There are eight major Buddhist hells, and we’re gonna decide which one you’re going to.
The hell research community doesn’t have a consensus on the exact number
of hells there are, because the old writings were all over the place.
The most popular belief is that there are 8 hot hells and 8 cold hells, but the cold hells are
like my childhood, they don’t get a lot of love. It’s the hot hells that everyone talks about.
But some say there are 18 hells.
And then there are writings describing 16 more lesser hells, including my favorite,
the Hell of the Flaming C--k. Others say there are 64,000 hells.
Buddhists like to look over at the Christians with their one hell and laugh and say things like
“Oh how quaint” and “Indubitably” before drinking a cup of lava and screaming.
There’s also the idea that hells are created from bad karma.
As more people commit a type of crime, bad karma builds up.
Enough of it builds up, and it creates a hell just for people who committed that crime.
Maybe that’s why the first major hell is so big.
The first hell is for murderers, and the reason it’s one of the major hells
is because so many of you mfers running around murdering.
Why this idea of spontaneous hell creation should
give you nightmares is that you may end up suffering in your own personal hell.
Say if you were a creative type person and you committed a crime that no one’s ever done before,
like you killed your mother-in-law by letting her play that VR game where
you walk on a plank and jump off, but then you actually put her on a real plank 80 stories up.
Yeah if you do that, a hell may be created just for you,
out of your bad karma, to punish you with an appropriate ironic twist.
In a normal hell, at least you’re suffering with other people. In this one, you’ll be suffering all by yourself.
Interestingly, the people who will suffer the least in these personal hells
are probably married people.
They’ve already lived an entire life with the person they love,
All 8 hells lie beneath the earth. Each one is a cube tens of thousands of miles on each side,
and the lowest one is at a few hundred thousand miles on each side,
bigger than all the others combined, and still not big enough to hide from your mother-in-law.
This video is about the hells of Japanese Buddhism,
which is similar to Chinese or Indian Buddhism, except some of the punishments are different,
and when the demons torture you, they’re overly polite about it.
These hells are often drawn like walled prison cities
dotted with areas where people go to get tortured.
Now I know you’re all dirty sinners, so pay attention, you’ll wanna know
what to expect when you die. Take my hand and let me lead you down the eight hells.
Don’t worry, you’ll be safe, I won’t leave you okay? I’m not your dad.
First is the Reviving Hell, or Tōkatsu Jigoku 等活地獄.
You may think, well reviving doesn’t sound so bad.
Shut up.
It’s a hell for murderers.
People who fall into this hell walk around with iron claws.
The hatred in their hearts is so great that they attack when they see another person.
People claw at each other’s flesh, leaving only bones.
Another way to die is by the hands of demons, who beat you until you’re a Play-Doh of flesh.
Death is no release here in hell. After a while, a cold wind blows over your body,
waking you up to endure the torture again.
Each hell has 16 sub-hells, each with their own unique tortures.
Here are some sub-hells of the Reviving Hell.
The Region of the Mud of Excrement, a place for people who killed deer and birds.
It’s full of poop mud.
Here you eat poop mud while insects with snouts as hard as diamond
tear your skin and eat your flesh, break your bones and suck your marrow.
The Region of the Wheel of Swords. For people who murdered out of greed.
This place is surrounded by an iron wall dozens of miles tall.
Inside, a fire burns so hot that if it touches you, you explode into a million pieces.
Hot iron and swords rain from the sky.
The Region of the Roasting Skillet. For people who cooked and ate animals.
You’re fried on a skillet.
The Region of Darkness. For people who killed sheep by suffocating them,
or killed turtles by crushing them.
A hell of the oddly specific.
This place is black as night, where a wind of black fire blows,
burning and cutting people like dark lightsabers.
Unlike the Christian hell, Buddhist hell doesn’t last forever.
It only lasts for trillions of years.
It takes time to work off all your bad karma,
like you ate a bunch of sweets and now you gotta burn off those calories.
And similar to calories, it takes trillions of years to burn off.
Life in the Revival Hell lasts for about a trillion years.
Each hell lasts longer than the one above it.
Your stay in the lowest hell, the eighth hell, lasts a few million trillion years.
Afterwards you reincarnate into another realm.
[2. The Black Cord Hell]
The Black Cord Hell, or Kokujō Jigoku 黒縄地獄, is a prison for those guilty of murder and theft.
Here, demons use hot black cords to burn marks on your body, then cut your body into pieces
using the markings as guides. They’re surgeons for the healthy.
You also have to walk a tightrope carrying iron weights on your back.
One slip and you fall into boiling cauldrons.
The suffering here is 10 times more painful than the previous hell.
There’s one sub-hell that’s pretty cool.
Demons tie you up with flaming black ropes and throw you off a miles long cliff,
then you fall onto swords like a Mortal Kombat fatality,
and dogs with iron fangs feed on your impaled body.
[3. The Crushing Hell]
The Crushing Hell, or Shugō Jigoku 衆合地獄, is a place for those
guilty of murder, theft, and secksual crimes.
Here in the third hell, you’re stuck between two iron mountains as they ground you into
humanburger meat.
Demons place people on stone slabs and then pound them or grind them with another stone.
Iron mountains fall from the sky.
Randomly, there’s a forest where secksy men and women sit atop the trees,
calling for you with voices as sweet as honey covered s--t.
You’re overcome with lust and can’t help but climb.
The leaves are sharp as knives and give you a thousand cuts.
When you reach the top, blood escaping from all parts of your body except for one,
the alluring figure you saw is now at the bottom of the tree, still beckoning.
So you climb down, enduring another thousand cuts.
And then they’re at the top again. You repeat this for trillions of years.
There’s a sub-hell for those who kidnapped and did horrible things to children.
Here, the sinner sees his own children tortured as demons drive iron rods or hooks
into their children’s privates.
Meanwhile, the sinner is hung upside down while demons pour molten copper into him.
The copper flows into his butt and out his mouth.
This way, he is tortured physically and mentally.
[4. The Screaming Hell]
The Screaming Hell, or Gōkyō Jigoku 号叫地獄, is for those
who are guilty of murder, theft, secksual crimes, and being a drunkard.
Here in the fourth hell, demons fry you on a skillet,
or boil you in a cauldron.
They also pour molten copper into your mouth.
It’s called the Screaming Hell because you tend to scream when these things happen.
There’s also a sub-hell for people who have sold diluted wine, which seems excessive.
Sinners here suffer from 404 diseases.
[5. The Great Screaming Hell]
The Great Screaming Hell, or Daikyō Jigoku 大叫地獄, is for those who committed the previous crimes,
plus lying.
The suffering here is 10 times that of the previous hell.
In one sub-hell, demons pull out your lying tongue with pliers,
or ram nails into it and rip it out.
Your tongue grows back only to get ripped out again.
Also, demons pluck out your eyes in case that didn’t hurt enough.
[6. The Burning Hell]
The Burning Hell, or Ennetsu Jigoku 炎熱地獄, is for those who committed the previous sins,
plus believing in the wrong Buddhist views.
Here in the sixth hell, you’re impaled on a spear
in the middle of an ocean of fire, as demons shove hot irons on your skin.
The fires in this hell are super hot. A flame the size of a bean could burn the whole of
India in an instant.
Compared to these fires, the fires of previous hells feel like snow.
There’s one cruel sub-hell where you’re burning from head to toe, and someone says,
“Quick, there’s a nice cold lake there!”
And then you run to it and it’s just more fire.
Wow.
[7. The Great Burning Hell]
The Great Burning Hell, or Dainetsu Jigoku 大熱地獄, is for people who committed the previous sins,
plus if they’ve hurt a Buddhist monk, like if they killed a monk or violated a nun.
The suffering here in hell number seven is 10 times worse than the previous hell.
Here, you’re impaled on a trident instead of a spear.
So terrible that I don’t even know how that works. And the ocean of fire is even hotter.
There’s a sub-hell for monks who violated women after getting them drunk or after
enticing them with gifts.
These people are skinned alive and left on the red hot ground to fry,
while demons pour molten iron on their skinned bodies.
[8. The Hell of Unending Suffering]
The Hell of Unending Suffering, or Mugen Jigoku 無間地獄, also called the Avici Hell.
This is the eighth hell, and the one most often talked about when monks try to convert people.
It’s the favorite hell of the controversial monk Nichiren.
He loved condemning his enemies to this hell.
It’s a place for the worst of the worst, just really terrible people,
or as Nichiren would call them, anyone who disagreed with him.
He better hope there’s no hell for people who condemn others to hell.
This hell is for anyone who broke one the Five Grave Offenses of Buddhism:
Willfully killing your father.
Willfully killing your mother.
Killing an arhat, which is an enlightened being or a Buddhist saint.
Shedding the blood of a Buddha.
Or creating a division within the Buddhist community, meaning spreading heretical beliefs.
Much of the suffering in the eighth hell is a mystery because many are afraid to describe it.
Why? Because they say if a person truly understood how terrible it is,
they would spit out blood and die.
So let me tell you about it.
You enter the Hell of Unending Suffering by falling upside down while burning, for 2000 years.
It’s a huge drop. You fall further than the British empire.
When you hit bottom, you’re welcomed by a bunch of interesting creatures ready to put a smile on their face.
Like there are the 4 dog guardians, hundreds of miles tall,
with eyes like lightning and fangs like swords.
Jets of flame escape from every pore of their bodies, and they smell really bad.
There are snakes that spit venom and fire. Their hisses sound like 100,000 thunderclaps,
and they can call down iron balls from the sky.
There are 50 billion worms, each with thousands of beaks.
They spit fire into the air that falls as rains of flames.
Everywhere in the Avici Hell are superhot flames that fly around burning your flesh,
severing tendons, cracking bones, and scorching the marrow inside.
No one can tell you apart from the flames.
Demons stretch out your tongue to let it dry like leather.
Sometimes they force you to deepthroat a big red hot iron ball for fun.
You’re forced to walk knee deep through hot coal and ash. Each step causes the
skin and muscles on your leg to blister and fall off, but once you lift your leg,
it returns whole so you can keep marching.
This hell borrows many tortures from previous hells, but times 1000.
There’s a sub-hell for people who ate offerings that were supposed to be for the Buddha.
These people are made to be so hungry that they eat their own bodies.
They’re also eaten by black bellied snakes.
There’s another sub-hell for people who dammed up rivers and caused people downstream to die of thirst.
Here, the ground is full of sharp knives to cut your feet when you walk.
Elephant sized birds with flaming beaks swoop down and grab people to drop them from the sky.
Besides the 8 major hells, there are also 16 lesser hells.
Among these is the Hell of the Flaming C--k.
There it is, the flaming c--k, going around screaming f--k-a-doodle-doo to everyone.
It’s a huge c--k, way too big for me. It’s gonna cause some damage.
The only thing you can do when you see this thing is run away,
but be careful not to let it back you into the iron wall surrounding this hell.
You’d be stuck between a c--k and a hard place.
For more Japanese Buddhist Lore, check out these videos.
We have some new patrons this week: U2didntseeanything, SteamBinary, Rachel Thomas,
EnodoratheWitch, Victoria Watt, Janine, Captain Kohai, and Shy Edwards.
Thanks so much you guys.
Alright I love you, and spread the knowledge.