When hell is not emptied, I will not become Buddha
THIS sentiment in Chinese calligraphy is engraved next to the above lifesized statue of a monk (above, left panel) presiding over Singapore's sprawling Kwong Min Shan crematorium that I have to visit once each year with my wife and her mother.
The visit, during the Ching Ming festival of the dead, provides an opportunity for the living to offer cash, food and material goods to the dead. The cash is in the form of "banknotes" with each bill bearing a printed figure of hundreds of billions of dollars right next to a portrait of Yama, king of Hell. The goods are paper-made cars, mansions, Rolex wrist watches, tuxedo suits, handphones and computers. So far, I haven't seen an Apple iPod player yet.
Ching Ming (meaning "clear and bright") falls around March or early April. As a kid growing up in the 1950s and 1960s in Chinatown with a large extended family that included my granny, uncles, aunts and a small army of cousins, Ching Ming was an important event to me. We would hire a bus to transport the entire clan to a hillside cemetery in Thomson Road where my grandfather was buried. There, we would cut the weed and tall grass around the grave and made our prayers and offerings.
Today, most dead people are cremated and their ashes stored in a crematorium, like the one that I went with my wife and her mother.
At Kwong Min Shan, the distinguished-looking statue, encased in glass, represents a Bodhisattva, a saint who has made a vow of great compassion not to enter into the bliss of Nirvana (i.e. become a Buddha) until hell is emptied of sufferers.
But how real is hell and the suffering of its inhabitants?
Hell is real and all in my mind
It is a difficult paradox to understand. On one hand, each living being is driven by the law of an impartial, impersonal, implaccable karma that determines his fate according to his actions, thoughts and motives. Evil action leads to terrible consequences, including a long stint in hell which is depicted as a real place with real suffering.
On the other hand, the entire cosmos resides in my mind. Reality is what I've created. Buddhahood is my mind, my very own nature. At death, my consciousness will see Buddhas, angels, demons and other entities which the authoritative Tibetan Book of the Dying urges me to recognise as projections from my mind, to which I must confront. All my pleasure and suffering are likewise what I have produced and projected, so that my mind is my own heaven and hell. Moreover, if I examine myself carefully, I will find there is no permanent, real "I".
My "self" that I think I know is just a mental process that arises and disappears, arises and disappears, in a seemingly continuous stream.
If I can see, recognise and grasp this fact of impermanence and the non-existence of a self, then I would have achieved realisation, and all my past karmic imprints, obligations and debts would vanish like the sea foam.
Nonetheless, there is also a separate relative reality where karma operates, where every action has consequence; and a downward chain of painful rebirths -- leading to the lowest hells -- awaits a thoughtless, heedless person who has committed negligent, immoral, hurtful acts. But the Sutras (Buddha's own words) also emphasize that all my action, speech and interaction with the outside world exist only in my mind, and, realising this fact, I can cut, in one fell stroke, the iron chain of birth / suffering / death / rebirth . . .
The answer, I believe, is that both scenarios are true. It's like the old connundrum in physics -- is light a wave or a particle? Just as we know that light behaves as both wave and particle, so there is a separate "real" reality ruled by an inflexible law of karma outside of my mind and if I can realise this, karma, rebirth and suffering are no more than the endless creations of my mind.
Mark Twain once offered a similar explanation in a dark story, The Mysterious Stranger. He said in the story that after we have gone through many existences, ultimately each person must realise he or she is no more than a single, lonely thought in a companionless universe, and that all else are no more than creatures of this thought.
-- Ching Ming, Saturday April 19, 2003
Candles, joss sticks, paper money and food are offered to the long-departed during Ching Ming:
