Is There a Buddhist Heaven or a Buddhist Hell?

Heaven and Hell are words found in many Buddhist scriptures, but the ideas behind the Buddhist heavens and Buddhist hells are very different from the concepts of Heaven and Hell in other religious traditions. In a sort of spiritual ecology, it would be a waste for someone to end up in Hell for all eternity.

Instead, the Buddhist hells are more like the Catholic concept of Purgatory. Buddhist hells are not places of eternal punishment; instead, they are places to work out bad karma accumulated over lifetimes. Similarly, Buddhist heavens are not final, eternal resting places. Hells and heavens are just links on the wheel of samsara, the almost eternal cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. Like Buddhist hell, Buddhist heavens are not ends to the journey. In fact, there are many heavens and many hells within which karma and merit are balanced.

As a rule, the Buddhist scriptures do not speak all that highly of Heaven. Consider this passage from The Dhammapada, the best known Buddhist scripture: "better than going to heaven, better than lordship over all worlds, is the reward of the first step in holiness."

The Buddha taught that heavens and hells exist not only outside our world, but also within our world, within us. Here and now, we may burn with greed or anger or lust. We may burn from emotional as well as physical pain.

No matter what plane of existence or consciousness, a Buddhist hell is a place where there is more suffering than pleasure. A Buddhist heaven is a place where there is there is more pleasure than suffering. In either place, either kind of place, we who experience the "precious human birth" can learn and progress toward enlightenment, beyond heaven or hell.

After death, traditional Buddhist teaching holds that there is an incredible spectrum of possibility. One truth only is inevitable: no new state of being will be eternal. Hell is terrible, and there are some terrible representations of Buddhist hells, and Heaven may be pleasant, but both are temporary states.

The cycle of birth, death and rebirth goes on and on unless one achieves Nirvana, which is permanent, actually beyond time. In the course of births and deaths, we each have been born into hells many times, into heavens many times.

But, according to Buddhist teaching, all of us always have within ourselves the potential for heaven and hell here and now. Again, to quote The Dhammapada, "All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with a pure thought, happiness follows him, like a shadow that never leaves him." In other words, within his (or her) own mind, a Buddhist creates a unique heaven or hell.

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