RELIGION or POLITICS - How about HELL? Hmmm?

        (Much of these writings are out of the Book "The Buddha in Daily Life" by Richard Causton.)


A couple blogs ago, I wrote about the 10 Worlds that all Buddhists do and, can live in day to day - HELL being the first. It was brought on by seeing again, the hell of the terrorist's attack on 9/11. It was vividly displayed on most all television stations. A hell for sure.

Then I gave the story of a young Jewish chemist, Primo Levi, who in 1944 was transported to a labor camp near Auschwitz, Germany and the subsequent horror he and some 100 others experienced there, another type of pure hell on earth.

Fortunately, most of us wil never have to suffer the sort of agony which Levi and other death-camp victims went through, but that is not to say that Hell of other individuals cannot be as intense, say, like losing a loved one. We may not understand another person's particular hell, or perhaps think that the cause of it is insignificant, still for that person it is real and undeniable.

For instance, RAGE, is the world of Hell. (different than the world of Anger). Rage, essentially is directed toward one's self. It is the rage of frustration and even self destruction, often including the desire to destroy one's surroundings.

Worry is also a manifestation in the mind of the world of Hell, a particularly cruel and subtle one, consisting of imagining the worst possible outcome of some event. Another aspect is the Lack of Hope.

To all intents and purposes, the state of Hell really is the lowest of he Ten Worlds. Part of the greatness of Buddhism, however, lies in teaching that all nine worlds, Fom Hell to Bodhisattva, have both a positive and negative aspect (Buddhahood alone being wholly creative) and that all are necessary to life. It might be thought there can be absolutely no redeeming features in the world of Hell, but actually there are. Firstly, and quite simply, without Hell we could never know happiness.

Then again, the desire to keep out of the world of Hell is a powerful motivation for action: if we did not suffer the pain of hunger, we would never know when to eat, for instance. Similarly, suffering can be a form of protection: if fire did not hurt, we could seriously injure ourselves without being aware of it.

Perhaps most importantly, though, if we never suffered ourselves, we would never be able to identify and sympathize with the suffering of others, or be moved to help them. In other words, in Buddhism the world of Hell leads directly to the world of Bodhisattva. ( I'll explain what a Bodhisattva is at a later time, but achievement is definitely a good thing).

Thanks for reading, good person. You will be wiser of doing so. For today. Cheers    CJ