Repentance elevates, guilt destroys. Scaring people with the fear of hell is nothing but instilling guilt. It is far easier to discipline someone by frightening him with hell than to coax him towards the good with the blessings of heaven. That is why many say that hell does not really exist at all, that it was invented only to discipline fools.
But look at any religious or spiritual tradition, and everywhere you will find vivid descriptions of hell, indeed of hells, of choice circles and sufferings. For each kind of sin, different sufferings and torments await the depraved, and the theological plot of damnation is conceived in much the same way in the West and in the East.
A relatively recent source of Tibetan Buddhism, a woodblock print from the nineteenth century, the ‘Teaching that shows by means of pictures the causes for which living beings are born into hell or into the world of wandering spirits, and thus, by awakening fear in people, guides them onto the right path’, presents a system of hells with 136 circles, listing 16 sub-hells beside each of the eight hot main hells, as well as eight cold hells. Beyond these there are also short-lived hells around the entrances to the main hells, and souls are freed from these sooner.
Dante speaks of upper and lower hells, and his sinners range from the indifferent, the unbridled lovers and the gluttons, through the heretics and blasphemers, to the murderers, corrupt officials and frauds, with the circles of the traitors and of those who rose against their benefactors deepest of all.
An interesting idea of the Indian Bhagavata tradition is the series of planets that stretch beneath the Earth yet have advanced civilisations and offer great pleasures: these are the spheres of bodily intoxication, of evil spirits, corpse-demons, sorcerers and titans, or of serpents. The real hells come after these, some sources listing twenty-eight, others speaking of several thousand kinds.
And what sort of hellish story is this? It is precisely earthly goods, pleasures, that are rewarded with bitter damnation, though it is mostly excesses and moral weaknesses – the pleasures of the body, licentiousness, the unscrupulous pursuit of self-interest – that are honoured with choice sufferings.
From the Tibetan hell-world there is scarcely any hope of liberation: souls may atone there for whole world-ages, and even if they get out of one circle, their suffering goes on in the next. The Hindu picture of hell is a little more encouraging, for these hells are not places of eternal damnation. Once the soul has served its sentence, it may go on with its life, even at the very level from which it fell into hellish suffering. The sufferings of the hells act mentally and emotionally, not in a physical body.
This idea suggests that hell is not necessarily a circle somewhere in the underworld, but a plane of consciousness. We may even speak of inner hells, since man lives through countless kinds of suffering in body and soul alike, and for this neither judgement nor damnation is needed. Three kinds of suffering afflict earthly existents: natural disasters, the trials that living beings inflict on one another, and the personal sufferings that spring from the body-mind complex. Among the inner torments are fear, hatred, greed, malice and jealousy, envy and contempt, anger and grief, or even love. One need not descend into the underworld to live through hellish sufferings because of these inner agonies.
So is there a hell, or is there no hell? If you are looking for the physical place, you may not find it. If you are looking for the mental sphere where your torments unfold, where you atone for all your faults and misdeeds, then the inner hell is easier to find. And if you are looking for the place of cosmic justice, where balance is restored, where one must live through a similar situation in return for the suffering caused to others, then this hell is not far from that heaven where you may enjoy the fruits of good deeds. Could it be that hell and heaven are here on Earth, or rather in your thoughts?