The Buddhist Wheel of Existence

If you think this red, three-eyed figure with the crown of skulls and pointed nails looks demonic, you are correct. He is Mara, personification of the forces of time, death, and illusion in Buddhist thought. And here, he has the whole of existence— the Wheel of Existence—in his grip, and that whole includes, of course, hell (naraka in Sanskrit). What we are seeing here, then, is the overall cosmic context in which Hell occurs in Buddhist thought—it is the worst and bottom-most of a hamster wheel of conditions into which a being can be reborn.

The wheel’s geometry divides those conditions into six pie slices. At six o’clock, the bottom slice is the literal hell based on the ancient Indian model, and gruesome tortures appear there. At four o’clock, the almost-hell of animal rebirth appears, with the infinite chain of eater-and-eaten. And at eight o’clock we can see another almost-hell, the realm of the hungry ghosts or pretas, who can never satisfy their immense bellies through their pinhole mouths.

Even the gods at twelve o’clock and the demigods at two endure hellish suffering, for when their good karma exhausts itself they see the bad rebirth awaiting them and get terrified. Humans too know hellish experience when we suffer mental or physical pain. Suffering thus pervades the entire cosmos, such that it becomes round-the-clock hell.

And yet there is hope, for to see this structure is to see through it, to see that it is constructed and not ultimately real. And in this insight lies potential liberation from any sort of rebirth, any sort of condition.