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A discussion of The Advantages of Being Good and the Disadvantages of Going Bad is a standard part of the Gradual Course.
This material is being transcribed from the only remaining copy (save one that was stolen and exists who knows where) of my setting down of the original of this.
This copy was sent to my friend Dances with Bijaka, who lent it back to me for this purpose. His copy was sent to him with this note (I imagine, from the dated reference in the text, somewhere around June 1992):
. . . And again . . .
Here is the Hell Spell. In Buddhist countries this is a great favorite. It is very difficult, impossible really, to do a spell in writing. To "get it" (I figured this out after 20 years of missing the trick) one needs to do it out loud to an audience told like a ghost story around a camp fire. The books are only the script, the spell in the spell comes from the actor or story teller.
Again, here today, this stuff is like getting a radio broadcast from 2500 years ago. In the old days language itself was young and although I believe the onomatopoeia of Pali was lost to the average person even then, still it was . . . had to be vastly easier to get some of the jokes. This is why I put in the Pali, and further put in as much about each important concept as I could. Still, we have some things the original hearers didn’t have . . . we can hear how some expressions have evolved in their trip down through Time, and we can see the influence of certain ideas suchas the idea of Hell in this spell . . . I am thinking of Dante.
On the spell: it is a little helpful to remember that it is a simile. However, how this sort of thing works is that if you look at the spell and apply it to the here and now (that is, to try and see how certain behavior here results in certain consequences here) you can see that there is a seamless transition between the spell as a simile here and now and the spell as at least one form of real possible outcome in the hereafter. We are dealing with the imagination. Here the imagined has got a little solidity and gives the idea of long lastingness. After death the mind becomes (until, at least, it latches on to the next rebirth) more plastic. What here would be preposterous is in the imagination . . .
NO PROBLEM MON
One more point: I told you you could kill someone by describing Hell to them. I mean you no harm! That is done, anyway, by a very personal vision and the evil intent is important to it’s working.
When The Weird-O Tells you
He talks with God
You laugh
And think him mad
But God knows
When the Weird-O laughs
And tells you
He talks with God
That the Weird-O knows
God knows who’s God
And who is
And who is not
Mad
The Disadvantages of Going Bad
The Horrors and Woes of Niraya Part I
The Horrors and Woes of Niraya Part II
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