t will be seen, there is
moral confusion, but, in the long run, exact compensation.

The exuberant prodigiousness of the Hindu imagination is
strikingly manifest in its descriptions of the rewards of virtue
in the heavens and of the punishments of sin in the hells. Visions
pass before us of beautiful groves full of fragrance and music,
abounding in delicious fruits, and birds of gorgeous plumage,
crystal streams embedded with pearls, unruffled lakes where the
lotus blooms, palaces of gems, crowds of friends and lovers,
endless revelations of truth, boundless graspings of power, all
that can stir and enchant intellect, will, fancy, and heart. In
some of the heavens the residents have no bodily form, but enjoy
purely spiritual pleasures. In others they are self resplendent,
and traverse the ether. They are many miles in height, one being
described whose crown was four miles high and who wore on his
person sixty wagon loads of jewels. The ordinary lifetime of the
inhabitants of the dewa loka named Wasawartti equals nine billions
two hundred and sixteen millions of our years. They breathe only
once in sixteen hours.

The reverse of this picture is still more vigorously drawn, highly
colored, and diversified in contents. The walls of the Hindu hell
are over a hundred miles thick; and so dazzling is their
brightness that it bursts the eyes which look at them anywhere
within a distance of four hundred leagues.7 The poor creatures
here, wrapped in shrouds of fire, writhe and yell in frenzy of
pain. The very revelry and ecstasy of terror and anguish fill the
whole region. The skins of some wretches are taken off from head
to foot, and then scalding vinegar is poured over them. A glutton
is punished thus: experiencing an insatiable hunger in a body as
large as three mountains, he is tantalized with a mouth no larger
than the eye of a needle.8 The infernal tormentors, throwing their
victims down, take a flexible flame in each hand, and with these
lash them alternately right and left. One demon, Rahu, is seventy
six thousand eight hundred miles tall: the palm of his hand
measures fifty thousand acres; and when he is enraged he rushes up
the sky and swallows the sun or the moon, thus causing an eclipse!
In the Asiatic Journal for 1840 is an article on "The Chinese
Judges of the Dead," which describes a series of twenty four
paintings of hell found in a Buddhist temple. Devils in human
shapes are depicted pulling out the tongues