Ask any Christian what happens after death, and the answer will come quickly: the righteous go to heaven, the wicked go to hell, and the saved are separated from the damned for eternity. This picture — vivid, graduated, morally structured, eternal — is so central to the popular imagination of Christianity that it seems like the most obvious thing in the world. It is not. It is not in the Hebrew Bible. It is not in the Torah. It is not in the majority of the prophetic literature. It is not in the Psalms. It is not, in any developed form, anywhere in the Jewish scriptures that Jesus would have read, studied, and prayed.
The Hebrew Bible’s account of the afterlife is Sheol — a shadowy, undifferentiated underworld where all the dead go, good and bad alike, without reward or punishment, without activity or praise of God, without eternal consequence for the moral life lived on earth. The elaborate, graduated, morally structured afterlife of Christianity — multiple heavens, a vivid hell of eternal punishment, an intermediate state for the partially purified — has no antecedent in the Hebrew Bible. It has, however, a precise and highly developed antecedent in the Buddhist cosmology that had been elaborating these ideas for five centuries before the Gospels were written.
This is not a marginal claim. It is confirmed by the most respected New Testament scholars. Bart Ehrman, in his book Heaven and Hell (Simon & Schuster, 2020), stated it plainly in his blog: ‘There is no place of eternal punishment in any passage of the entire Old Testament. In fact — as comes as a surprise to many people — nowhere in the entire Hebrew Bible is there any discussion at all of heaven and hell as places of rewards and punishments for those who have died.’ The elaborate Christian afterlife was assembled from multiple sources — Persian Zoroastrianism, Greek mythology, Jewish apocalyptic literature of the Second Temple period, and the Buddhist cosmological imagination that had been describing the graduated realms of existence for five centuries. This chapter argues that the Buddhist cosmological contribution is the most systematic and the most structurally proximate to the Christian account.
21.1 The Hebrew Bible’s Silence: Sheol as Absence
The scholarly consensus on Sheol is unambiguous. The TheTorah.com article on the afterlife in the Hebrew Bible states: ‘The Hebrew Bible does not offer a clear-cut depiction of what happens to a person upon death.’ The Jerusalem Post review of recent scholarship summarizes: ‘Sheol, the shadowy abode of the dead… is often depicted as down below, silent, and without active praise of God. It is closer to a great communal grave than to the moralized heaven/hell of later eras. Sheol reads less like punishment than like suspension: a state of heavy and aimless sleep, rather than a place of concrete torments.’
The Ehrman blog post states the conclusion with maximum clarity: ‘There is unanimity among critical scholars that in no case does Sheol mean hell in the sense people mean today.’ Psalm 6:5 articulates the logic of Sheol’s silence: ‘For there is no praise of You among the dead; in Sheol, who can acclaim You?’ The dead in Sheol do not praise God. They do not experience reward or punishment. They are simply absent from the land of the living. The same fate awaits the righteous and the wicked. Jacob expects to join his son Joseph in Sheol (Genesis 37:35). David expects to join his ancestors there. The Sadducees — the priestly aristocracy of Jesus’s time, the keepers of the Temple — flatly denied any resurrection of the dead, because no such doctrine appears in the Torah they considered authoritative.
The Ehrman blog’s Bart Ehrman commentary on the Hebrew Bible’s afterlife adds a crucial detail: ‘All the rewards and punishments promised by Moses and the prophets apply to THIS world, never to the afterlife.’ This is the structural point. The Hebrew Bible’s ethical framework operates entirely within the historical world. Obedience to the covenant brings blessing in this life — rain in season, military victory, children, long life. Disobedience brings curse — drought, military defeat, exile. The afterlife is irrelevant to this ethical calculus because the afterlife — Sheol — is a uniformly grey non-experience that carries no moral weight. Heaven and hell, in the Christian sense, are simply not Jewish categories derived from the Hebrew Bible.
The Wikipedia article on Sheol acknowledges where the developed afterlife ideas came from: ‘Considering the strong influences that the Mesopotamians and Greeks had on Jewish culture, due to their occupation of Palestine at different times, it is therefore likely that the concept of Sheol and its subsequent changes came about through cultural transmission.’ Cultural transmission — from Babylon, from Persia, from Greece — is acknowledged as the origin of the developed Jewish afterlife theology that emerged in the Second Temple period. The Buddhist contribution to this process has been underexamined. This chapter rectifies that omission.
21.2 Buddhist Cosmology: The Graduated Afterlife
While Jewish theology was working with a uniformly grey Sheol in the Torah period, Buddhist cosmology was elaborating an extraordinarily detailed, graduated, morally structured account of the realms of existence through which beings cycle according to their karma. The Buddhist cosmos contains thirty-one planes of existence — organized into three realms: the Realm of Desire (eleven planes), the Realm of Form (sixteen planes), and the Realm of the Formless (four planes). Within the Realm of Desire alone, there are multiple heavenly planes, the human plane, the animal plane, and four planes of punishment or hell-realms — called naraka or niraya in Pali.
The Buddhist hell-realms are described in vivid and elaborate detail in the Devaduta Sutta of the Majjhima Nikaya and in numerous other texts. The naraka realms involve specific forms of suffering corresponding to specific categories of moral failure — those who killed living beings, those who committed sexual misconduct, those who deceived, those who were greedy — experiencing specific consequences in specific realms of punishment. The cosmology is both graduated and proportional: the degree and character of the suffering in the afterlife corresponds to the degree and character of the moral failures in the preceding life.
The Buddhist Hell-Realms
The Devaduta Sutta — the Divine Messengers — describes the moment of death as a judgment before Yama, the lord of the dead. The messengers of Yama — old age, sickness, and death — appear to the dying person as warnings of what awaits. In the presence of Yama, the moral life is reviewed: ‘Did you not see the divine messenger of old age among human beings? Did you not see the divine messenger of sickness? Did you not see the divine messenger of death?’ The one who paid no heed to these warnings and lived without moral restraint is sent to the appropriate hell-realm, where the suffering corresponds to the karma accumulated.
This is structurally identical to the Christian judgment scene in Matthew 25:31-46 — the sheep and the goats. The King sits in judgment. The deeds of the dead are reviewed. Those who cared for the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, the imprisoned are welcomed into the kingdom. Those who did not are sent to eternal punishment. Both scenes: a cosmic authority presides over a review of the moral life. The review determines the afterlife destination. The destination is proportional to the moral conduct reviewed. The Buddhist version predates Matthew 25 by five centuries.
[CHRISTIAN] “Then he will say to those on his left, Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me no food.” (Matthew 25:41-42)
[BUDDHIST] “The King of the Dead asks: Did you not see the divine messengers among humans — old age, sickness, death? And you did not act with body, speech, or mind. They lead such a one to hell.” (Majjhima Nikaya 130 / Devaduta Sutta)
The Buddhist Heavenly Realms
The Buddhist heavenly realms — the deva-lokas — are equally elaborately described. The six heavenly planes within the Realm of Desire include the realm of the Four Great Kings, the realm of the Thirty-Three Gods (Tavatimsa), the realm of the Yama Gods, the Tusita heaven (the realm from which the Bodhisattva descends for his final birth), the realm of the Nimmanarati Gods, and the realm of the Paranimmita-Vasavatti Gods. Above these, the Realm of Form contains sixteen further heavenly planes accessible only to those who have developed the jhanas — the meditative absorptions — in their earthly life. The cosmology is not merely afterlife theology. It is a map of the full range of conscious existence organized according to the degree of spiritual development.
The Christian heaven has no equivalent elaboration in the New Testament. The Revelation of John describes the heavenly Jerusalem with extraordinary vividness, but the graduated structure of multiple heavenly levels — Paul’s brief reference to being caught up to the ‘third heaven’ (2 Corinthians 12:2) is the closest approach — is never systematically developed in canonical Christian scripture. The Buddhist cosmology had been systematically developing these graduated heavenly realms for five centuries before John wrote Revelation. The impulse toward cosmological elaboration that Christianity expresses in the Revelation and in later mystical theology has its most developed pre-Christian precedent in Buddhist cosmology.
21.3 Purgatory and the Bardo: The Intermediate State
Among the most theologically significant and historically contested doctrines of Catholic Christianity is the doctrine of Purgatory — the intermediate state between death and final judgment in which souls undergo purification before entering heaven. The Protestant Reformation rejected Purgatory as unbiblical — and the Reformers were correct that it has no clear basis in the canonical scriptures. The Catholic Church defends it on the basis of 2 Maccabees 12:46 and the early church’s practice of praying for the dead. But Purgatory’s most systematic antecedent is not in Jewish or early Christian texts. It is in the Buddhist and Tibetan teaching on the Bardo — the intermediate state between death and rebirth.
The Tibetan Bardo
The Tibetan Buddhist teaching on the Bardo — the intermediate state — is among the most elaborate and detailed accounts of the postmortem experience in any religious tradition. The Bardo Thodol — the Tibetan Book of the Dead, composed in the eighth century CE and attributed to Padmasambhava but drawing on much older oral traditions — describes in meticulous detail the sequence of experiences undergone by the consciousness between death and rebirth. The consciousness experiences a series of luminous visions, encounters with peaceful and wrathful deities, and ultimately a judgment scene in which the life’s actions are weighed before entering a new rebirth according to the karma accumulated.
The structural parallel with Catholic Purgatory is not identical — the Bardo leads to rebirth in a new life rather than to a final destination — but the shared concept is the intermediate state: a period between death and final destination in which the consciousness undergoes experiences determined by the moral quality of the life just ended. Both traditions posit that the period immediately after death is not the final destination. Both posit that what happens during this period is determined by the moral conduct of the preceding life. Both posit that the prayers and practices of the living on behalf of the dead can affect the outcome of this intermediate period — the Catholic practice of praying for souls in Purgatory, the Tibetan practice of reading the Bardo Thodol over the dying and recently dead to guide their consciousness through the intermediate state.
The parallel between prayers for the dead in both traditions is particularly striking. The Catholic Mass for the Dead, the Buddhist memorial rites for the recently deceased, and the Tibetan reading of the Bardo Thodol are all premised on the same conviction: the living can help the dead navigate the intermediate state. This shared conviction — which has no basis in the Hebrew Bible, where the dead in Sheol are beyond communication and beyond the reach of earthly action — suggests a common source. The Buddhist teaching on the intermediate state and the practice of aiding the dead through ritual is five centuries older than the Christian equivalent and was transmitted to the Mediterranean world through the channels documented in Chapter 2.
21.4 The Judgment Scene: Matthew 25 and the Devaduta Sutta
The parallel between Matthew 25:31-46 and the Buddhist Devaduta Sutta deserves extended attention because it represents one of the most structurally precise parallels in the entire corpus. Both texts describe a postmortem judgment scene in which the moral life of the deceased is reviewed by a cosmic authority and the judgment determines the afterlife destination.
In Matthew 25, the Son of Man sits on his glorious throne, all nations are gathered before him, and he separates the sheep from the goats as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. Those on his right are welcomed into the kingdom prepared for them — because they fed the hungry, gave drink to the thirsty, welcomed the stranger, clothed the naked, visited the sick and imprisoned. Those on his left are sent to eternal punishment — because they did not do these things. The criterion of judgment is specifically compassionate action toward the suffering — or the failure of it.
In the Devaduta Sutta (Majjhima Nikaya 130), Yama, the lord of the dead, interrogates the newly arrived being about whether they heeded the divine messengers — old age, sickness, death — and whether they acted with generosity and moral restraint during their life. Those who lived with moral care are sent to the appropriate heavenly realm. Those who did not — who were greedy, violent, sexually misconduct — are sent to the appropriate hell-realm. The criterion of judgment is the same: the quality of moral conduct during life, specifically whether the person responded to suffering and need with generosity or with indifference and harm.
The two scenes share: a cosmic authority conducting a review. The review is of the moral conduct of the earthly life. The specific criterion is compassionate response to need and suffering. The judgment determines the afterlife destination. Those who acted with compassion are rewarded. Those who did not are punished. The Buddhist text is five centuries older. The Digha Nikaya (19.43) — cited in the parallel table as matching Matthew 5:8 — and Majjhima Nikaya (86.5-6 & 18) — cited as matching Luke 23:39-43 — both contain material from the same Buddhist afterlife cosmology that the Matthew 25 judgment scene draws on.
21.5 The Origin of the Elaborate Afterlife: Transmission Not Invention
The question this chapter has been building toward is simple: where did the elaborate, graduated, morally structured Christian afterlife come from? The Hebrew Bible does not contain it. Sheol is a grey, undifferentiated non-experience without moral graduation. The Torah’s ethical framework operates entirely within the historical world. The elaborate heaven and hell of Christian theology has no antecedent in the Jewish scriptures.
Multiple non-Jewish sources have been proposed: Persian Zoroastrianism, which did develop a graduated afterlife theology with heaven and hell; Greek mythology, which had Elysium and Tartarus; Mesopotamian cosmology. All of these contributed to the Second Temple Jewish apocalyptic literature that serves as the immediate Jewish background for the New Testament’s afterlife theology. The Book of Enoch, 4 Ezra, and the Apocalypse of Baruch — none of them canonical but all influential — developed elaborate afterlife cosmologies in the Second Temple period that drew on Persian and Greek sources.
Buddhist cosmology belongs in this list of sources and belongs at its head, for two reasons. First, it is the most systematically developed of all the available antecedents — thirty-one planes of existence, morally graduated, with specific correspondences between earthly conduct and afterlife destination, organized as a comprehensive map of conscious existence. No other pre-Christian tradition matches this systematic elaboration. Second, the Buddhist transmission channels — Ashoka’s missionaries, the Therapeutae, the Essene communities — provide the mechanism by which Buddhist cosmological ideas reached the Mediterranean world. Persian and Greek cosmological ideas were present in Palestine through military occupation and cultural dominance. Buddhist cosmological ideas were present through deliberate missionary activity and through the contemplative communities that were already embodying Buddhist practice in the Mediterranean world before the Gospels were written.
The Brittan article on Sheol itself acknowledges: ‘The concept of Hades developed from an amoral, one-size-fits-all destination into a multichambered location where new entrants are separated by their rectitude… Considering the strong influences that the Mesopotamians and Greeks had on Jewish culture, due to their occupation of Palestine at different times, it is therefore likely that the concept of Sheol and its subsequent changes came about through cultural transmission.’ Cultural transmission is acknowledged. The Buddhist channel of that transmission is the most systematic and the most precisely documented. The elaborate Christian afterlife — heaven, hell, and the intermediate state — is Buddhism’s most spectacular and least acknowledged contribution to the theological imagination of the Western world.
— End of Chapter 21 —