The Three Realms Are Not a Map of Another World
In the previous episode, as I concluded my discussion of anger among greed, anger, and ignorance, I drew on the Heart Sutra. When nothing obstructs the mind, it does not waver; leaving inverted, dreamlike thinking far behind, it reaches nirvana. Here I connect that explanation to the three realms of desire, form, and formlessness. They are not a literal map of a universe we enter after death. They depict ordinary human life, the practitioner’s temporary stilling of thought, and the path of awakening on which views about oneself and the world are released one by one.
I previously criticized Jinje, a former Supreme Patriarch of the Jogye Order, for wrongly explaining the three realms in a summer-retreat Dharma talk. I even said that a person who cannot explain Buddhism properly should step down from such a position of authority. Here I go beyond rebuke and explain what the three realms mean. Mount Sumeru and the six realms of rebirth belong to this structure, but treating them as literal worlds misses the point. The story embodies the process of leaving greed, anger, and ignorance and shows the direction of practice.
The Desire Realm: Life Crushed by Wants and Obligations
The three realms present an aesthetics of subtraction. The desire realm is our ordinary life. At its bottom is hell. What is hell? When I have countless things I want to do and believe I must do, yet cannot accomplish them in reality, my mind falls into hell.
I have lived in such hells. Jokingly, I may dream of wealth and splendor, sports cars, yachts, and travel around the world. I may also burden myself with the conviction that, as the eldest son, I must restore my household, support my relatives, and even set the country right. Reality does not obey me. When I cannot obtain what I want or fulfill what I regard as duty, self-reproach and resentment lodge in my chest. The tighter that obstruction becomes, the more hellish life is.
Above hell come hungry ghosts, animals, asuras, humans, and heavenly realms up to the Heaven of Freely Enjoying Others’ Creations. Yet even the highest heaven remains within desire. A life in which everything appears available at will is still driven by craving and pursuit. In a single day we travel between hell and heaven: a fulfilled wish sends us upward, and frustration casts us down. The sixfold round of rebirth can thus be read as the ceaseless movement of our actual minds.
Two kinds of discrimination operate beneath it: like versus dislike, and right versus wrong. I try to acquire what I like and avoid what I dislike; I also demand that people and the world conform to what I judge right. When these meanings and views harden, I see without seeing the world, myself, my thoughts, or my mind. I mistake a world tinted by my own lenses for reality itself.
The Form Realm: A Temporary Liberation When Thought Stops
The form realm is represented by the four jhanas. It is the time in which one briefly steps away from a daily life crowded by wants and duties and becomes a practitioner. Sitting down and concentrating on one object, even briefly, stills the thoughts filling the head. Likes and dislikes, right and wrong, subside. The mind enters equanimity and immovability. What had been tightly compressed becomes calm like a clear, still lake. I call this a temporary liberation of mind.
This is why meditative absorption matters. When thought pauses, we experience how much thought normally torments us. We learn bodily that suffering comes not only from the outside world but also from the views and discriminations we hold. Yet entering absorption does not itself make a person awakened. Even in the Buddha’s time many practitioners mastered absorption and samadhi, and pre-Buddhist yoga already pursued such states.
Once meditation ends, the old habits and subconscious patterns return. Thought stopped during absorption, but the misunderstanding that produced it did not vanish. Desire and attachment revive in ordinary life. We cannot remain absorbed all day. Absorption is an important method because it reveals the problem of thought, but it cannot substitute for a genuine understanding of self, world, and mind.
The Formless Realm: Releasing Matter, Cognition, and Views
What is next required is observation and genuine understanding. Whether or not one has mastered the four jhanas, one can set wants and obligations aside and examine oneself and the world through the Buddha’s teaching. The four formless attainments portray the successive subtraction of what we grasp.
The Sphere of Infinite Space
First, what appears as solid matter is not an eternal, unchanging substance. A phone in my hand is temporary, continuously changing, and present only through many conditions; it has no independent essence. My body and every material thing are the same. Because they arise relationally and change without pause, nothing fixed can be identified as self. Understanding material form as empty releases attachment to matter.
The Sphere of Infinite Consciousness and the Sphere of Nothingness
Yet the cognition that knows matter to be empty remains: “I recognize that the world is empty.” The sphere of infinite consciousness exposes this cognitive activity. Looking more closely, cognition too is conditioned and constructed in this moment, not an eternal subject. Consciousness as well as matter is empty. Seeing no fixed substance in either mind or matter is the sphere of nothingness.
The Sphere of Neither Perception nor Non-Perception
Even the understanding that mind and matter are empty can become an image and a view. Neither perception nor non-perception means clinging neither to the presence of perception nor to its absence. No view is retained as the final truth. In the phrase I repeatedly use, one arrives at: “There was no such thing.”
Releasing Even the Final Pursuit
A final pursuit often survives: the hope that an immaculate supreme state, perfect truth, and complete awakening can be possessed. But a human being is an animal who must eat, sleep, age, and die. Body and mind keep changing. Fully understanding dependent arising, impermanence, and not-self reveals that even the desire for an absolute state is a human fabrication.
I may die today or tomorrow, and the world never stops changing. Releasing the last object of pursuit returns a person to this very place. Outwardly, one is ordinary again. Yet one no longer suffers at every collision between reality and demands that things must be this way or that way. One observes oneself and the world, lives each changing moment, and does not cling to views. That is what I mean by an arahant.
Buddhism does not end by acquiring one more thing. It removes, one by one, the beams blocking our vision and the shells of views enclosing us.
Buddhism Is a Religion of Subtraction
The three realms display the path toward awakening. The desire realm is ordinary humanity moving between hell and heaven. The form realm is the practitioner’s respite in which likes and dislikes, right and wrong, become still. The formless realm is the process of observing and releasing attachment to matter, cognition, and views. Absorption lets us feel that our own thinking causes suffering, but genuine understanding of self and world remains decisive.
The Heart Sutra’s departure from inverted dream-thinking and my rendering, “when nothing obstructs the mind, it will not waver,” meet this same structure. We should not read the three realms merely as a cosmology locating gods, Mount Sumeru, and hell. Their story contains human reality, the practitioner’s life, and the movement toward awakening. Buddhism subtracts rather than accumulates: removing the beam from the eye, breaking the shell of views, and clearing obstructions from the mind so that this moment and this world can be seen directly.
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