The six realms (sad-gati, “six destinations”) are where beings are reborn. They are the standard Tibetan and East Asian presentation of Buddhist cosmology, and what the wheel of life depicts in its six segments.

Three are “fortunate” destinations — gods, asuras, humans — and three are “unfortunate”: animals, hungry ghosts, hell-beings. Some schemes count five, folding the asuras into the god realm; the Theravada thirty-one-plane scheme expands the god realm enormously while keeping the lower realms as they are.

Each realm is produced by a characteristic mental state and its associated karma, and each has a characteristic form of suffering. None is permanent.

The god realm (deva) #

Produced by: generosity, ethical conduct, and meditative attainment — genuinely wholesome karma. Rebirth here is a reward.

Characteristic affliction: pride, and the complacency of pleasure.

Devas live immensely long lives of beauty and delight, in bodies of subtle matter, without the illness and hardship that structure human existence. The Theravada scheme distributes them across twenty-six planes, from the six sense-sphere heavens through the sixteen Brahma worlds attained through the jhanas to the four formless spheres.

The trap is exact: there is nothing to prompt practice. Existence is too pleasant to raise the question of suffering and too absorbing to permit sustained effort. Long-lived gods may also come to believe themselves eternal, and the canon contains a pointed account of a Brahma who believes himself the creator, having simply arrived in an empty world first and then observed others appearing after him.

The suffering of this realm is concentrated at the end. The texts describe the five signs of a deva’s approaching death — flowers wilting, garments soiling, sweat appearing, the body losing its radiance, and discontent with one’s seat — and describe the resulting anguish as acute, precisely because the fall is so far and was so unexpected.

The asura realm #

Produced by: generosity and virtue mixed with jealousy, competitiveness, and the desire to surpass others.

Characteristic affliction: envy and aggression.

Asuras — “demigods,” “titans,” or “jealous gods” — are powerful and long-lived, but consumed by rivalry with the devas. The traditional image has a wish-fulfilling tree rooted in the asura realm whose fruit ripens in the god realm above, so that the asuras labour and the devas enjoy. They make war on the devas constantly and constantly lose.

Some classifications place them among the fortunate realms and some among the unfortunate, which is itself informative: the asura condition combines real advantages with a state of mind that makes them useless.

It is the most immediately recognisable realm to modern readers — the state of someone who has a great deal and is tormented by someone else having more.

The human realm #

Produced by: a broadly ethical life, particularly the keeping of the five precepts, mixed with ordinary desire.

Characteristic affliction: desire, and the full range of dukkha — birth, ageing, sickness, death, separation, and not getting what one wants.

And yet: this is the best realm to be born in, and the tradition is emphatic about it.

The reason is the balance. There is enough suffering to make the question of suffering unavoidable, and enough stability, freedom, and intelligence to do something about it. Gods are too comfortable, asuras too preoccupied, animals too dull, ghosts too desperate, hell-beings too overwhelmed. Only humans routinely have both the motive and the means.

Buddhas appear in the human realm. Practice happens here.

The tradition calls this the precious human rebirth, and it is the subject of the first contemplation in the Tibetan preliminary practices, where it is analysed as requiring eighteen conditions — the eight freedoms and ten endowments, which include not being born in a time or place without a Buddha’s teaching, having intact faculties, and not holding wrong views.

Its rarity is illustrated by the famous simile of the blind turtle: a turtle surfaces once a century in an ocean across which a single yoke floats on the waves. The chance of its head coming up through the yoke is the chance of a precious human birth.

The animal realm #

Produced by: ignorance, dullness, and heedlessness.

Characteristic affliction: stupidity, fear, and being used by others.

Animals suffer from predation, from being hunted and farmed, from bearing burdens, and from an inability to understand their situation or improve it. The particular defect of the realm is not pain but incapacity: an animal cannot practise, cannot receive teaching, and cannot form the intention to change its condition.

Buddhism’s treatment of animals is unusual among premodern traditions in taking their suffering seriously as a moral matter, which follows directly from the realm structure: an animal is a being in an unfortunate rebirth, not a different kind of thing. The first precept covers all sentient beings, and the vegetarianism debate is grounded here.

The hungry ghost realm (preta) #

Produced by: greed, miserliness, and the refusal to give.

Characteristic affliction: insatiable craving.

Pretas are depicted with enormous distended bellies and throats as narrow as a needle: capable of limitless hunger and incapable of taking anything in. Traditional accounts multiply the torments — food turning to filth or fire on being swallowed, water drying up on approach, the sight of rivers that become sand.

The realm is the most transparently apt as a description of a mental state, and it is used that way constantly. Addiction is the standard modern reading; so is the condition of consuming without ever being satisfied.

Pretas are also the realm most involved in ritual practice. Food offerings to hungry ghosts are made in many traditions, and the Chinese and Japanese Ghost Festival — Ullambana, from the story of Maudgalyayana rescuing his mother from this realm — is among the major annual observances in East Asia. See Buddhist Holidays & Observances.

The hell realm (naraka) #

Produced by: hatred, anger, and violence.

Characteristic affliction: unremitting pain.

The hells are described in detail and at length — eight hot hells, eight cold ones, and numerous neighbouring hells, each with its own torments and durations, the longest running to enormous numbers of years. The literature on this is extensive and graphic, and it functioned, as such literature does elsewhere, as moral deterrence.

Two points are essential and are routinely missed.

Buddhist hells are not eternal. However long the duration, the karma that produced the rebirth is eventually exhausted and the being is reborn elsewhere. There is no permanent damnation in Buddhism.

There is no judge. Nobody sends beings to hell. The realm is the ripening of one’s own actions, operating as a natural process. Yama, who appears in the imagery, is a personification rather than an authority deciding cases — though popular tradition in East Asia developed elaborate bureaucratic hells with courts and records, which coexist with the doctrinal position without much friction.

The bodhisattva Kshitigarbha — Jizo, Dizang — is associated with this realm, having vowed not to attain buddhahood until the hells are emptied.

The pattern #

Read as a whole, the six realms make a single argument.

Each realm is produced by a mental state, and each realm is the maximal expression of that state. Pride produces a life of pleasant self-regard that ends in a fall; envy produces a life of perpetual losing competition; greed produces a life of hunger that cannot be fed; hatred produces a life of pain. The realm is not a punishment matched to a crime. It is what the state of mind becomes when there is nothing else in the picture.

This is why the psychological reading works as well as it does: the realms are descriptions of what it is like to be wholly occupied by a particular affliction, and anyone can recognise short visits to most of them.

It is also why the human realm is fortunate. Humans experience all six states and are dominated by none — which is uncomfortable, and is exactly the condition under which change is possible.

How to read the realms #

The three readings — literal, psychological, and functional — are set out in Buddhist Cosmology. A few additional points specific to the six realms:

The psychological reading is genuinely traditional as a supplement. Tibetan teachers routinely use the realms to describe states of mind, and the Bardo literature explicitly connects the realms to mental tendencies at the moment of death.

But the traditions also unambiguously hold that the realms are destinations of actual rebirth, and the entire structure of merit-making practice across Buddhist Asia presupposes it. A presentation that offers only the psychological reading is not describing what Buddhists have believed.

Common questions #

Are the realms literal places? The tradition has overwhelmingly said yes. Modern Buddhists vary widely, and many hold the psychological reading either alongside or instead. What can be said without controversy is that the literal reading is the traditional one and that the tradition’s practice assumes it.

Can you be reborn as a human again? Yes, but the texts treat it as unlikely without deliberate effort, using similes of extreme improbability. The point of the similes is motivational: do not assume you will get another chance like this one.

Do animals have buddha-nature? In Mahayana, yes — all sentient beings do, and Tiantai extended the claim even to insentient things. Animals cannot practise in their current rebirth, but the capacity is not absent.

Which realm are hungry ghosts in relation to us? Traditional cosmology places them in a specific location, often described as beneath the earth’s surface or in particular wilderness places, and holds that they are occasionally perceptible to humans. The ritual life around them — offerings, festivals, transfers of merit — treats them as present and reachable.

Is there a devil in Buddhism? Mara is the nearest figure, and he is not a ruler of hell or an opponent of a creator god. He is a deva of the highest sense-sphere heaven with an interest in keeping beings within his domain — the personification of death and of what binds beings to samsara. He tempts, he does not punish.

Sources & further reading #

Rupert Gethin, The Foundations of Buddhism (Oxford, 1998), ch. 5. Patrul Rinpoche, The Words of My Perfect Teacher, trans. Padmakara Translation Group (Shambhala, 2nd ed. 1998), part 1 — the six realms and the precious human rebirth in Tibetan preliminary practice. Bhikkhu Bodhi (ed.), A Comprehensive Manual of Abhidhamma (BPS, 3rd ed. 2000), ch. 5 — the thirty-one planes. Stephen F. Teiser, The Ghost Festival in Medieval China (Princeton, 1988) — on the preta realm in East Asian practice. Randy Kloetzli, Buddhist Cosmology (Motilal Banarsidass, 1983).