SECTION CXCVIII
"Yudhishthira said, 'Tell me what description of hell is obtained by a
Reciter? I feel, O king, a curiosity to know this. It behoveth thee to
discourse on the subject.'
"Bhishma said, 'Thou hast sprung from a portion of the god of
righteousness. Thou art by nature observant of righteousness. Listen, O
sinless one, with undivided attention, to these words resting on
righteousness as their basis. Those regions that are owned by the
high-souled gods, that are of diverse aspects and colours, of diverse
descriptions and productive of diverse fruits, and that are of great
excellence, those ears again that: move at the will of the riders, those
beautiful mansions and hells, those various pleasure-gardens embellished
with golden lotuses, those regions that belong to the four Regents and
Sukra and Vrihaspati and the Maruts and Viswedevas and Sadhyas and the
Aswins, and the Rudras and the Adityas and the Vasus, and other denizens
of heaven, are, O sire, spoken of as hells, when compared with the region
of the Supreme Soul. The region last spoken of is without any fear (of
change for the worse), uncreate (and therefore, in its true nature),
without pain of any kind (such as ignorance and delusion), without any
agreeable or disagreeable element, beyond the reach of the three
attributes (of Sattwa, Rajas, and Tamas), freed from the eight incidents,
(viz., the five primal elements, the senses, the: mind, and the
intellect), without the three (distinctions between the knower, the
known, and act of knowing); freed also from the four attributes (seeing,
hearing, thinking, and knowing),[633] without the fourfold causes (of
knowledge), without joy and delight and sorrow and disease. Time (in his
forms of past, present, and future) arises there for use. Time is not the
ruler there. That supreme region is the ruler of Time as also of Heaven.
That Reciter who becomes identified with his Soul (by withdrawing
everything into it) goes thither. He has, after this, never to feel any
sorrow. This region is called Supreme. The other regions (of which I have
first spoken) are hell. I have not told thee of all those regions that
are called hell. Indeed, in comparison with that foremost of regions all
the others are called hell.'
