It wouldn’t surprise anyone that Buddhism has a vast literature on suffering, rebirth, and karma, but I often meet people who tell me with great confidence that in Buddhism there’s no heaven or hell. In Buddhist cosmology, hell isn’t just implied; it’s a landscape, precisely and richly described. While there’s no Buddhist Inferno—the closest equivalent would probably be Wu Cheng’en’s sixteenth-century novel Journey to the West, which takes its hero, the Monkey King, to hell for all manner of torments—systematic descriptions of the underworld are laid out in primary scriptures, which have been condensed, memorized, and recited to lay Buddhists in Asia for centuries, as well as dramatized in murals, sculptures, plays, and, more recently, Buddhist theme parks. A passage from the Lamrim Chenmo:
In the Hot Hell the hell-guardians throw the living beings into a hot, blazing iron kettle many leagues across and boil them, deep frying them like fish. Then they impale them through their anuses with blazing iron skewers, which emerge through the crowns of their heads; blazing flames leap forth from their mouths, eyes, noses, ears, and from all of their pores. Then they are placed either on their backs or face down on a blazing iron surface, where they are pounded flat with a hot, blazing iron hammer. In the Extremely Hot Hell the guardians force iron tridents into their victims’ anuses. . . . Their bodies are caught in a hot, blazing iron press; they are thrown head-first into a great blazing iron kettle full of boiling water and boiled . . . until their skin, flesh, and blood are destroyed and only their skeletons remain. Thereupon the guardians fish them out, spread them on the iron surface—where their skin, flesh, and blood regenerate—and then throw them back into the kettle.
posted by f.sheikh