14 The Question of an Eternal Hell
tion (which, no doubt, some would regard as unhealthy). Even
at that tender age, I had already been fascinated with Asian lit-
eratures, cultures, and religions for years, and knew that this
would constitute some significant portion of my future schol-
arly and literary interests. I suspect it all started very early in
childhood, with a large anthology of classical Indian and Chi-
nese texts edited by Lin Yutang that was one of my especially
prized books as a boy, as well as several volumes of Lafcadio
Hearn (the ghost stories in particular), various collections of
Asian myths and legends and poems, and such condensed ver-
sions of the great Indian epics as were available at the time
( and, I have to admit, the television program Kung Fu had
something of a powerful influence over me at an impression-
able age). I had even come by then to know quite a lot about
the Mahayana Buddhist understanding of bodhisattvas: those
fully enlightened saviors who could, if they chose, enter finally
into the unconditioned bliss of Nirvana, but who have instead
vowed not to do so until all other beings have been gathered
in before them, and who therefore, solely out of their super-
abounding compassion, strive age upon age for the liberation
of all from Samsara, the great sea of suffering and ignorance.
They even vow to pass through and, if need be, endure the
pains of all the many narakas, those horridly numerous and
ingeniously terrifying Buddhist hells, in pursuit of the lost. But
then, in fact, in a marvelous and radiant inversion of all expec-
tations, it turns out that such compassion is itself already the
highest liberation and beatitude, and that, seen in its light, the
difference between Samsara and Nirvana simply vanishes. Of
course, I was too young as yet to have understood the more re-
condite details of the various schools of Buddhist thought, and
certainly had not yet read any of the more difficult texts on the
figure of the bodhisattva, such as Santideva's glorious Bodhi-