Lam-rim 18: The Rest of the Hot Hells; Cold Hells

One of the ways of relating to the different beings in the different realms such as the hell realms is, first of all, to think of them in terms of the mental continuum. We all have individual mental continuums with no beginning and no end. In each lifetime, each mental continuum will have associated with it a physical form. The mental continuum always has a physical basis, a physical support. The physical form with which it is associated in any given lifetime is determined by the karma that was activated at the time of death in the prior rebirth. And that life form, the physical basis, will be such that it will be capable of supporting feelings of happiness and unhappiness up to a certain threshold level. Happiness and unhappiness have physical as well as mental aspects, so associated with that happiness and unhappiness can be physical pleasure and pain. But the main variables that we are concerned with here, in talking about what we would experience in a given rebirth, is happiness and unhappiness, more so than pleasure and pain. We can be happy even while experiencing physical pain. For example, when somebody pulls out a splinter, we can be quite happy about it, even though it’s a bit painful. Perhaps a better example would be getting a rather painful deep-tissue massage. As the English expression goes, “no pain, no gain.” In any case, that’s not the point here. 

The point is that the activity of a mental continuum – which is just an unbroken succession of moments of mind, of mental activity – is, in each moment, experiencing something. In fact, experiencing (myong-ba) is a synonym for mental activity, or mind (sems). What is integral to that moment-to-moment experiencing is feeling levels of happiness – anywhere from extreme happiness, through neutral feelings, to extreme unhappiness – which, again, may or may not be accompanied by feelings of pleasure or pain. Different types of beings having different physical bases experience different thresholds of happiness and unhappiness, pleasure and pain. We know, for example, that when it comes to the physical senses, what we humans are able to see, hear, smell, and so on is only a portion of these sensory spectrums. Many animals can perceive and experience much more. There’s no logical reason why there can’t be yet other kinds of physical bases that can support levels of happiness and unhappiness, pain and pleasure that are beyond what the human apparatus can support. Based on that line of reasoning, it starts to become a little bit easier, I find, to relate to these other life forms and to consider that these other realms in which we could take rebirth exist.

We didn’t go into this point, but in the abhidharma texts, there are descriptions of the locations of these various realms, the sizes of the bodies of the beings who live there, the lengths of their lifespans, and all of that. As for the actual physical locations, these are described in the abhidharma texts in terms of their locations relative to Mount Meru and the four continents that are around it, a description that accords with the general Indian view of geography. Each of the Indian systems seems to have a different version, though it’s basically of the same thing. However, as His Holiness the Dalai Lama has said, the point of the Buddhist teachings is not to teach us geography; the point is to teach us how to overcome suffering. So, if these descriptions of the universe do not fit in with the current scientific view of cosmology and so on, then there’s no reason to insist on the Buddhist description; we can use any description that fits with observation and science. So, we shouldn’t get hung up on these descriptions of the hells in terms of where they’re located – whether they’re underneath Bodh Gaya in India, etc. 

As for the sizes of the bodies and the lengths of the lifespans, again, precise measurements are given. But, again, I think the point is just to know that the beings there have very large bodies and, therefore, much more surface over which to experience pain and unhappiness and that they have very long lifetimes and, therefore, much longer periods of time in which to experience unhappiness and pain. 

As we’ve discussed, the main point of doing these meditations, and what’s specific to this initial scope of motivation, is to understand the types of destructive behavior that would cause us to have these types of rebirths and to feel very strongly that we absolutely want to avoid experiencing them. The causes for rebirth in each of the hot or cold hells are specific types of destructive behavior. What we would experience are things happening to us that are similar to what we had done to others, but happening in a magnified form. We already spoke about how the beings in the first of the joyless realms, the Reviving Hells, fight with and kill each other 500 times each day with weapons that correspond to the weapons that they had used to kill, beat, or injure others in previous lifetimes. What I think would really be a hell would be having to do that over and over again – always killing and being killed, always reviving and having to continue experiencing extreme pain and fear in the process.  

In addition to wanting to develop an understanding of the types of destructive behavior that would bring that kind of suffering, what we also want to develop is compassion – compassion not only for those who experience such extreme pain but also for those who perpetrate violence, because they will, as a result of their actions, experience the same type of horror in a future life. These are the two main emphases that we have here.

When we do the meditations, we can certainly imagine being in these various hell realms. That’s a very, very strong type of practice, one not for the weak-hearted. Again, the reason we meditate on these things and imagine them happening to us is not just because we want to scare ourselves. But we do want to get a little taste of what being in these hell realms might be like, at least in our imagination, because then we certainly would want to avoid them. These are very, very strong meditations. They’re not very appealing and not very easy to do in a sincere way. 

We can extend the meditation to include a slightly lighter form – which is not so light, actually – by thinking of what we personally find to be the most frightening thing and imagining it happening to us and, then, as a consequence, wanting sincerely to avoid that. As I said, this is not a type of practice or meditation for those who are faint of heart or emotionally unstable. This is certainly not recommended for them. 

We went into the discussion last time about our extreme reticence to do these meditations. I, for instance, don’t want to imagine what it would be like to be burned alive. That’s something that I personally would not want to experience. I find that really quite awful. We talked about why we don’t even want to see these types of things in a movie, or even to read about them in a book, and examined what the reasons for that reticence might be in our own individual cases. There’s no need to repeat that discussion, but it brought up some very interesting points having to do with not only feeling helpless when seeing somebody else in a horrible situation but also feeling a great deal of fear when imagining being in that kind of situation ourselves. 

I think we are meant to feel a certain amount of fear when we do these meditations so as to be motivated not to create the causes for being born in these realms. But, obviously, fear is not the optimal motivation. Fear is based on a very strong sense of a solid “me,” a solid pain, and a solid horrible situation, which the feeling of helplessness is strongly associated with. We don’t want our Buddhist meditations to degenerate into wanting to be good just because we’re afraid of going to hell. These horrible rebirths are not punishments. There’s no judge. Basically, it is we who create these situations for ourselves by engaging in very negative, destructive behavior – whether it harms somebody else or not. So, I prefer to explain the motivation that we want to have as being one of dread as opposed to fear. Dread is a strong wish not to experience something. Fear, as I had said, is associated with this strong grasping for a “me.” 

What all of these meditations on the joyless realms, the clutching ghosts, the animal births, and so on are leading up to is the meditation on refuge, or safe direction. This is the antidote to feeling helpless. Fear is very much associated with a feeling of helplessness – that there’s nothing we can do. But when we have this safe direction of refuge, we realize that we have a way to avoid all of this, which is to avoid the causes. Then we have a very clear direction. We’re not helpless because we are able to prevent these things from happening. 

Now, of course, going in a safe direction isn’t very easy for those who are presently experiencing joyless realm rebirths. That’s not exactly the most conducive circumstance for doing voidness meditation or for avoiding the types of negative behavior that perpetuate these types of states. One has to think more in terms of preventing these kinds of situations from ever happening in the future. After all, we have precious human rebirths now, which means that we’re in a situation in which we can prevent that from happening. If we were in an animal realm, in a joyless realm, and so on, we wouldn’t be able even to listen to the Dharma teachings, let alone put them into practice. So, I think meditating on the suffering of the lower realm beings is more of a theoretical thing in the sense that the focus is on preventing our own future suffering. We’re not focusing on what the beings in those realms can do to avoid the suffering that they’re experiencing now and thinking, “Well, what about these poor beings in the joyless realms? What can they do to get out of it?”

The Possibility of Building Up Positive Force in the Lower Realms

There’s a story that is told about one of the famous kings, King Ashoka. King Ashoka was very sick at the time of his death. In the room, there was one of these punkah fans that you find in India. It is a type of bamboo apparatus that is up on the ceiling, and, usually, there is a little boy there to pull the rope on it to make it go back and forth. The boy fell asleep, and the fan fell on top of Ashoka. He got very angry and died in that state of tremendous anger. Even though Ashoka had done so many wonderful things in terms of Dharma, he had also done a tremendous number of destructive things, such as leading his country into war and conquering many territories. Consequently, in his next lifetime, he was reborn as a snake in a pond that was near the palace in which he had lived as king. There was one Indian master – I forget who – who went over to the pond and saw the snake, recognizing that it was the rebirth of Ashoka. When he saw that the snake was about to eat a frog, he said, “Ashoka, don’t eat that frog!” This snake that was Ashoka somehow understood him and didn’t eat the frog. From then on, the snake wouldn’t eat any other small creatures, and it starved itself to death. In that way, he was able to wear off that negative karma and be reborn again as a human. So, there is that anecdote to indicate that it is theoretically possible to build up some positive force even in a lower realm. 

There’s also the story of the fly that circumambulated a stupa on a piece of donkey turd that was in a flood and, as a result of that, built up some positive force – which is another of these lovely examples that we find in the Buddhist literature. So, it’s not hopeless; even in these realms, we can somehow do something positive. In any case, here, we are really only thinking in terms of us, as human beings, having precious human rebirths and doing something to avoid worse rebirths in the future.  

The Tibetans always take their dogs for walks around stupas or around monasteries. Serkong Rinpoche, the young one, always took his dog for a walk with him when he circumambulated his monastery. The Tibetans will even bring their dogs to initiations just to plant the seeds, as it were, even though the dog obviously doesn’t receive the initiation. I always use that as an example: When we go to an initiation, or empowerment, we shouldn’t just sit there like dogs, not understanding and not participating at all in what’s going on because it will have as little effect on us as it would on a dog – or a baby, whom the Tibetans also bring. 

OK. Let us get on with these practices. I don’t want to spend too much time on these hell realms. I think we can get a general idea by just going through a few of them. Also, I think that the main point is to think in terms of the negative acts that we might have done that would cause us to be reborn in these types of realms.

The Black Thread Realm

We discussed the Reviving Realm (Sanjiva), in which everybody is continually killing each other with weapons. The next one is called the “Black Thread Realm” (Kalasutra), in which the guards lay us flat on a burning ground, draw lines on our backs with thread or acid, and then chop up our bodies into little pieces. Then our bodies come back together again, and we go through it all over again – over and over. 

We can think of various people – ourselves, perhaps, in past lives – who sadistically chop off people’s arms or legs as a punishment or as an act of war. I was just reading the news on the internet about the troops in the Congo who had chopped off people’s arms and things like that. Think how absolutely awful it would be to have our bodies chopped up in that way and how we would certainly want to avoid committing any such sadistic acts. Little children sometimes have sadistic tendencies. They might catch an insect, like a fly, and pull its wings or legs off. This type of thing would also result in this type of rebirth. 

Also, it says that, even being very divisive, always aiming to divide others up, will cause us – our bodies – to be divided up. Being divisive is doing things like breaking up friendships or causing those who are far apart to be even further apart. Think of the situation between the Israelis and the Palestinians. They’re already divided, and there are some who try to make the situation even worse. The bodies of those who do that would be divided up, particularly if their divisive behavior went together with violent physical actions. 

Participant: That makes me think about the research that is done with animals.

Dr. Berzin: Vivisection, for example – cutting up animals while they’re still alive. So, we don’t even have to imagine specific types of hells in order to imagine similar things happening to us. There are, as we all know, experiments where the researchers give little mice in the laboratory some horrible disease or do something else really awful to them to further their medical or biological research. As a result, they themselves might be victims of such types of experiments – as happened, in fact, to some people in the Nazi concentration camps. These types of things are not so farfetched. 

I think it’s pretty awful imagining things like somebody’s arm being chopped off or having one’s own arm being chopped off. I wouldn’t really encourage people to do that. I personally have such an aversion to thinking even slightly of such things. What these meditations draw me more into thinking is that I would certainly want to avoid inflicting that type of harm on anybody else. I will confess, though, that when I was four or five years old, one of my favorite things to do was to go out on our back porch with a flyswatter to kill the flies. The porch faced the garbage in the backyard, so here were a lot of flies. If I caught them, I did, in fact, pull their legs and wings off. If we have done things like that, we try to feel very strong regret, even if we did them as very young children, not really knowing what we were doing or thinking. And certainly, we think about wanting not to repeat such behavior ever again in the future, even to have the instincts to repeat it.

[meditation]

OK. Two things came to my mind. 

One is the naivety that we have. I certainly had that. We think, “Well, this fly doesn’t have any feeling,” or “What does it matter if I pull its wings off?” – things like that. It’s a very closed-hearted, closed-minded attitude. Many people can have that attitude toward other people, not just insects or animals. 

Developing Compassion for Those Who Inflict Suffering on Others

The other thing that came to my mind was that we have compassion for those who are experiencing that kind of suffering now – for instance, having their limbs amputated or chopped off with a machete – but not so much compassion for those who cause it. But if we think in terms of the beginningless and endless mental continuum and rebirth, we see that the suffering those beings are experiencing now is just a consequence of their own past actions. It’s a result of the causes they created in former lives. Therefore, we could – even need to, I think – extend that compassion back to when, in their former lives, they committed similar destructive acts themselves. Like that, I think it becomes a little bit easier to start to develop compassion for those who perpetrate very violent crimes. What do you think?

Participant: In former times, and even not so long ago, it was necessary for almost everybody to kill to eat.

Dr. Berzin: Well, we’ve had agriculture for a very long time, for many thousands of years. But before there was agriculture, when people lived by hunting, they were, in a sense, no better than animals in that they had to hunt in order to live. You’re right, though, that in the more recent past, when there weren’t stores and so on, people raised chickens and pigs that they killed to eat.

Participant: The point is that, even here in Europe, slaughtering animals was just normal. Everybody was killing – and many still do.

Dr. Berzin: So, what is the conclusion?

Participant: It’s that the big fish eat the small fish.

Dr. Berzin: This is why it says in the teachings that there are far, far more beings in these lower realms than there are in the higher realms and that the precious human rebirth is very, very rare. 

Participant: But how does one stop all the killing?

Dr. Berzin: This is the importance of this precious human rebirth – that we are in a situation where we can actually do something to stop it. We can’t go around trying to get everybody to stop killing – to get the fish in the sea to stop eating each other or the lions to stop hunting. Obviously, we can’t do that. We try to influence people, but their instincts are very strong. Remember, one of the characteristics of the precious human rebirth is not having the strong negative karmic instincts that would draw us into repeating actions of killing and so on. If we are free – temporarily, at least – of those kinds of instincts, then we can do something. On an initial level, we can at least exercise self-control and not act destructively. That’s what we work on, on the initial level. Then on the intermediate and advanced levels, we work on getting rid of the disturbing emotions and the unawareness, or ignorance, which are the causes for us to act destructively. And then, on the advanced level, we think, in addition, about others. So, we develop much stronger compassion. 

That’s exactly the point of the precious human rebirth: we can actually do something now, but we may not be able to do something in our next lives. That’s what we’re trying to realize with the meditations we’re doing now. We might not have the opportunity of a precious human life later. Don’t think that we necessarily will.

Getting Another Human Rebirth Is Not a Given

I have a very good friend who spends a great deal of her time in the Tibetan community. She is very close with the lay Tibetans. She says that the Tibetans in the lay community think that they’re not going to be humans in their next lifetimes. We Westerners assume that we’re always going to be reborn as humans. Tibetans don’t. The Tibetans – we’re not talking about the monks and nuns who have some deeper Buddhist education – really seem to think, “Hey, this is it as a human being! Chances are that, next lifetime, I’m going to be something much, much worse.” They think we Westerners are quite arrogant and naive to think that it’s so easy to be reborn as a human, especially one with a precious human rebirth. 

That’s something that we don’t seem to emphasize so much in our meditations – how rare and how difficult it is to get a precious human rebirth. I think that’s worth taking a few minutes to consider. What is our attitude about how easy it’s going to be to get precious human rebirths again? Do we sort of assume that we will always be reborn as humans? We do, don’t we? And because we think we’re always going to be reborn as humans, we’re lazy. We don’t make strong efforts to build up the causes to be reborn as humans because we think it’s going to happen just automatically. 

Whether we believe in rebirth or not, the point is to get motivated to build up the causes to be reborn as a human with a precious human rebirth. What are the causes? Ethical self-discipline completed with the other far-reaching attitudes – generosity, patience, perseverance, concentration, discriminating awareness – and also prayers.

Participant: Yes, but one has to believe in rebirth; otherwise, it makes no sense.

Dr. Berzin: However, even if one doesn’t believe in rebirth, it’s very beneficial. If we have more discipline, patience, perseverance, etc., we create more happiness for ourselves and others, even in this lifetime. It certainly doesn’t benefit us or make us happy to be angry all the time or to go around killing people.

Participant: I find that trying to have compassion for the person who does something very negative helps to reduce my anger. But it’s very difficult to explain that idea to someone who isn’t Buddhist or who has no understanding about it. Often they misunderstand, thinking that it means that they shouldn’t do anything when someone tries to hurt them. They think that I’m saying, “Oh, yeah, let them do whatever they want.”

Dr. Berzin: This is referring to the point that I brought up concerning compassion – that if we can have compassion for those who are suffering now, we could extend that compassion back to when they acted very destructively, which was the cause for their current suffering. In this way, it would be possible to develop compassion toward those who perpetrate violence – particularly when they direct it at us – and to respond without getting angry and without hitting back. But it can be difficult trying to explain that to others. They can think that we are being very weak and just letting the other person push us around. But His Holiness says that, actually, it takes far more courage not to get angry. It’s much easier to get angry, to act completely out of control, and to escalate the violence. Also, as His Holiness points out, the point of the teachings on patience, tolerance, compassion, etc. is to learn how not to get angry. However, there are certain situations in which we need – without getting angry – to forcefully get the other person to stop being violent. That’s, of course, very difficult to do.

Participant: That’s difficult to explain to those who are not thinking in terms of karma.

Dr. Berzin: But look at any sort of nonviolent movement, peace movement. We don’t have to understand karma in order to be in favor of nonviolence.

But let’s get back to our topic. 

The immediate topic before this was about how we have the naïve assumption that we’re going to have precious human rebirths all the time. Did that point sink in? I hope it did, because the reason we meditate on and take these worse realms seriously is so that we really do try to continue having precious human rebirths. That’s the first way of taking advantage of the precious human rebirth: to use it to ensure that we get more. And the point is not just to get more: it’s to use the precious human rebirth to gain liberation and enlightenment. That, undoubtedly, is going to take more than one precious human lifetime to achieve, even though, in theory – in the highest class of tantra – it is possible to achieve in one lifetime. But that is unbelievably rare.

The Realm of Mass Destruction

The next of the hot hells is the Realm of Mass Destruction (Samghata). There, we are placed with many other trapped beings between two mountains that are in the shape of ram heads or other animal heads and crushed between them and, then, brought back to life. This happens 500 times a day. This is for those who deliberately step on insects, squash them, smack them – like smacking mosquitos with our hands – and things like that. 

This is an example of things happening back to us on a much larger scale – like being stepped on by Godzilla or something like that. Again, there’s the naivety that ants and flies don’t feel anything. But if there were some giant going around smashing us between their hands or stepping on us with their feet, we would find that pretty awful, especially if they did it arbitrarily – just for fun. They just see us and they run over and stomp on us. That would be a pretty awful kind of life. So by thinking like that – like exchanging ourselves with others, putting ourselves in the position of that ant or fly being smacked – we would want to refrain from acting that way ourselves. 

So, let’s do this as a last meditation on these hot realms. There’s no need to go into boiling lobsters alive and, therefore, being boiled alive ourselves and so on. I’m sure there’s hardly anybody who has not deliberately smacked a mosquito or stepped on something – a cockroach, for instance.

[meditation]

Moving on, we have the cold joyless realms, the cold hells. These are increasingly colder and colder situations in which we’re completely naked, experiencing extreme cold; our bodies are cracking and so on. Being reborn in these realms is caused, on the one hand, by throwing creatures out into the cold and, on the other hand, by having a very closed-minded, closed-hearted attitude. 

Throwing insects out into the cold – I certainly am guilty of that. I find some insect in my house and, winter or not, I open the window and just throw it out. Now, it could be a fly that is able to fly away, but how many times have we done this with a little worm or a beetle that can’t fly? We just naively toss it out the window of a five-story building, as if this thing were going to bounce or not get hurt when it falls such an unbelievable distance to the ground.

Participant: Normally, nothing happens to insects, even if they fall down a thousand meters. But throwing them out in the cold could certainly kill them.

Participant: When we bring in wood for heat, we sometimes find some small bugs in it. We try to take them outside to some spot where it’s not too cold. I didn’t expect that, if it’s a bit too cold – below zero – they just died. It’s difficult to decide what to do with them. We can’t keep them all in our houses.

Participant: We burn their houses.

Dr. Berzin: This is all part of the all-pervasive suffering. In a broad sense, it’s the suffering inherent in having the types of bodies and minds that we have. That means not only that because we have heads, we get headaches but also that because we have the types of bodies we have, there’s no way that we can eat, walk, or do anything without killing something.

Participant: I remember a story about Lama Zopa. He also had quite a lot of bugs in his house. So, he bought some boxes from the supermarket and kept all the bugs in these boxes in his house during the winter because it was too cold outside. And he probably did some pujas with them.

Dr. Berzin: I’m sure Lama Zopa did. But if you’re not Lama Zopa, it’s not so simple. 

I think the point here is that there’s naivety and, also, a closed-mindedness and closed-heartedness. We just toss the things out without thinking anything about what their lives are going to be like. 

Anyway, let’s think a little bit about this before we end.

[meditation]

There are just a few more points about these joyless realms, but we can leave them for next time.