said, it's not a wreath of flowers, it's a razor wheel. And he said, you're just saying that because you don't want to part with it, hand it over. So this second fellow thought, it must be that my karma has ended, and this fellow has struck his mother down just as I did. So he takes off the wreath and puts it on Mandika's head, and it turns back into a razor wheel, and cuts into his head, and he can't get it off. And the other fellow disappears, his karma's finished, he's no longer in hell. And Mandika looks around, and what he had seen before as a beautiful city has turned into a hideous, terrifying hell scene. So many lessons in that. First of all, the Buddhist idea of the proper relationship with your parents. You have to be very careful around your parents, you owe them your existence, and you're definitely not to strike them. It's not a good idea to hit your mother. And secondly, though, that the perception, the initial perception of these places that Mandika has gone is inviting. And it's quite often, you know, imagine entering a game, you know. It looks like there's some nice girls, and some money, and some drugs as well, and that's the beginning of hell, isn't it? It's the entrance into the deepest maximum security prison, where you're going to end up being murdered in the yard. People don't go to terribly negative, painful places voluntarily. They go through misapprehension and misperception. And they're not able to perceive this. I remember that one of the gambling, the addiction to gambling, is said to be a doorway to the lower planes. So it's not in itself primarily evil, but it leads to downwards. It's something that this initial, the addiction leads downwards. It's a doorway leading to the lower planes. So yeah, there's a lot of insight there. Nobody goes to horrifying places. They all misperceive them as beautiful. There's also, in this story, it highlights the kind of illusory nature of these realms, the mind-created sense of these realms. One way of interpreting the story is that he died immediately being thrown off the ship. He was drowned, and these various realms that he passed through were like bardo states, to use Tibetan language, that he was on a journey between lives. And they notice that they keep getting better, but the very fact that they get better, like there's more women and it's golden, etc., it's kind of like a series of five failed marriages, something like that. Mickey Rooney or Elizabeth Taylor or something like that. It looks glamorous, but one is ejected from the other side, swimming for one's life back into the ocean. Yeah, it's a very skillful exploration of delusion, the nature of delusion. So yes, now there's nobody enforcing any of this. These are just product of natural law, isn't it? It is, although there are like personnel, beings that are in one of the hell realms. They're divided into the suffering beings and the torturers, the rayakas and the rayapalas, the guards of hell, the wardens of hell. And these are like a demonic sort of beings that drag people around with hooks or throw them in pots of boiling copper and various tortures. In early Buddhism, there was a debate. This is in the book of the debates, the Katawattu, it's one of the discussions, is whether the hell wardens are actual beings with consciousness and karma of their own or whether they're illusions created by the karma of the sufferer. The Theravada came down on the side to say that they are actual beings and it's a particular karma. If you're like a cruel jail guard or a torturer in the human life, you can be reborn there because this is also a state of suffering. But other schools of Buddhism said, no, there are no actual beings. They're just illusions created by the suffering, the karma of the sufferers. Right. Real enough though. What about this? This is an interesting case. This is very disturbing in some ways to the Western mind, the karma of soldiers that are killing in battle. Usually in the West, we try to somehow describe it as not as murder, but as kind of a glorious service to the country. Just the country killing somehow. Yeah, justified. Whereas the Buddha has some problematic talk about this, even in the service of the country. Killing is always a bad karma in Buddhism. There's no kind of justification for killing at any time. There is a story, it's a short sutta in the Samyutta, where a mercenary captain encounters the Buddha and they're having a dialogue. He asked the Buddha, it's said by the elders in our tradition that when a soldier dies, if he was good and brave, then he will go to the heaven of those slain by another and there enjoy feasting and mock battles and so on. Just like Valhalla. You'll go to Valhalla and the Buddha is silent. He doesn't answer. So he follow asks three times and Tathagata always answers on the third time. This is a motif that occurs often in the suttas. If there's some unpleasant truth, the person doesn't want to hear it. He hesitates to say. Yeah, but if you keep insisting, he will. The third time he will tell you. And he says, no, what will happen is you'll go to the hell of those slain by another where you will be perpetually forced to hack each other up with swords and axes. Then there's a parallel sutta of an actor who approaches the Buddha and with a very similar wording. He says the elders in our tradition say that when an actor dies, he goes to the heaven of the laughing devas. And again, the Buddha is silent until the third time. And then he says, no, you'll go to the hell of the hell of the laughing demons. And this one I've, you know, I've often contemplated having been in the arts myself, known a few actors and it always seemed a little bit mysterious. So the commentary, does it have an explanation of why this would occur to actors? The commentary says it's because the actors in their performance, they lead people further into sensual desire and delusion. Yeah, if it does. Since, of course, in the Buddhist tradition, there's all kinds of Jataka plays where even monks participate in performances. So there must be a type of drama. Yeah, I think it's the content. It's valueless or degenerative persuasion towards degenerative ideas. Yeah. So you're not exempt saying, oh, I was only an actor. And you're not exempt saying, I was only following orders. Yes. As a soldier. Of course, this is what the Second World War, came out of the Second World War, was that you're not exempt to say, I was just following orders. Yes. Yeah, that was established as like a principle of international law. Yes. Very interesting the Buddha is so far ahead of his time. This must be very discouraging in Buddha's countries to try to get soldiers to enlist for that. With that in mind, I think that the monks in general are a little bit reluctant to be so explicit, just like the Buddha was, like, bring that out in front of the army. And as you know, quite often the army will come and visit monasteries and ask for dhammatalks from monks and so forth. And it's always a bit of a tension there with, you know, you're not exempt, just because you're in the army, if you kill somebody, you're not exempt. Yeah, it is a problematic thing. I have heard that some Thai soldiers justify it in their own minds by saying that they love their country so much, they're willing not only to sacrifice their life, but their next life. Yeah, kind of a Bodhisattva thing where you're fully aware of the consequences of this, but you're going to do it anyway. Yeah. Yeah, which is a bit strange. But that's the state, most religions, Christianity, Buddhism, so forth, when they permeate the country, they are quickly subverted into state religions. Yeah. Where it's not really, it's like you see in the States, particularly, Christianity is really not Christianity, it's the religion of the state. And it's justified through these things, but you're always off to war in some foreign country. And of course, even the football teams are, Jesus is on each side. Yeah, yeah. Praying to Christ. Yeah. A very subversion of it. So it has really not, the message does not necessarily penetrate into the folk level quite often. And this is, you know, as you see, in the time of the Buddha, the same ideas, the story is, we will actually have rewards, but Buddha is not going to tell us, sorry, it's not going to work. It doesn't work that way. Throws a wrench into things. Yeah. Human history. Yeah. People have, you know, they have the high ideals coming from the religion, but they always find ways to weasel around it. Like some fishermen in Buddhist countries, commercial fishermen, they justify it by saying, oh, we're not actually killing any fish, we're just taking them out of the water, and then they die of natural causes. Yes. So any other dimensions that you want to explore with? We can mention Yama. It's a very interesting character. He's the guardian or king of hell, and he acts like a doorkeeper. And he's rather a sympathetic character because he seems to be reluctant to throw anybody into hell. He gives each person that comes before him, you know, somebody after death is brought before him, and he gives him a series of questions. My good man, did you not ever, in your life as a human, did you not ever see a sick person and think, I too am subject to sickness? Oh, no, no, that never occurred to me. And he goes through this whole list of sickness, old age, death, you know, the whole works. And finally, in despair, he says, oh, it's nothing to be done with this one, and hands him over to the hell wardens, and they drag him off to be tortured. So this is more or less functioning as a judge, you know, a judge who's not particularly a violent one, just acting out, just showing that the universe has rules and laws. And he's kind of like a bureaucratic, you know, he's just following procedures. And I don't, I guess Yama really doesn't, it's not his karma. He's just a warden there. He's not actually enacting these functions. Yeah. And it said in one place in the commentary, it says that he's unhappy in his lot. He hopes to be reborn someplace else. He's a good warden, actually. He's just a warden that would like to move on. Just do his job. He has a curiosity about him, too, from a relationship of Yama as we know him from the Buddhist sources to older conception of Yama. And there's some overlap. In the Vedas, Yama was the first human. And he had a twin sister. And they were the progenitors of the human race. Adam and Eve. Yes, Yama and Eve. And when he died, he was the first human to die. So they made him Lord of Death. And his realm was the third heaven, which in the Buddhist conception, the third heaven is Yama. It's spelled differently, though. It's like long A and Yama, the being is short A. Can't help thinking there is some connection with Adam and Eve. Yama and Adam almost, you know. And there, of course, mortality is introduced into the Garden of Eden when they sin. Because they're ignorant. So they're the first ones to die. Wow, parallels. Amazing parallels. You wonder where this stuff comes from and how it arises. From a modern point of view, we look for historical sources or origins to this. But from the Buddhist point of view, these themes keep recurring cyclically in cyclical universes that just keep reappearing and fading and reappearing and fading. I think they express some kind of a deep truth. And different cultures and different traditions are kind of peering through a dark glass, trying to figure out. They express it through these stories. And so there's an underlying similarity in all the stories, because they're all trying to get at the same thing. Yeah. And the best psychologists of the time, whether you're a Neanderthal psychologist or whatever, that type of person who reflects on motives and reflects into things is seeing these things, and they become encased in stories. Quite often, people think that the Buddha is borrowing from history or just adapting stories that haven't come before. It's not necessarily the case any more than Einstein is just borrowing from Newton. He sees the same material, but sees that there's something lacking in the previous descriptions or distorted in the previous descriptions. So Galileo's version of the universe is not entirely different, and it's not based on the previous conception. He's looking at the same phenomena but understanding them in different ways. So this is the tendency is to assert that the Buddha is just evolving out of the Vedas or the Upanishads or something like this. Not necessarily so, just in the same way physicists are not evolving out of the previous physics. They have to see. And quite often, it's radically different, but not quite often. It's sometimes just subtly different. We could also talk about the interworld health. That's a special case, the Lokantara Narayanas. The scheme of the universe is that the Chakavalas, the world systems, are circular, and they abut one another like wagon wheels, so that there's a roughly triangular space in between the worlds. And this space is very dark and very cold, and the sun never shines there because the orbit of the sun is lower than the walls around the world system. So the beings can be reborn into this realm, and this is a particular karma that leads one there is a heavy wrong view. So the darkness of wrong view is expressed as utter darkness of this realm. And it's said that they crawl around like bats hanging on to the outer walls of the world systems. And in the dark, they are unaware there are other beings, so they also suffer from great loneliness. And on rare occasions, they encounter one another, they touch one another as they crawl around, and they immediately think it's something to eat, because they're also hungry, and they attack one another, and they both end up falling down into the caustic sea that everything floats on, and they're dissolved. Yes, well, that's a nice description of certain types of mentality. That's a real lost type of consciousness, isn't it? Yeah. Extreme darkness, the extreme fringes, the total rejection from any form of society. Yes. They're not even in a band of robbers. Yeah, they're just isolated. They're clinging to the outer walls of the world, everything they desire is on the inside, they're on the outside. Extreme isolation and madness. Yeah. Well, that is an exploration of a realm that is rarely talked about in meditation circles. And I suppose it's not a...you can see that the Buddha himself is reluctant to talk about this, but if people persist. So one of the reasons we talk about this is that we don't want to leave people ignorant, and also nicely misinformed that there is no such thing as these realms in Buddhism. There are descriptions of these realms, and they're cautionary tales. I mean, we really should be afraid to do evil. There are consequences. These realms like this one and the Pateron, they're used sometimes in Dhamma talks in the East, particularly in Burma, it's part of the tradition to...it's like hellfire servant, to encourage diligence in your practice, because the only guarantee that you're not going to fall into that realm is to attain to the state of stream-enterer. First stage enlightenment. Yeah. So if you want to be sure not to, you know, first describe all the horrible things that happen, and then if you really want to escape from that, you better get cracking with your practice. Even if one is sure that one has done plenty of good, and been generous, and has really no significant karma, and confident that one should, after this life, be at least human, or go to heaven, there's still a matter of what happens after that, you know, so... Yes. And the Christian idea is like, go to heaven, it's over, it's eternal. But in Buddhism, it's just a resting place for a while. It ends too. Yeah. But it requires a long view of things. Most often people don't...they have the inability to delay gratification, and a short view of things. And that's the mark of development, is the ability to delay gratification at the service of higher qualities of happiness. And having a longer time frame for things, centuries, millennia. And whereas the ordinary person, or even an animal, is just impulsive, it's only in the next two minutes that it has any meaning to them. So they see a nice radio in a store, so they dig a brick, throw it through the window, grab it, and that night at the cocaine party, somebody else steals it from you, and in the morning, both the criminals and the cops are looking for you. That kind of thing. Versus the kind of undertaking a 12-year doctorate, living on ramen noodles, and working at the soup kitchen on the side, you know, sort of thing. So you see this vast spectrum of consciousness, and the higher rewards of this, one's the longer use of things. So that is a little tour of the niraya realms.