[92] Righteousness (dhamma) is the path, great king; unrighteousness (adhamma) is the road astray.
Unrighteousness leads to hell (niraya); righteousness brings one to a happy destination (sugati).
O king, as for men who practise unrighteousness, men of crooked living —
the bourn to which they go when they have passed away, those hells: hear them from me.
Sañjīva and Kāḷasutta, Saṅghāṭa and the two Roruvas,
then yet another, the great Avīci (Mahāvīci), and Tāpana and Patāpana —
such are the eight hells declared, hard to pass beyond,
thronged with doers of savage deeds, and each has its sixteen ussada hells:
searing the hard-hearted, horrific, flaming, of great terror,
hair-raising to behold, dreadful, fearsome, painful;
four-cornered, with four gates, divided and measured out in portions,
bounded by a rampart of iron, covered over with iron.
Their floor is wrought of iron, ablaze, charged with fire;
suffusing a hundred yojanas all around, they stand so for all time.
Into these hells they fall, feet upward, head below —
those who transgress against the seers, the restrained men of austerity.
Those slayers of growth (bhūnahu), men who have wrought iniquity,
are cooked like fish cut into pieces for years beyond all reckoning.
With bodies ever burning, within and without,
though they seek a way of escape, they find no gate out of hell.
They run toward the east, and then they run to the west;
they run toward the north as well, and then they run to the south:
whatever gate they run to, that very gate is shut.
Many hundreds of thousands, the people gone to hell,
stretch forth their arms and wail, having met with suffering (dukkha) that is not small.
As one would not provoke an enraged venomous serpent, fiery, hard to come at,
so let no one assail the good among restrained men of austerity.
Ajjuna, lord of the Kekakas, huge of frame, the mighty archer,
the thousand-armed, was annihilated for assailing the seer Gotama.
Daṇḍakī, who showered dust upon Kisavaccha the dust-free,
was cut down like a palm at its root: that king went to destruction.
Mejjha, who turned his mind in malice against Mātaṅga the illustrious,
was annihilated with all his court, and the Mejjha country then became a wilderness.
The Andhakavendas, having assailed the seer Kaṇhadīpāyana,
striking one another down with clubs, arrived at the domain of Yama (yamasādhana).
And this Cecca, cursed by a seer — he who formerly moved through the air —
entered into the earth, fallen from his state, when his appointed time came round.
Therefore the wise do not commend the following of partiality (chandāgamana);
with a mind uncorrupted one should utter speech bound up with truth.
If a man with a corrupted mind looks upon a sage
possessed of true knowledge (vijjā) and conduct, he passes downward to hell.
Those who revile the venerable, people harsh in their assaults,
become without offspring, without heirs: they are as stumps of palm.
And whoever slays one gone forth, a great seer whose task is done,
is cooked in the Kāḷasutta hell for many a long night.
And whatever king, established in unrighteousness, a ravager of the realm, when dead,
having tormented the countryside, is cooked hereafter in Tāpana;
and he is cooked for a hundred thousand celestial years;
beset round by masses of flame, he undergoes painful feeling (vedanā).
Radiant crests of fire stream forth from his body;
the limbs of him whose food is fire [blaze] together with the tips of his hairs and his nails.
With body ever burning, within and without,
transfixed with pain he bellows, like an elephant tormented by the goad.
Whoever, vilest of men, slays his father out of greed (lobha) or out of hatred (dosa),
is cooked in the Kāḷasutta hell for many a long night.
Such a one is cooked in the copper cauldron (lohakumbhī);
and, when he is boiled, they strike him with spears till he is stripped of skin;
having made him blind, with urine and excrement for his food,
they plunge a man of such a kind into the caustic lye.
A red-hot iron ball at a seething boil,
and long ploughshares heated many a long night —
seizing a prop [for the jaws] and wrenching [the mouth] apart with cords,
the rakkhasa demons pour these in at the opened mouth.
Black dogs and brindled hounds, and vultures,
and flocks of ravens — birds with beaks of iron —
gather round and devour him as he writhes,
rending his tongue apart, [feasting on] the bloody leavings.
Him — a scorched palm, his body broken through and through —
the rakkhasas range about, beating him down;
for theirs is the sport, while the others suffer:
in such a hell do they dwell,
whosoever in this world here are slayers of their fathers.
And a son who has slain his mother, going hence to the abode of Yama (yamakkhaya),
meets with suffering in abundance, coming into the fruit of his own deed.
Non-human beings, exceeding fierce, press hard again and again
upon the slayer of her who bore him, with bristles made of iron.
The blood flowing from his own limbs, sprung from his own body,
hot as molten copper, they give the matricide to drink.
Plunged into a pool — loathsome, corpse-like, putrid,
foul-smelling, a mire of dung, in semblance like pus and blood — there he stays;
and there worms of monstrous body, with mouths of iron,
break through his skin and devour him, ravenous for his flesh and blood.
And he, come to that hell, sunk to the depth of a hundred men,
reeks of putrid carrion for a hundred yojanas all around.
For by that stench even one possessed of eyes is robbed of his eyes:
such, Brahmadatta, is the suffering that a matricide obtains.
Treading along the razor's edge, keen, hard to endure,
women who cause the fall of the womb drop into Vetaraṇī, the river hard to cross.
Silk-cotton trees all wrought of iron, their thorns sixteen finger-breadths long,
overhang on either side Vetaraṇī, the river hard to cross.
There they stand flaming, like masses of fire seen from afar,
kindled by fire, towering upward a full yojana.
Into these hells — burning hot, set with sharpened thorns — descend
women who are unfaithful and men who go to the wives of others.
They fall head-downward, flung about, battered, in their throngs;
they lie with limbs impaled
English translation from the Pali (Siam Raṭṭha edition) — under review, not for citation.