Dhamma By : Bhikkhu Pesala
"THE WAY DOWN TO HELL IS EASY”
Introduction { PART 1 }
Introduction
In most religions, Hell is conceived of as a place of incessant torment where non-believers and evil-doers suffer for their wickedness.
Buddhism contains similar teachings about various hells, with good and evil deeds leading to very different destinies. However, its final aim is to attain the transcendental bliss of nibbāna, which is not a place of blissful enjoyment like heaven, but the highest possible spiritual achievement of eternal liberation from suffering.
Final liberation is attained by the total destruction of craving and ignorance.
Buddhists are very fortunate to have a well-preserved and consistent record of the Buddha’s teaching over a period of forty-five years. More than two thousand five hundred years after the Buddha’s demise, these teachings are still easily available, with an extensive commentarial literature to explain and analyse the meaning. All of the Pali texts and many of the commentaries have been translated into English. A patient student of Buddhism can learn sufficient Pali to clarify doubts about the accuracy of available translations by referring to the original texts with the help of a dictionary.
The problem is, perhaps, that there is too much to learn, so the average person does not have sufficient time to read more than a fraction of the Buddha’s original discourses. People are so busy with acquiring the knowledge needed to survive in the modern world, that they seldom have adequate knowledge of Buddhism.
Having read many books and articles on modern physics, biology, genetics, and psychology, their thinking is often more in line with materialism than with Buddhism.
I will try to rectify this imbalance by gathering, in this pocket-sized booklet, quotations and key passages from the texts, so that the reader can know something of what the Buddha taught about heaven and hell.
All Buddhists should ensure that they have rightly grasped the Buddha’s teachings.
Misrepresenting the Buddha does serious harm to Buddhism, and to the welfare of humanity as a whole, but most of all to oneself. If one does not know what he taught, one should try to learn more. If one does not believe what he taught, then one has not found the right path. If one believes that he did not teach what he did teach, that is a wrong view. If one declares that view, it is wrong speech.
The Buddha declared one of two destinations for one who clings to a wrong view: animal rebirth, or rebirth in hell. Wrong views should be removed by discussing the Dhamma and reading Dhamma books.
Biography of Bhikkhu Pesala
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