MURYOKO
'Infinite Light'
Journal of Shin Buddhism
Harold Stewart
Heaven and Hell
In the Buddhist view, Hell and Heaven are in the human heart. So we are not judged and condemned to eternal torment by some legalistic god of love, but by the law of karma: that to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The length and kind of punishment, therefore, is self-determined and exactly fits the crime. As Lafcadio Hearn put it: 'We suffer only from the consequences of our own faults - the demon-torturer in the Buddhist hell says to his victim: "Blame not me - I am only the creation of your own deeds, words, and thoughts; you made me for this!" ' Nor is our self-punishment eternal or everlasting, for as soon as we are purged of our evil karma, we are at once reborn into some higher and happier state.
In reality it is the true inner Self alone that judges the false outer self and condemns the egoistic will to death. So, as William Blake resolved in his poem Milton:
I will go down to self-annihilation and eternal death,
Lest the Last Judgement come and find me unannihilate,
And I be seized and delivered into the hands of my own selfhood.
But as the anonymous author of the Theologia Germanica realized: 'Nothing burns in Hell but the self-will'. It is precisely this illusion of self that constitutes Ignorance in Buddhist doctrine, in which it is the primal evil and cause of all the others.
Enma-ten or Enma Dai-O (Great King Emma, which is the colloquial Japanese pronunciation of his name) is the Indian god Yama-Raja, Ruler of the Underworld and Judge of the Dead. After death, all mortals must stand trial in his infernal court. He presents a fearsome visage of wrath with inflamed and glaring eye-balls under formidable brows. Yet despite his frightful and menacing appearance, Enma-ten still retains something of the originally beneficent character of the Hindu god Yama Deva; and this is why he is still supplicated for aid, since he has been known even to sacrifice one of his eyes to restore the sight of a blind woman. Enma-O is really the infernal counterpart of the gentle Bodhisattva Jizo who in Chinese Buddhism is called Ti-tsang Wang and recognized as Lord of the Underworld.
Hence my cry for help to Jizo, who is also considered to be one of the Bodhisattva forms of Amida, so that ultimately Enma-O is the wrathful aspect assumed by Amida to rescue obdurate beings in Hell. He does not sentence but only reveals the truth because Amida, as Divine Wisdom and Compassion personified, never judges or condemns but saves good and evil doers alike. So whoever throws himself unconditionally on his Divine Mercy cannot be refused Deliverance. As the Japanese Buddhist proverb states, this is 'like meeting with a Buddha in Hell' for Jizo can disperse the posthumous nightmare with the Light from his magic jewel. Either one dies willingly during this life and with full acceptance at its end; or reluctantly, still craving and clutching at life. If no detachment from clinging to this world has been achieved during life, then one must be purified of such attachment in some purgatorial state after death. But unlike the bad dreams from which we can still escape to the waking state, from that posthumous nightmare there can be no voluntary awakening until our last debt has been paid and all our evil karma is exhausted.