I kept hearing about the "Ten Courts", that they were Asian, so I got off my pasty European duff and looked into it:
Wikipedia has it under the heading "Diyu". Apparently there are ten courts but eighteen hells, maybe up to 134. (Under Catholic thought I suppose most of them would be technically "purgatory"; when the sentence is over you can get out.)
Tip for planewalkers: the one you don't want to be sentenced to is Avici.
What's interesting about this, to me anyway, is that after going through the ordeal, you get fed a "drink of forgetfulness" so that you could rejoin the world. That makes sense for a Buddhist cosmos which is taken from Hinduism. But that makes me think that this is a borrowing from an Indo-European assumption. The Greeks have the river Lethe. So: why bother with a river of forgetfulness if you were going into Hades never to return? A Lethe only makes sense on the assumption of reincarnation. Did the Indo-Europeans believe in reincarnation before settling into Greece and Italy, only then shifting to a more static "hell" model?
Another weird thought going through my head: The Chinese only started thinking about hellfire under the Tang, which began 618 AD. Maybe lots of Zoroastrians and Christians were running away from the Muslims overrunning Persia and Afghanistan 630-660? Maybe Shi'ite Muslims soon after that?
Wikipedia has it under the heading "Diyu". Apparently there are ten courts but eighteen hells, maybe up to 134. (Under Catholic thought I suppose most of them would be technically "purgatory"; when the sentence is over you can get out.)
Tip for planewalkers: the one you don't want to be sentenced to is Avici.
What's interesting about this, to me anyway, is that after going through the ordeal, you get fed a "drink of forgetfulness" so that you could rejoin the world. That makes sense for a Buddhist cosmos which is taken from Hinduism. But that makes me think that this is a borrowing from an Indo-European assumption. The Greeks have the river Lethe. So: why bother with a river of forgetfulness if you were going into Hades never to return? A Lethe only makes sense on the assumption of reincarnation. Did the Indo-Europeans believe in reincarnation before settling into Greece and Italy, only then shifting to a more static "hell" model?
Another weird thought going through my head: The Chinese only started thinking about hellfire under the Tang, which began 618 AD. Maybe lots of Zoroastrians and Christians were running away from the Muslims overrunning Persia and Afghanistan 630-660? Maybe Shi'ite Muslims soon after that?
