Ideally all beings will be assisted in moving into the human realm, for the human realm offers an almost unique possibility: that of undertaking a life of discipline and spiritual practice. Humans are not so overwhelmed by the unending torment of the hell or ghost realms that they are unable to practice, but they do suffer enough to want to find a way out. Unlike animals, they have enough wisdom to perceive the workings of cause and effect. They are not completely narcotized by the pleasures of the higher realms of existence. Human beings thus have the greatest potential to undertake a path leading out of endless transmigration and toward nirvana
To understand the work of Jizo Bodhisattva, we should know more about each realm. For each realm we will look at how Jizo Bodhisattva functions to help beings who are trapped there.
The Human Realm
The human realm can be seen in two ways. First, it can be seen as completely separate from the other five realms. From this point of view there are countless beings with bodies and minds who live in six distinct realms and experience their own particular kind of suffering. The other five realms of existence can coexist in time and place with human activity, but most humans have only a faint and occasional awareness of other beings such as ghosts or devas (“beings of light”). Human beings might have a better, but still dim, awareness of the animal domain, to the extent it interfaces with ours through our pets or domesticated animals.
The second way to see the human realm is that it contains all the other realms. The nonhuman realms are all aspects of our own awareness, states of mind and feelings that arise within us at different times. Our life consists of rapidly fluctuating experiences as human-animals, human-gods, human-ghosts, humans in hell, and human-jealous titans. From this perspective only the Buddhas and bodhisattvas are truly human, having realizing the purest and highest human potential. They are fully aware of the flux of thoughts in the mind, feelings in the heart, and sensations in the body, but they are not caused to suffer by them.
For example, in a single meditation period we can cycle through all the realms.
You are on your way to a meditation retreat in your new car. The sun is out and your favorite music is playing. Everything is perfect. The god realm. Someone sideswipes and nearly hits your car and you arrive and sit down to meditate feeling furious. An asura. Pretty soon you feel hungry. Your stomach growls. You dream of delicious food and, salivating, enter the animal realm. To pass the time you fantasize about how to spend the money when you win the lottery. A dip into the god realm. You could make much better use of the money than the old geezer farmer who won it last week. A jealous asura again. Winning the lottery would mean a Mercedes . . . the hungry ghost realm. The illusion fades as your knees begin to bum. You are in agony. When will the bell ring to end the pain? A (mild) hell realm. You begin to get annoyed with the people running the retreat but reason with yourself The human realm. You undertake loving-kindness meditation toward the people who are leading the retreat. The human realm. It works. The knee pain disappears as you are filled with a blissful sensation of warmth radiating from your heart chakra. The heavenly realm. The dinner bell rings . . .
Actually the human realm is not merely a patchwork of other realms. It is unique. The Buddha spoke of the rare and precious opportunity of human birth. There are many billions of living beings. Of these very few are human. The Buddha admonished his disciples not to be fools and waste the rare opportunity of human birth. The difficulty in the other realms, he said, is that “There is no practicing of the Dhamma [Dharma] there, no practicing of what is righteous, no doing of what is wholesome, no performance of merit. There mutual devouring prevails and the slaughter of the weak.”
As humans we have certain advantages over those in other realms. Our suffering is not as overwhelming and unremitting as in the lower realms. Thus we are able to look at our dissatisfaction and pain with some objectivity and look around for a way to decrease it. We have hope. We are able to summon some energy to practice. We have a modicum of wisdom. This consists of both a larger perspective on our life and its context, and a dim understanding of the operation of cause and effect.
With a little training we are able to step back, examine our states of mind objectively, and begin to learn to change them. We can catch glimpses of what drives our thoughts and actions and what the effects are, wholesome and unwholesome. We can perceive the struggling and suffering of the other five realms both externally as the lives of other beings, and inside us as states of mind. Eventually we understand the need to practice. At that turning-moment, the very mind whose activity obscures the Truth and the path to it now becomes the very tool for liberation.
Roku Jizo at Zenshu-ji Temple in Los Angeles.
If we are more fortunate, “men and women of good families” as the Buddha said, we have the free time and resources to devote ourselves to practice. If we are truly fortunate, we encounter the Dharma and a clear-eyed teacher. If you are reading this book, you have fulfilled many of these conditions.
There is an opportunity in the human realm to encounter a great truth. It is that all that is, each life in every realm including your own human life right now as you read, is the One Mind’s experience of itself. Please do not waste this rare opportunity.
The Hell Realms
Buddhist descriptions of hell are the same as those in every religion. Hell is characterized by great heat or great cold and by extreme physical pain, with no hope of escape. Hell is described as sitting in a blast furnace. To sit still is torture, to move is worse. This kind of hell is created by hot anger. It wants to move out, to attack people, to kill by searing. To sit still with hot anger is torture. It burns us inside. To give vent to hot anger seems like a relief, but it is ultimately worse, with even more painful consequences afterward.
The same is true of extreme cold. When we are very cold we pull inward. Our extremities, fingers, toes and ears, are horribly painful. We pull our attention away from the pain and shrink down to any place there is a little warmth, maybe in our belly, and we guard it. This is like cold anger. It numbs the pain by moving away, collapsing, and becoming guarded. It kills by ignoring; it’s the “cold shoulder.” There are also hells of pain described as piercing thorns or cutting knives. Attempts to escape bring worse pain, a doubling of the thicket of sharp blades.
In the Sutra of the Past Vows of Earth Store Bodhisattva, Jizo is asked to name the many hells and describe the path to those hells. Jizo lists hells with names like Flying Knives, Squeezing Mountains, Uninterrupted, Head Chopping, Quarreling, and Embracing Pillar. Within each of these there can be “hundreds of thousands of smaller hells, each with its own name.” This means that each unwholesome act is unique in time and space, and every act committed by each one of hundreds of thousands of individuals has its own particular consequence.
Hells do not exist outside of our actions. Hells come into being at the time we act, as a direct consequence of what we do. It is also our own action that can free us from hells.
The Chinese Master Hsuan Hua explained that the hell called Embracing Pillar contains “a large hollow brass pillar full of fire.” Those guilty of sexual misconduct fall into this hell and see the roasting pillar as a person. Men, for example, see it as a beautiful woman whom they rush to embrace, only to find themselves burned so badly that they cannot pull their seared flesh away from the pillar. After death they are revived by “a wind called the ‘Clever Breeze’ a wonderful Dharma . . . [they] then forget the painful consequences of their behavior, recalling only its pleasurable aspects. Driven by this memory, they rush to the pillar again, only to find the cycle repeated.”
The hell of the Embracing Pillar is one I recognize from talking with women who are living with their third or fourth battering partner. After several years of being beaten and degraded they escape with their children to a shelter. Within a short time they are revived and return to embrace the same or a new version of the fiery relationship. This happens repeatedly, leaving the women and their children deeply
scarred and, too often, dead.
Abused children have told me of life in the hell called Uninterrupted. For such natural childlike actions as wetting the bed, vomiting, or breaking a toy, they are burned with cigarettes, curling irons, hot plates, propane torches, hot plates, or dunked in pots of boiling water. They are beaten with sticks, toilet brushes, electric cords, brooms, Ping-Pong paddles, belts, and coat hangers. Their hair is torn out; they are locked in dark closets. If they cry, they are beaten again or sodomized or bound and gagged with duct tape.
The Path to the Hell Realms
Hell realms are entered through indulging anger, allowing it to control our thoughts, speech, and action. When we are angry, we lose our humaneness and do not care whom we hurt or how we hurt them. We kick dogs, slap children, stab with verbal daggers, nurse old wounds, and plan revenge.
Jizo Bodhisattva’s Activity in the Hell Realms
The staff of Jizo Bodhisattva is said to have such power that, if he strikes the iron doors of hell, they must open. What teaching provides such strength that, if we use it, it will surely free us from all hells? It is the teaching of karma, or action, and its consequences. As Kalu Rinpoche emphasized, “Of the 84,000 collected teachings of the Buddha the most essential is the understanding of the karmic process.” It is also called retribution. The word retribution has extra, moralistic overtones to Western ears. It is, however, an impartial physical law, the action of cause and effect.
This law applies to all realms but is vividly described in the Sutra of Earth Store Bodhisattva in relationship to the hell realms. This description warns people about the implacable action of cause and effect and to encourage them to keep the precepts. Thus there are specific reparations in the hells for particular deeds. The retribution of flaying or “flesh from bone” is incurred by those who trap animals, especially young animals. Flaying hell refers both to the experience of physical pain like sharp knives cutting flesh from bone and also to the emotional pain of separation and loneliness when members of our family are cut off from each other by the sharp knife of anger. If a person beats step- or adopted children, their retribution is to be flogged in future existences. If a person makes fun of people who are ugly, the retribution is to become ugly.
How does the karma of retribution work? The first way is straightforward and easy to observe. For example, if you become angry your face becomes contorted. Even beautiful people become ugly, inside and out, by repeatedly giving vent to anger. The second mechanism is less obvious. We are very naive to think our bad actions can be hidden, that no one knows about them, and thus they won’t have any consequences. It is delusion to think that when we die all of our poor or harmful actions will simply disappear.
If the physical elements of our body don’t disappear but go on to make new living beings, why is the same not true of our emotional and psychological energy, our anger or our loving-kindness, our reactivity or our equanimity? Whatever we have set into motion with our words or actions will continue to act through cause and effect in the lives of new beings, will continue to affect the lives of our children, friends, and people not known to us, generation after generation. This is very important to consider. Retribution means that unwholesome acts bear unwholesome fruit and wholesome acts bear wholesome fruit.
The Buddha said that hell is extreme physical and emotional pain without hope of relief. The power of Jizo Bodhisattva, which is the power of sincere spiritual practice, can turn our physical and emotional pain around, make it work to knock on and open the gates of hell. It can lead us to freedom. For example, Zen masters have used hellish cold as a training tool. Daiun Harada Roshi had a temple with an unheated zendo in the snow country in Japan. He said the biting cold “drove people into their bellies.” In this extreme cold the mind shrinks to the only place of warmth, a tiny warm spot in the center of the belly, the hara. When movement means pain, the mind becomes very focused. The usually huge sense of self also shrinks to one unmoving spot. From there it is only one sound, one touch away from the great death and the great rebirth.
One Zen student told me of enduring a childhood of physical and sexual abuse by her father, then falling into the hands of a misguided therapist who convinced her that she had many personalities. Pushed into exploring these personalities, she suffered for several years in hellish, demonic realms. Even fifteen minutes of meditation practice was very difficult for her, but her determination was as strong as her anguish, and she returned to practice again and again. One day she was driving on the freeway, immersed in her pain. She suddenly thought, “Who is suffering?” At that instant the suffering stood by itself and fell away. Now she is able to practice steadily, not completely free of suffering but out of its maw and firmly on the path.
Pain can also be used as a training tool. At her first retreat one student realized that she already had experienced meditation. She had learned it on her own in childhood when she suffered severe migraines. Holding mind and body absolutely still was the only way to be free of pain. This is also true of acute emotional pain, such as comes with a divorce or the death of a loved one. To move the mind even a bit into memories of the irretrievable past or shattered hopes for the future brings renewed waves of fresh pain. The only relief is in holding the mind still in the present moment. Out of this comes the first taste of that Great Peace that is our refuge.
At a ceremony of remembrance, a young mother spoke of finding this truth. A few weeks before she had gone into her seven-year-old son’s room to waken him for school and found him dead. A virus had weakened his heart and he had died in his sleep. At first she was overwhelmed with grief, and kept playing the scene of finding him over and over in her mind. Then came a flood of thoughts about “what if?” “What if I had gone in his room earlier?” Then she was taken over by the torment of thoughts of what would never happen—his graduation, her grandchildren. If her mind strayed to memories of past times with her son or to future times without him, she was plunged into despair. The only place there was any relief from her intense suffering was when her mind was fully involved with the events of the present moment.
When we do not run away, cold is just cold, heat is just heat, and pain is only pain. This is where Jizo Bodhisattva works, pulling people from the agonizing fire of hell into the purifying fire of Dharma.
This is easy to say but hard to do. We spend a lot of energy trying to avoid even mild forms of discomfort, heat, or cold. What kind of person would deliberately choose to enter places of extreme misery, freezing and burning hells, as Jizo does?
We can name people who have, people like Albert Schweitzer and Mother Teresa. There are many we cannot name who also carry out the work of Jizo Bodhisattva. They are those who clean stool and maggots from the bedsores of a person dying with AIDS, who bandage a child’s limbs amputated by land mines left from a war that ended before the child was born. They are those who welcome victims of family violence into foster homes and shelters at midnight, and those who offer water, food, and kindness to people who are starving in a famine thousands of miles distant.
What would compel someone to do this? What characteristics would such a person have? Two: no fear, great love.
In addition to these, Jizo Bodhisattva is said to have supreme optimism. She would have to be optimistic to go forward with a vow not to rest until every being is rescued from every hell. Jizo has thus become the patron of lost causes. In times of deep despair it is enough just to know that the energy of Jizo exists, that there is someone somewhere who does not believe that there are any lost causes and who will descend into the cesspool where you have fallen to give you help, whether you ask or not.
The Realm of the Hungry Ghosts
The hungry ghosts (called preta in Sanskrit) are one level above the agony of the hell realm. Their plight is to be constantly hungry and thirsty, tortured by unfulfilled desire. They are depicted in scrolls and paintings as emaciated beings with huge, swollen bellies. Their mouths are as small as the eye of a needle.
The hu
ngry ghosts see rivers of water and heaps of food. They run to drink and eat, but when the water touches their mouths it becomes liquid fire. If they are able to stuff even a bit of food in their tiny mouths, it turns into a red-hot iron ball that sticks in the throat.
We experience this realm whenever our hunger is immense but we are unable to take in that which would be truly nourishing. The hungry ghost experience that is ubiquitous in the human realm is addiction. An addict is like an empty shell controlled by hunger. In the past I cared for infants born addicted to drugs. Their mothers were using combinations of cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin, methadone, and alcohol. They wanted to be good mothers, but their life energy was consumed by their habit. They sold food stamps the day they arrived in the mail for half their value in cocaine. Because crack and speed suppressed appetite, they did not feel hungry themselves so did not perceive their children as hungry and did not feed them. Their habits cost between twenty-five and three hundred dollars a day. To make this money they sold their possessions, stolen goods, their children, and themselves. In one study we did, several mothers were prostituting while visibly pregnant, and many were prostituting within a few weeks after giving birth.
Like the hungry ghosts, addicts see food and drink, alcohol and drugs, and run to it. But as soon as they use, they and everyone around them are further seared. Incarceration, job loss, divorce, drunk driving, AIDS all just inflict more pain.
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