Beings You Might Meet in Buddhist Hell

Who's Who in Naraka

By Barbara O'Brien

Yama Holding a Bhava-chakra.  Stephen Shephard, Creative Commons License

It might surprise you to know there even is a Buddhist hell. There is a realm of hells, in fact. Called
Niraya in Pali or Naraka in Sanskrit, it is one of the Six Realms of the World of Desire, which is one of
the Three Worlds of old Buddhist cosmology.
If you are interested in where Naraka originated and how it is described in Buddhist sutras, please see
"The Buddhist Hell Realm." For a discussion on how the hell ream is understood -- is it real, or
allegory?-- see "Understanding the Buddhist Hell Realm." Note that when I write about the hell realm I
usually treat is as an allegory, although it's understood many ways.
This article is about the characters you might meet in Naraka, if you go there, and what function they
serve.
Yama
Yama is lord of the hell realm, a job he has held since before there was Buddhism. He was first
mentioned in the Vedas, Hindu scriptures that already were a few centuries old when the historical
Buddha was born.
The Buddhist version of Yama does not judge. His role is to oversee punishments for those who come
under his jurisdiction, but it is a person's own karma that put him in that unhappy state. Yama also sends
"messengers," or warnings, to people who are on the path to his realm. Such messengers might include
the sights of an elderly person or a corpse, reminding us that old age and death waits for us, too.
The important thing to understand about Yama is that he's not a bad guy. Yes, he has a terrifying
appearance, but that's because frightening people is part of his job. He is in fact a dharmapala, or a
protector of the dharma. His ultimate purpose is to help all beings realize enlightenment.
Yama is known to have a host of "helpers," something like demon soldiers, who live with him in the hell
realms and carry out his orders.
Even Yama and his soldiers hope someday to be released from hell when the karma of what they do is
exhausted. To this end, they regularly punish themselves for torturing others by drinking melted metal.
Ksitigarbha
Ksitigarbha is the bodhisattva of hell beings. This bodhisattva is said to travel freely among the Six
Realms, guiding beings in the bardo, and he often is called upon to be a protector of deceased children.
But his primary mission is to rescue people in hell and guide them out of it.
It his said that once Ksitigarbha was a girl whose mother died and was reborn in the hell realm. The
worked tireless to obtain merit, dedicated to her mother, so that her suffering would be eased. One day
she was shown a vision of the hell realm, and a hell-soldier told her that her mother had been liberated.
But the girl was so disturbed at the sight of other beings in torment that she vowed to free them all. "If I
do not go to the hell to help the suffering beings there, who else will go?" she said. "I will not become a
Buddha until the hells are empty. Only when all beings have been saved, will I enter Nirvana."
Ksitigarbha sometimes is depicted standing, surrounded by the flames of hell. He wears monk's robes
with his feet showing, indicating that he travels. He carries a wish-fulfilling jewel and a staff with six
rings, symbolizing his mastery of the Six Realms.
Read More: Ksitigarbha
Avalokiteshvara
The Bhava-chakra, or Wheel of Life, is a graphical depiction of the Six Realms. The Bhava-chakra often
shows a bodhisattva in each realm, including hell. This teaches us that no matter how desperate our
circumstances, the dharma is always available to us. And that bodhisattva is Avalokiteshvara.
It is said Avalokiteshvara -- who is sometimes described as male but is more often female -- has traveled
to all of the Six Realms,and in her presence they become something like heavens. When she entered the
hell realm, all the torture devices disappeared, and lotus blossoms bloomed everywhere.
Avalokiteshvara can be understood as the embodiment of bodhicitta, or the desire to realize
enlightenment for the sake of all beings. A person who has cultivated bodhicitta is immediately liberated
from the hell realm.
http://buddhism.about.com/od/thesixrealms/fl/Icons-of-the-Buddhist-Hell-Realm.htm

Buddhist Hell
Your Guide to Naraka

By Barbara O'Brien

Hands from hell sculpture by artist Chalermchai Kositpipat at Wat Rong Khun, Thailand.  © Ym1107 |
Dreamstime.com - Wat Rong Khun Temple In ChiangRai，Thailand Photo
By my count, of the 31 realms of the old Buddhist cosmology, 25 are deva or "god" realms, which
arguably qualifies them as "heavens." Of the remaining realms, usually only one is referred to as "hell,"
also called Niraya in Pali or Naraka in Sanskrit. Naraka is one of the Six Realms of the World of Desire.
Very briefly, the Six Realms are a description of different kinds of  conditioned existence into which
beings are reborn.
The nature of one's existence is determined by karma. Some realms seem more pleasant than others --
heaven sounds preferable to hell -- but all are dukkha, meaning they are temporary and imperfect.
Although some dharma teachers may tell you these realms are real,physical places, others regard the
realms in many ways beside literal.
They may represent one's own shifting psychological states, for example, or personality types. They can
be understood as allegories of a kind of projected reality. Whatever they are -- heaven, hell or something
else -- none are permanent.
Origin of Hell
A kind of "hell realm" or underworld called Narak or Naraka is also found in HInduism, Sikhism and
Jainism. I understand the earliest use of the name is in the early HIndu Vedas (ca. 1500-1200 BCE).
Yama, the Buddhist lord of the hell realm, made his first appearance in the Vedas as well.
The early texts, however, describe Naraka only vaguely as a dark and depressing place. During the 1st
millennium BCE the concept of multiple hells took hold. These hells held different kinds of torments,
and reincarnation into a hall depended on what sort of misdeeds one had committed.
In time the karma of the misdeeds was spent, and one could leave.
Early Buddhism had similar teachings about multiple hells. The biggest distinction is that the early
Buddhist sutras stressed that there was no god or other supernatural intelligence passing judgments or
making assignments. Karma, understood as a kind of natural law, would result in an appropriate rebirth.
"Geography" of the Hell Realm
Several texts in the Pali Sutta-pitaka describe the Buddhist Naraka. The Devaduta Sutta (Majjhima
Nikaya 130), for example, goes into considerable detail. It describes a succession of torments in which a
person experiences the results of his own karma. This is gruesome stuff; the "wrongdoer" is pierced with
hot irons, sliced with axes and burned with fire. He passes through a forest of thorns and then a forest
with swords for leaves. His mouth is pried open and hot metal is poured into him. But he cannot die
until the karma he created is exhausted.
As time went on, descriptions of the several hells grew more elaborate. Mahayana sutras name several
hells and hundreds of sub-hells. Most often, though, in Mahayana one hears of eight hot or fire hells and
eight cold or ice hells.
The ice hells are above the hot hells. The ice hells are described as frozen, desolate plains or mountains
where people must dwell naked. The ice hells are:
 Arbuda (hell of freezing while skin blisters)
 Nirarbuda (hell of freezing while the blisters break open)
 Atata (hell of shivering)
 Hahava (hell of shivering and moaning)
 Huhuva (hell of chattering teeth, plus moaning)
 Utpala (hell where one's skin turns as blue as a blue lotus)
 Padma (the lotus hell where one's skin cracks)
 Mahapadma (the great lotus hell where one becomes so frozen the body falls apart)
The hot hells include place where one is cooked in cauldrons or ovens and trapped in white-hot metal
houses where demons pierce one with hot metal stakes. People are cut apart with burning saws and
crushed by huge hot metal hammers. And as soon as someone is thoroughly cooked, burnt,
dismembered or crushed, he or she comes back to life and goes through it all again. Common names for
the eight hot hells are:
 Samjiva (hell of reviving or repeating attacks)
 Kalasutra (hell of black lines or wires; used as guides for the saws)
 Samghata (hell of being crushed by big hot things)
 Raurava (hell of screaming while running around on burning ground)
 Maharaurava (hell of great screaming while being eaten by animals)
 Tapana (hell of scorching heat, while being pierced by spears)
 Pratapana (hell of fiercely scorching heat while being pierced by tridents)
  Avici (hell without interruption while being roasted in ovens)
As Mahayana Buddhism spread through Asia, "traditional" hells got mixed into local folklore about
hells. The Chinese hell Diyu, for example, is an elaborate place cobbled together from several  sources
and ruled by Ten Yama Kings.
Note that, strictly speaking, the Hungry Ghost realm is separate from the Hell Realm, but you don't want
to be there, either.
Seriously?
In my opinion, literal belief in these hells makes no sense on several levels. The way the hells are
described suggest individual rebirth, for example, which is not what most of Buddhism teaches. If the
point of them originally was to scare the stuffing out of people to keep them from going astray, I bet that
more often than not, it worked.
http://buddhism.about.com/od/thesixrealms/fl/The-Buddhist-Hell-Realms.htm

Understanding the Buddhist Hell Realm

Is Hell Real or Allegorical?

By Barbara O'Brien

Detail of murals with scenes of hell, 19th century, Wat Saket, Bangkok, Thailand.  © Luca Tettoni /
Getty Images
The Buddhist hell realm -- Naraka (Sanskrit) or Niraya (Pali) --  is one of the Six Realms of the World
of Desire. It is also said to be a horrific place of fire and ice. Some sutras describe the hell realm as a
place with multiple hells offering increasingly nasty sorts of torment.
Beings born into a hell realm stay there only until the karma of their misdeeds is exhausted, not for all
eternity. That can take a very long time, however.
See "The Buddhist Hell Realm: Your Guide to Naraka" for more about the origins of the hell realm and
how it is described in scripture. See "Icons of the Buddhist Heal Realm" to read about beings you might
meet there. Here I want to talk more about the mythology surrounding the hell realm and how some
dharma teachers understand it.
Is Hell Real or Allegorical?
The first thing most people want to know is, do Buddhists believe the hell realm is a real place? Some
do, but that's not necessarily how it is meant to be understood.
The question of the existence or reality of the hell realm requires a careful answer, however, because in
Buddhism it can be problematic to talk about the existence or reality of anything. Buddhist teachings
rest on the proposition that the way we normally understand "existence" and "reality" is delusional.
For example, the Madhyamika school of Buddhist philosophy teaches that because all phenomena
depend on other phenomena for existence, no phenomenon has intrinsic existence, and a thing or being
takes identity only in how it relates to other phenomena.
  Thus, phenomena cannot be said to exist or not-exist.
The Yogacara school proposes that all of the things and beings we think are "out there" actually are
fabrications of mind or awareness (vijnana). Awareness is real, but objects of awareness do not have the
physical reality we assume they do.
With that in mind: If you were to survey several dharma teachers and ask how they understand the hell
realm, you might get several different answers.
One might say "yes," meaning it's no more or less real that wherever you are now. Another might say
"no," meaning it has no objective reality, but then neither does anywhere else. And in this case these two
teachers might understand hell in exactly the same way. "Yes" and "no" sometimes end up in the same
place.
Outside of metaphysics -- many Buddhist teachers, as well as many psychologists, will tell you that we
all go through life in a fog of projected reality. The "reality" we experience is made of those projections,
and the Six Realms are sometimes interpreted as allegories of those psychological projections. If we are
in "hell," it's a projected hell, and we can release ourselves from it by changing our projections and our
karma.
Commentaries on Hell
In his commentary on the Bardo Thodol, Chogyam Trungpa (1939-1987) described hell as a state of
violent aggression in which fear and anger turn inward. In this sense, a fire hell being lives in a
projected world in which everything is against him, and he doesn't understand he is the one creating this
world. He has such intense anger issues he drives everyone away, which of course makes him more
angry.
"You are angry with something and try to destroy it, but at the same time the process becomes self-
destructive, it turns inward and you would like to run away from it; but then it seems too late, you are
the anger itself, so there is nowhere to run away. You are haunting yourself constantly, and that is the
development of hell." [The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Shambhala, 1975), edited by Freemantle and
Trungpa; p. 6]
Ice hell beings also are aggressive, but this aggression keeps them from reaching out to others. Ice hell
beings live in a cold, isolated place full of smugness and self-satisfaction, Trungpa said.
Another noteworthy commentary was written by the Japanese teacher Nichiren (1222-1282). Sometimes
published under the title "Hell Is a Land of Tranquil Light," this essay actually is a letter written by
Nichiren  to a recently widowed woman on July 11, 1274,
 "The word jigoku or 'hell' can be interpreted to mean digging a hole in the ground. A hole is always dug
for one who dies; this is what is called "hell." The flames that reduce one’s body to ashes are the fires of
the hell of incessant suffering. One’s wife, children and relatives hurrying one’s body to the grave are
the guards and wardens of hell. The plaintive cries of one’s family are the voices of the guards and
wardens of hell. One’s two-and-a-half-foot-long walking stick is the iron rod of torture in hell. The
horses and oxen that carry one’s body are the horse-headed and ox-headed demons, and the grave itself
is the great citadel of the hell of incessant suffering. The eighty-four thousand earthly desires are eighty-
four thousand cauldrons in hell. One’s body as it leaves home is departing on a journey to the mountain
of death, while the river beside which one’s filial children stand in grief is the river of three crossings. It
is useless to look for hell anywhere else."
This seems harsh written to a widow, but he continues with a more hopeful tone. Nichren taught that the
whole of the dharma is given to humankind through the Lotus Sutra.
"Those who embrace the Lotus Sutra, however, can change all this. For them, hell changes into the Land
of Tranquil Light, the burning fires of agony change into the torch of wisdom of the Buddha in his
reward body; the dead person becomes a Buddha in his body of the Law; and the fiery inferno becomes
the "room of great pity and compassion" where the Buddha in his manifested body abides."
In other words, in this widow's time of grief the world could manifest as hell or as a land of tranquil
light. The same is true of the world you live in.
http://buddhism.about.com/od/thesixrealms/fl/Understanding-the-Buddhist-Hell-Realm.htm

The Thirty-one Realms

Ancient Buddhist Cosmology

By Barbara O'Brien

You may have heard of the Six Realms. You can't wade very far into Buddhism before bumping into
discussion of the Six Realms, so understanding them is useful. But did you know there are 25 other
realms?
In old Buddhist cosmology -- which was adapted from very ancient, pre-Buddhist Vedic cosmology --
there were 31 planes of existence, all clustered in layers around great Mount Meru. These 31 planes or
realms are sorted into three meta-realms, or Three Worlds.
These are Arupyadhatu, the formless world or realm; Rupadhatu, the world of form; and Kamadhatu, the
world of desire. "Our" Six Realms are parts of Kamadhatu.
If you ever run into mention of "Three Realms" or "Three Worlds,"  usually this is referring to
Arupyadhatu, Rupadhatu, and Kamadhatu. And, as I said, within these three worlds are the 31 realms.
You might run into a dharma wheel with 31 spokes some day, and this is what the 31 spokes represent.
Do you need to know this? Probably not. But you will run into it,so it's useful to know. There are some
schools of Buddhism, especially in Asia, that take the 31 realms very seriously. For most of us, it's all
right to understand them as allegories.
The image at left is my handy-dandy clip-and-save guide to the 31 realms.
The Three Worlds (or Dhatus)
Note that the Sanskrit word dhatu often is translated as "world" or "land," but that isn't exactly right. A
dhatu is more like a perceptual basis or source of something, not necessarily a geographical or physical
thing.
Arupyadhatu. Arupyadhatu would not be a physical place even if you believed in it literally.
The  Arupyadhatu and the beings who inhabit it are formless. They have no shape or location, and
neither does their world.
This Formless World contains four spheres. The first is the sphere of neither perception or non-
perception; the beings in this sphere have gone beyond perception but are not completely unconscious.
The second is the sphere of nothingness, where beings contemplate, well, nothingness. Please
understand this is not the same as "emptiness," which is more of an undifferentiated something than
actually nothing.
The third sphere is the sphere of infinite consciousness, where beings contemplate vijnana pervading
everywhere. And in the fourth, the sphere of infinite space, beings contemplate space pervading
everywhere. I understand that these four kinds of contemplation represent states of mind that various
not-Buddhist teachers considered to be enlightenment, but which really aren't enlightenment.
Rupadhatu. This is the world of form. The beings of this realm are said to have very subtle forms that
would be invisible to most other beings, but they are forms nonetheless. The Rupadhatu is a more
complicated place than the Arupyadhatu. There are five primary realms in the Rupadhatu but also a
number of sub-realms, so that the Rupadhatu accounts for 16 of the 31 realms.
For reference, the five primary realms are:
 Suddhavasa
 Brhatphala
 Subhakrtsna
 Abhasvara
 Brahma
These realms are visualized as stacked one on top of the other, and the lower realms don't know about
the upper ones, so they all imagine they are living in the top realm.
The beings of the formless and form realms, Arupyadhatu and Rupadhatu, are considered to be devas of
various sorts. These devas have transcended the world of desire, so they aren't the same sort of devas
one finds in the Kamadhatu deva realm. But neither are they entirely enlightened, so they've missed out
on Nirvana.
Kamadhatu. Again, this is "our" world, the world of desire, or samsara, or karma. When Buddhists talk
about the Six Realms, they are talking about Kamadhatu. This is the world represented on the Wheel of
Life. I've written about world in other articles, and if you are studying any form of Buddhism it's useful
to become familiar with it.
And no, you don't have to believe in the Six Realms literally. I have found them to be a fascinating
guide to personality types, however, and even to some of my own passing moods.
Although we call Kamadhatu the "Six Realms," the devas have sub-realms,so Kamadhatu counts for 11
of the 31 realms.
Whether it's useful to explore the other worlds I cannot say, because I haven't much looked at them
myself. Information about them strikes me as a lot of brain clutter, frankly. But there may be some
allegorical gems in the clutter somewhere that are worth seeking.
http://buddhism.about.com/od/thesixrealms/fl/The-Thirty-one-Realms.htm