The Six Realms: A Buddhist Look at Life

By Carol Grafford, True Transmission of Vows

There are many ways to look at life.  One Buddhist teaching perceives the “Six Realms of Existence.” Traditionally, it is taught that we live in one realm for an entire lifetime, reincarnating into the same or a different realm in the following life.  Today, most Buddhists recognize that we vacillate between these different realms at different points in our life, or even at different points in a single day!  Each realm has its own brand of suffering.  These six realms are:

The blissful god realm

The angry god realm

The hell realm

The realm of hungry ghosts

The animal realm

The human realm

With the help of two Buddhist Masters, Roshi Reb Anderson (Soto Zen) and Thich Nhat Hanh (Vietnamese Zen), we can identify the realms we tend to occupy, and learn to meet them with mindfulness, to transform our suffering into compassion, peace and joy.

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