Heaven: A Traveller’s Guide to the Undiscovered Country

CHAPTER TWO Come Back and Finish What You Started

Judaism moved forward from the Axial Age by developing the idea of a personal God whose ways soared above those of humanity as the heavens tower above the earth. Other contemporaries, though, travelled in the opposite direction. They rejected the single, personal God as too limiting, prone to become a projection of our own fears, needs and desires. They opted instead for an impersonal and opaque deity which was less constrained, less clearly defined, less of an encouragement to complacency within a system of rewards and punishments, and more of a challenge to individuals to journey beyond language, dogma and earth-bound imagery in order to explore the transcendent within.

On the Indian subcontinent, there is some surviving evidence that the reincarnation-based belief system later encapsulated in Hinduism had in fact existed since prehistoric times. On the basis of archaeological findings, for instance, scholars believe that faith in reincarnation existed in the Dravidian people of southern India and northern Sri Lanka. However, in the Vedas – the first sacred texts of Indian civilisation, composed in the second millennium BC – there is the conviction of a life after death but no details about how it is achieved. It is merely a land of shadows akin to the oldest Jewish beliefs.

The Axial Age saw the emergence of both Hinduism and Buddhism. The stance they took on afterlife was radically different from that taken first by Judaism, under the influence of Zoroastrianism, and later by Christianity and Islam. Between 600 and 300 BC, some of the key documents of Hinduism, the Upanishads, were written down by scholars and philosophers of the highly developed civilisation which was based on the River Indus. The Upanishads, while paying homage to the Vedas, substantially developed their ideas on what happened after death by teaching something called samsara – literally a chain of embodiments – whereby individuals died and were reborn according to how they had lived their previous life, i.e. by what ‘karma’ they had achieved.

In places the Upanishads were very specific. If you had stolen grain in one life, you would become a rat in the next. If you killed a priest, you would be reborn as a pig. By twinning reincarnation and karma, the principle that you reap what you sow was set in stone. The Upanishads made it plain that there was not one, single journey upwards. Rather, there would be many twists and turns in an individual’s spiritual journey, because that was how the principle of karma operated. It was a gradual process of education, seeking after moksha – the liberation of the soul from the oppression of the body. Part of the learning curve was to see the self in the wider context. The atman – or ‘individual soul part’ – of the Brahman-Atman – or ‘world soul’ – gave people a seed of the divine which had to be cultivated and, ultimately, liberated.

The process of death and rebirth, therefore, was not envisaged as an endless one. The goal was to continue learning and growing until you had reached such a high level of karma that you could relinquish any sense of yourself and be absorbed into the divine, for at the end of the line stood the gods. It was all about self-learning, self-improvement and self-control. When you reached the highest point, the Upanishads said, you were realising your own destiny. Instead of heaven then, one attained a state of mind or of being, described in one passage in the Upanishads as self-abandonment. The way you lived your life could block your ascent: self-centredness, for instance, was deemed to hinder your absorption into what was called the ‘Great Self. ‘Little Self was egotism; ‘Great Self was understanding your place in the divine plan.

In the Kausitaki Upanishad there is a description, using familiar imagery of place and landscape, to convey the idea of union with the infinite spirit or brahman, but there is little sense of the reader being invited to take what he or she reads literally. It seems instead an effort to put into words what is in fact beyond words. When people depart this world, it states, they go to the moon, which is both the doorway to new life – rebirth on earth – and to the final destination. When they get to the moon, most become rain and are rained down on to the earth, where they are reborn. (Later Hindu belief allowed for a place of temporary respite, called Priti Loka, where one could recharge one’s batteries before returning to earth.) A small number of people, however, are allowed to pass into the inner sanctum where a long, winding path, lined by solicitous angel-like nymphs, leads to the world of brahman:

He first arrives at the lake Ara. He crosses it with his mind, but those who go into it without complete knowledge drown in it. Then he arrives near the watchmen, Muhurta, but they flee from him. Then he arrives at the river Vijara, which he crosses with just his mind. There he shakes off his good and bad deeds, which fall upon his relatives – the good deeds upon the ones he likes and the bad deeds upon the ones he dislikes. It is like this – as a man driving a chariot would look down and observe the two wheels of his chariot, so he looks down and observes the days and nights, the good and bad deeds, and all the pairs of opposites. Freed from his good and bad deeds, this man, who has knowledge of brahman, goes on to brahman.

(Upanishads, translated by Patrick Olivelle)

Brahman, the divine soul anthropomorphised and sitting on a couch that is described as ‘life breath’, with one leg each for past, present, prosperity and nourishment, asks the new arrival to identify him or herself:

I am the season. I am the offspring of the season. I was born from the womb of space as the semen for the wife, as the radiance of the year, as the self [atman] of every being. You are the self of every being. I am who you are … the real.

The system of reincarnation and karma was closely linked in the Upanishads with earthly developments, notably the institutionalisation of the caste system in around 500 BC. Your karma was measurable by what class you belonged to on earth. It was difficult, therefore, within any one life-time to rise through the ranks. Hence the Brahmins (or priestly caste) were acknowledged as enjoying good karma accumulated in previous lives, while the Shudras (or servant caste) were suffering as a result of past bad karma. Ultimately, it made for an enclosed and hopeless world-view, effectively shutting off the possibility of developing and growing within a life and rising above your circumstances.

In so far as they were seen to buttress the existing political order by giving it a divine stamp of approval, the Upanishads came under attack. Moreover, because they taught that reaching the point of absorption into the Great Self was extremely rare, and that, even when achieved, it was a divine status that could easily be lost, with the consequent return to death and rebirth, their core message became, for many, a depressing and pessimistic one. Samara was part of an eternal grind of Sisyphean proportions.

Two movements arose simultaneously to challenge this bleak prospect. Mahavira (c. 540–468 BC), the most revered figure among the Jains, and Siddhartha Gautama Buddha (c. 563-c. 483) both suggested that karma should be seen as an exclusively spiritual quality which could not be directed to the practical end of propping up the caste system: no matter what level of society you were born into, you could still be a good spirit and grow and develop towards the ultimate within yourself inside that one lifetime. Mahavira advocated an asceticism, which included veganism, nudity and celibacy, and nonviolence towards all living creatures as the key to salvation from the cycles of reincarnation. His was a rigorous self-help credo, placing as a realisable goal liberation from the flesh and the world into a realm of mental and spiritual bliss called Isatpragbhara or Kevala at the top of the universe.

Jainism was a fundamentalist version of mainstream Hinduism and continues to thrive today with around two million adherents. Much more widespread, however, are the 350 million Buddhists worldwide (though very few are now in India itself). Buddhism took a gentler, less extreme course. Siddhartha Gautama was born in the sixth century BC, the son of a king in the foothills of the Himalayas in the north of India. His legend tells that when he was a young man he married, but he was afflicted by a strange malaise. He abandoned his prosperous family and his life of pleasure and indulgence, embarking instead on fasting, asceticism and meditation on sacred texts, finally achieving release from earthly desires and suffering under a Bodhi tree in his Great Enlightenment. Life on earth could be miserable, he taught, and each must seek liberation in this life, not by the self-denial of the Jains, or the resignation of the Upanishads, but rather by searching after knowledge of spiritual truths. There were, he said, Four Noble Truths which demonstrated that misery was caused by craving which in its turn could be cured by means of the Noble Eightfold Path. This led to the breaking of samsara and, ultimately, to nirvana – a mental state of blessedness. The eight steps on the path concerned growing in understanding and spiritual wisdom, living a moral life, and cultivating the mental discipline to prepare for nirvana. In Sanskrit, the word nirvana means ‘extinguished’ and for Buddha – the ‘enlightened one’ – it was a place for the extinguishing of human misery and cravings by self-knowledge.

While Buddha accepted the cycle of reincarnation and karma taught by the Upanishads, he offered as a release from samsara an achievable nirvana. Part of that nirvana was the knowledge of a deity, but, unlike Judaism, Buddha focused not on a personal god but on individual and internal enlightenment. This could, Buddha warned, be a long time coming. One of the most popular books in Buddhism is the Jatakas – birth-stories – which contains some 550 accounts of previous births of the Buddha in various human and animal forms.

Nirvana was not supernatural. ‘He did not rely,’ writes his biographer, the distinguished religious historian, Karen Armstrong, ‘on divine aid from another world, but was convinced that nirvana was a state that was entirely natural to human beings and could be experienced by any genuine seeker. Gautama believed that he could find the freedom he sought right in the midst of this imperfect world. Instead of waiting for a message from the gods, he would search within himself for the answer, explore the furthest reaches of his mind and exploit all his physical resources.’

From the third century BC, Buddhism began to spread, notably to China. Legend tells that in the first century BC a Han emperor sent envoys along the Silk Route to India. They returned with written versions of Siddhartha Gautama’s teachings which so impressed their readers that Buddhism immediately took root in China. The truth is more complex. Whereas in other parts of southeast Asia Buddhism had quickly and easily assimilated with existing beliefs, in China it stood in stark contrast to the two dominant ideologies, Confucianism and Taoism, both much more perfunctory in their attitude to the afterlife and transcendence. There was, therefore, a clear choice and a long period of conflict and competition.

Confucianism was a decidedly worldly creed which discouraged any great emphasis on either the hereafter or the mystical, and promoted instead practical imperatives on social responsibility, collective action, family values and hard work. Confucius (551–479 BC) was the codifier of an existing but ill-defined system of natural justice, someone who took received wisdom and moulded it in a robust package of beliefs. He was notably inhospitable to any supernatural concepts, but he did appeal to the individual to develop their intellectual powers and to act fairly in terms of following ‘the way of heaven’. This led all, whether high-born or low-born, ultimately to the reward of Tian, a paradise for virtuous souls governed by a ‘supreme spiritual presence’. This supreme being was later to be confused by Confucians with the person of the Emperor of China, in an effort to shore up political authority, but it was an understandable mistake for Confucius had great respect for the instruments of government (though he did not regard rulers as divine per se). The supreme spiritual being was ill-defined and vague, certainly not a Western-style god of judgement, and a force seldom active on earth.

Tian was not, characteristically, an original idea of Confucius’s. Meaning ‘sky’ it had been a part of Chinese thought for several thousand years before the philosopher annexed it to his code of ethics as a reward for good behaviour. Traditionally, Tian was ruled over by the god Tianshen and those who joined him there after death would be nobles or kings. Some Chinese tombs discovered by archaeologists, thought to belong to rulers dating back to before 1000 BC, include the remains of dogs, horses and servants, all apparently sacrificed so as to assist their master on his passage to Tian.

For the lowly-born, the only chance of entry was as a vassal or a scribe, keeping records by which Tianshen could judge the lives of those who came before him. Confucius, however, rejected such a system and attempted instead to make Tian a more democratic place, open to all on the basis of their earthly virtue and industry rather than rank and the arbitrary judgement of a deity. He was also less enthusiastic about the ancient Chinese practice of ancestor worship, believing it a distraction from current needs, but, again, his teachings have evolved down the years and have been interpreted as making a clear connection between heaven and earth. Hence sacrifices were offered in his name to dead emperors, various nature gods and even to Confucius himself.

Taoism, founded by Lao-tzu in the fifth century BC, was more open than Confucianism to supernatural ideas, but was still fundamentally wary of them. It was a much less worldly credo, rejecting institutions and politics and advocating instead a return to simplicity and harmony with nature in line with Tao – the hidden principle of the universe. The ideal was ‘wu wei’, non-doing or non-action, and in this passive belief system the notion of working to earn some sort of reward in an afterlife was anathema. With such an essentially blank canvas, as the historian Geddes Macgregor writes in Images of Afterlife, Taoism was ‘as much directed towards the this-worldly as has been the philosophy of Confucius. True, as Taoism grew into a popular religion that accommodated all sorts of emotional influences, it became capable of hospitality to almost any sort of practice, including magical techniques for the attainment of immortality, but such developments have tended to be peripheral to the mainstream from the Chinese outlook.’

Taoism is, by its very passivity, something of a jumble of ideas which has been imposed on the vague and amorphous founding principle over the centuries, and therefore at different stages has embraced both a deity – a holy trinity of Three Pure Ones, including Lao-tzu – and an approach to paradise, Mount K’unlun. This nine-level hill leads up through various disciplines to the gateway to eternal bliss which stands at the summit. Those who enter come under the protection of Hsi Wang Mu, a queen with power over the mortality and destiny not only of the dead but also of the living. Her powers are so great that one Tao legend teaches she can dispense a magic potion to her favourites which allows them to experience eternal bliss without having to die first – similar to the dream-like journeys of apocalyptic literature. The focus in the Taoist legend, though, is not so much on what is seen but on plots to steal the potion. Immortality, and the key to it, is more important than the actual nature of life after death.

Set against such worldly belief systems, Buddhism had a strong mystical appeal when it first came to China. Its doctrines of individual liberation stood in contradiction to the more corporatist leanings of Confucianism and Taoism. There has never been one, single form of Chinese Buddhism, but a whole variety of alternatives, some developing highly disciplined monastic schools – for example in Tibet – others straying into magic and sorcery.

Two of these are of particular interest because they developed more explicit ideas of paradise than those of Buddha himself: Ching-tu or ‘Pure Land’ Buddhism was formulated in China by T’an-luan (AD 476–542). Devotees believe that they reach an equivalent to nirvana not only through their own powers and their own interior journey towards transcendence but also through devotion to and dependence upon a later incarnation of the Buddha, Amida Buddha, ‘the Lord of Light’ who presides over a pure land or land of bliss. The modification to encompass a more defined and judgemental deity means that paradise, as that deity’s court, also is necessarily more precise, as set out in the Sukhavativyuha Sutra:

Breezes blow spontaneously, gently moving these bells [that hang from trees in the four corners of the land], which swing gracefully. The breezes blow in perfect harmony. They are neither hot nor cold. They are at the same time calm and fresh, sweet and soft. They are neither fast nor slow. When they blow on the nets and the many kinds of jewels, the trees emit the innumerable sounds of the subtle and sublime Dharma [the principles behind the law] and spread myriad sweet and fine perfumes. Those who hear these sounds spontaneously cease to raise the dust of tribulation and impurity. When the breezes touch their bodies, they all attain a bliss comparable to that accompanying a monk’s attainment of the samadhi of extinction.

Moreover, when they blow, these breezes scatter flowers all over, filling this buddha-field. These flowers fall into patterns, according to their colours, without ever being mixed up. They have delicate hues and strong fragrance. When one steps on these petals, the feet sink four inches. When one lifts the foot, the petals return to their original shape and position.

(from Land of Bliss, Luis Gomez)

This Pure Land is thought to exist in a particular place – beyond the sunset in the West – but it still remains, for all the detail, at heart a state of mind, the end point in the cycle of reincarnation achieved by those who raise themselves mentally and spiritually above day-to-day existence. There may be more of a focus on Ching-tu than on other forms of Buddhism, but still there is none of the resurrection hope that fuels monotheistic heavenly visions.

Tibet was slower than China to develop an interest in Buddhism. Its ancient creed, Bon, was an earthbound spirituality, with deities who were attuned to the landscape. The god Za, for instance, produced hailstones and lightning to damage the crops. This magical link between land and the gods was a practical support for a farming people, and they saw no need to replace it. Buddhism, when it came, had to be imposed on them by their rulers. In the eighth century King Trisongdetsen hoped that Buddhism would be a way of encouraging a higher, more sophisticated and more philosophical culture among his people. When it eventually took root, Tibetan Buddhism held fast to the essential beliefs of Buddha, though it modified them, resorting, for instance, to Vajrayana, a form of meditation undertaken by students and teachers which has the power to bring the enlightened state into everyday life.

Tibetan Buddhism, more so than its near relatives, has traditionally had a strong sense of the closeness of death. The Indian master Padmasambhava, ‘the Lotus-Born’, is credited as the founder of Tibetan Buddhism (though some doubt he ever existed), and he is said to have abandoned palaces to live on the charnel ground, a cemetery where dead bodies were traditionally left to rot as a reminder to the faithful of the unimportance of the human form and also because of a lack of fuel with which to burn corpses. Padmasambhava found the charnel ground an excellent place for meditation on the importance of letting go of your ego and your attachment to this life. It provided, he believed, the impetus to see beyond life and death to ultimate enlightenment.

Tibetan Buddhism followed his emphasis on death. In the Tibetan Book of the Dead, much is made of bardo, or the often frightening gap that opens up when you lose touch with life. It is a transitional state, but covers both the approach of physical death and the preface to enlightenment which can happen while you are alive. The two are seen as one. Bardo is dominated by a brilliant light which allows the true nature of the mind to be seen in all its glory. For those who can take this vision, liberation from the cycle of death and rebirth is at that moment possible, but the Book of the Dead teaches that most people in this transitory state are too confused and so are swept along, via a path of sometimes terrifying, sometimes peaceful, visions to new birth.