What Are the Eight Great Hells — Types, Order, and the Sins They Answer

"What are the Eight Great Hells?" Many have heard the name yet few know what it contains. This article gently explains the eight hells taught in Buddhism — their types, their order, and the sins they answer to — along with their sources.

What the Eight Great Hells are

The Eight Great Hells are the eight hells taught in Buddhism. They are said to be stacked in layers deep underground; the further down you go, the graver the sin and the greater the suffering. By their deeds in life, the dead are said to fall into one of them.

Because every one of these hells torments the dead with flame and searing heat, they are also called the "eight hot hells," as a pair to the eight cold hells that torment with cold.

The source — the "Essentials of Rebirth" and Genshin

The basis for this view of hell lies in Buddhist scriptures such as the Saddharma-smrtyupasthana Sutra and the Abhidharmakosa. In Japan it became widely known through the "Essentials of Rebirth" (Ojo Yoshu, 985) by the Heian-era monk Genshin (942–1017).

By depicting the horrors of hell vividly, Genshin taught a heart that wearies of this world's suffering and longs for rebirth in the Pure Land. Much of the later hell imagery and folklore takes its cue from this book's descriptions.

The eight types and the sins they answer

The Eight Great Hells are generally arranged in this order. Note how, with each added sin, one falls into a deeper hell.

• Reviving Hell: the shallowest, for those who took life. The dead wound one another, are revived by a cool breeze, and repeat the torment — hence the name "revive alike."
• Black Rope Hell: for those who added theft to killing. They are marked with a black inked cord and cut along its lines.
• Crushing Hell: for those who further added illicit desire. They are crushed between closing mountains and torment in a forest of sword-like leaves.
• Screaming Hell: where sins like intoxication are added and one cries out in boiling water and flame.
• Great Screaming Hell: where the sin of lying is added and one cries out still more fiercely.
• Scorching Hell: a burning hell for wrong views, such as teaching false doctrine.
• Great Scorching Hell: where more sins pile up and the burning grows fiercer.
• Hell of No Interval (Avici): the lowest layer, the Hell of No Interval, answering to the gravest sins, such as the five grave offenses.

Staggering lifespans — the "kalpa"

Another defining feature of the Eight Great Hells is the length of the sentence. The scriptures say that even the shallowest Reviving Hell far exceeds a trillion human years, and the figures grow by orders of magnitude further down, until the lowest Hell of No Interval reaches "a middle kalpa," an unimaginable span.

These are symbols of the weight of sin expressed through the sheer vastness of time, rather than actual years. That uncountable length is itself a device for making cause and effect felt in the body.

The sixteen sub-hells

The Eight Great Hells do not end at eight. Outside the four gates of each hell are said to lie sixteen "sub-hells," where the torments branch out according to the finer kinds of sin.

Scenes like the Mountain of Needles, which also appears in Yurusen's codex, often derive from these sub-hell descriptions. The Eight Great Hells are not merely eight layers but a vast world-image subdivided into as many torments as there are sins.

Hell within the six realms

The Eight Great Hells do not stand alone; in Buddhism they sit at the very bottom of the "six realms" — hell, hungry ghosts, animals, warring spirits, humans, and heaven, the six worlds of delusion. Within the idea of rebirth, where your deeds in life decide where you are next born, hell is only one "path" among these.

Worth keeping in mind is that hell is said not to be eternal. However long it lasts, once the set sentence is served, the dead are taught to be reborn once more onto another path. That hell has been told of as an occasion to mend one's conduct, rather than to punish without end, can be glimpsed here too.

Yurusen's "five judgments"

Building on this view of hell, the app "Yurusen" expresses the weight of your feeling toward an "unforgivable person" as five tiers of judgment. From the lightest admonition to the gravest, the Hell of No Interval, you can quietly choose a judgment to fit the type of person and the depth of your feeling.

This is not to truly punish anyone, but a mechanism that gives a "shape" — a tier — to feelings with nowhere to go, shrinking them to a manageable size. You are under no obligation to force yourself to forgive. The wraiths that appear at the end of judgment can be seen on the Wraith Codex page.