This story must serve instead of a detailed description of the Buddhist hells. It will be sufficient to say of them that they combine all that is horrible to each of the senses. Every form of torment, mental and physical, that can befall the unhappy violators of a good conscience and of the Buddhist law, are found there. The extremes of cold and heat, cutting, flaying, biting, insulting, and tantalising, have to be endured by such persons according to their deserts. Demons of the most monstrous shapes and most cruel dispositions terrify them in every possible way. All that fire and water, knives and clubs, can by ingenuity be made to do in tormenting, is there done.

The preceding brief sketch of the "three worlds" (san-kiai) almost all refers to what is common to the other native Hindoo sects. Buddhism adopted the national belief in regard to the form of the universe, including the worlds of reward and punishment. It belongs to all forms of Buddhism in China or elsewhere.

The Northern Buddhists have, however, gone further, and framed a much more extensive cosmogony, which deserves a separate consideration.

Footnotes

^222:1 The d and t in these two Sanscrit words are the cerebral d and t, usually printed with a dot under them. They approach the sound of l. The Buddhist dictionary, Yi-ts'ie-king-yin-i, says, that the word p'o-li is in its full Sanscrit form, sa-p'a-ti-ka. In K'ang-hi, we are told, "the Roman empire has glass of five colours," ta-ts'in-yeu-wu-se-p'o-li. In Buddhist books it means "rock crystal." Why the aspirate is not preserved in the common colloquial term po-li "glass," is not clear.

^223:1 There are two kinds of yojana. One consists of four goshalas, the other of eight. A goshala is the distance at which the bellowing of a bull can be heard, or nearly two miles.