generations ago, whose fruit he has not eaten, and which may bring him good fortune in spite of present sins, or on the rolling and many colored wheel of metempsychosis may secure for him next a celestial birthplace. In short periods, it will be seen, there is moral confusion, but, in the long run, exact compensation.
The exuberant prodigiousness of the Hindu imagination is strikingly manifest in its descriptions of the rewards of virtue in the heavens and of the punishments of sin in the hells. Visions pass before us of beautiful groves full of fragrance and music, abounding in delicious fruits, and birds of gorgeous plumage, crystal streams embedded with pearls, unruffled lakes where the lotus blooms, palaces of gems, crowds of friends and lovers, endless revelations of truth, boundless graspings of power, all that can stir and enchant intellect, will, fancy, and heart. In some of the heavens the residents have no bodily form, but enjoy purely spiritual pleasures. In others they are self resplendent, and traverse the ether. They are many miles in height, one being described whose crown was four miles high and who wore on his person sixty wagon loads of jewels. The ordinary lifetime of the inhabitants of the dewa loka named Wasawartti equals nine billions two hundred and sixteen millions of our years. They breathe only once in sixteen hours.
The reverse of this picture is still more vigorously drawn, highly colored, and diversified in contents. The walls of the Hindu hell are over a hundred miles thick; and so dazzling is their brightness that it bursts the eyes which look at them anywhere within a distance of four hundred leagues.7 The poor creatures here, wrapped in shrouds of fire, writhe and yell in frenzy of pain. The very revelry and ecstasy of terror and anguish fill the whole region. The skins of some wretches are taken off from head to foot, and then scalding vinegar is poured over them. A glutton is punished thus: experiencing an insatiable hunger in a body as large as three mountains, he is tantalized with a mouth no larger than the eye of a needle.8 The infernal tormentors, throwing their victims down, take a flexible flame in each hand, and with these lash them alternately right and left. One demon, Rahu, is seventy six thousand eight hundred miles tall: the palm of his hand measures fifty thousand acres; and when he is enraged he rushes up the sky and swallows the sun or the moon, thus causing an eclipse! In the Asiatic Journal for 1840 is an article on "The Chinese Judges of the Dead," which describes a series of twenty four paintings of hell found in a Buddhist temple. Devils in human shapes are depicted pulling out the tongues of slanderers with redhot wires, pouring molten lead down the throats of liars, with burning prongs tossing souls upon mountains planted with hooks of iron reeking with the blood of those who have gone before, screwing the damned between planks, pounding them in husking mortars, grinding them in rice mills, while other fiends, in the shape of dogs, lap up their oozing gore. But the hardest sensibility must by this time cry, Hold!
With the turmoil and pain of entanglement in the vortex of births, and all the repulsive exposures of finite life, the Hindus contrast the idea of an infinite rest and bliss, an endless
7 Hardy, Manual of Buddhism, p. 26.
8 Coleman, Mythology of the Hindus, p. 198.
exemption from evil and struggle, an immense receptivity of reposing power and quietistic contemplation. In consequence of their endlessly varied, constantly recurring, intensely earnest speculations and musings over this contrast of finite restlessness and pain with infinite peace and blessedness, a contrast which constitutes the preaching of their priests, saturates their sacred books, fills their thoughts, and broods over all their life, the Orientals are pervaded with a profound horror of individual existence, and with a profound desire for absorption into the Infinite Being. A few quotations from their own authors will illustrate this:
"A sentient being in the repetition of birth and death is like a worm in the midst of a nest of ants, like a lizard in the hollow of a bamboo that is burning at both ends."9 "Emancipation from all existence is the fulness of felicity."10 "The being who is still subject to birth may now sport in the beautiful gardens of heaven, now be cut to pieces in hell; now be Maha Brahma, now a degraded outcast; now sip nectar, now drink blood; now repose on a couch with gods, now be dragged through a thicket of thorns; now reside in a mansion of gold, now be exposed on a mountain of lava; now sit on the throne of the gods, now be impaled amidst hungry dogs; now be a king glittering with countless gems, now a mendicant taking a skull from door to door to beg alms; now eat ambrosia as the monarch of a dewa loka, now writhe and die as a bat in the shrivelling flame."11 "The Supreme Soul and the human soul do not differ, and pleasure or pain ascribable to the latter arises from its imprisonment in the body. The water of the Ganges is the same whether it run in the river's bed or be shut up in a decanter; but a drop of wine added to the water in the decanter imparts its flavor to the whole, whereas it would be lost in the river. The Supreme Soul, therefore, is beyond accident; but the human soul is afflicted by sense and passion. Happiness is only obtained in reunion with the Supreme Soul, when the dispersed individualities combine again with it, as the drops of water with the parent stream. Hence the slave should remember that he is separated from God by the body alone, and exclaim, perpetually, 'Blessed be the moment when I shall lift the veil from off that face! the veil of the face of my Beloved is the dust of my body.'"12 "A pious man was once born on earth, who, in his various transmigrations, had met eight hundred and twenty five thousand Buddhas. He remembered his former states, but could not enumerate how many times he had been a king, a beggar, a beast, an occupant of hell. He uttered these words: 'A hundred thousand years of the highest happiness on earth are not equal to the happiness of one day in the dewa lokas; and a hundred thousand years of the deepest misery on earth are not equal to the misery of one day in hell; but the misery of hell is reckoned by millions of centuries. Oh, how shall I escape, and obtain eternal bliss?'" 13
9 Eastern Monachism, p. 247.
10 Vishnu Purana, p. 568.