/lit/ - Literature

>>20218185
>it's not all bad edition

Just went on a date. Not sure if it'll go anywhere but she was a nice girl and we had a great conversation. I love hearing people's stories and such so if the least I get out of a date is a good conversation then I count that as a win.

plus it's always more material for my novel

I've been reading about the buddhist conception of hell and man is it brutal. It is much more detailed, precise, and measured than the Christian concept of hell partly because it is regulated by the karma and fits into the timescales of buddhist cosmology. Essentially you go to Naraka to work off some bad karma. This hell is well-planned and quantified. There are thousands of hell-realms and subdivisions separated into various categories like some great clockwork of pain. Your experience in hell reflects your sins. So murderers are forced to tear at each other with iron claws on a plane of burning coals for trillions of years. Every time they die they are immediately resurrected. The overly lustful are taken to a realm where beautiful men and women wave at them from atop trees that consist of blades and razors, so that as they are tempted to climb the trees they are eviscerated . As they reach the top, the beautiful people appear below them on the ground and wave at them down there. They repeat this for trillions of years as slaves of lust. Drunkards have molten lead poured down their throats, etc. It's a great time.

Presiding over Jigoku (Japanese buddhist hell, or "earth-prison") are Oni. Violent and brutal hulking demons who are angered by cries of pain and shrieks of suffering and p devour, and torture and pulverize with iron clubs anyone who weeps or screams.

I catch myself wondering how one might break the karmic logic of this hell system. I belong in at least a couple of these hells. I reason that, since this conception of hell is so systematic and highly specialized, what if the way to escape it is to commit MORE SIN so that there is no single hell into which one can fit? Or is there a notion of concurrent sentences? My death is a discrete event. Although my soul can respawn, it is bound to a single instance at any point in time. So if I commit all sins equally, I cannot go to all the hells at once. That's my get out of jail free card.