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VOL. 9.8

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Where earthly existence has advantages over both heaven and hell

There is a surprise in store for visitors to Thailand whose perceptions of Buddhism are based on superficial observation. Meditation, chanting, making merit and so on. Priest in saffron robes accepting alms, moving slowly through wats and villages.

Yet take a look at the lurid portrayals of Buddhist hell found in temple murals here in Thailand. Unfortunate beings are shown suffering an imaginative variety of torments that challenge anything within Christian traditions of threatened fire and brimstone.

These murals are lessons, designed more to inspire a sense of dread than to teach a cosmology. As in Christianity, some observers understand the depictions as literal descriptions, while other view them as allegories. (Indeed, according to the essential Buddhist doctrine, no part of our natural experience is literal, given the fact that all of samsara is illusion-like. Everything is compounded; there is no fundamental substance underlying everything.)

In the traditional Pali texts, experience is divided up into either five or six realms, including a variety of “hells”. In popular Thai Theravada Buddhism, a single hell is generally described as being part of sam lok, a simplified cosmology of “three worlds” - the realms of heaven, the human and hell.

On one level, all three spheres are part of samsara, or the natural world of birth and death and suffering. Thus, we’re merely talking about different intensities and kinds of suffering.

Nirvana is something that lies beyond heaven and earth, a condition outside the cycle of samsara and, for the dedicated Buddhist disciple, is the ultimate goal of right action.

Heaven is the fruit of right action. Hell is the punishment for greed, hatred and delusion. Strangely enough, to some outside the tradition, it is within the human realm that right action has the best chance of leading to Nirvana. Heaven is always only a temporary boon, remaining part of the world of samsara.

Being who attain the heavenly realm become overwhelmed by pleasure; they lack the spur of suffering to seek a path outside the cycle of being. In Hell, on the other hand, beings are overwhelmed by suffering, and lack the presence of mind to redeem themselves through good karma. So heed the lesson of the murals and avoid hell. It could involve a long and rather uncomfortable stay.