Tag Archives: Dante’s Divine Comedy

As our study of these Bardo Stages progresses, certain parallels can be drawn with Dante’s Divina Commedia: The Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso. His momentous and Epic Poem is indeed like a journey through bardo stages that hopefully will culminate in ultimate union with the Absolute. Along the road to the summit atop Mount Paradiso, though, one is in need of much purgation—a thorough cleansing of the karmic kleśas that prevent perfect clarity of the Lucid moment when Luminous Union occurs with the Dharmakaya in the Bardo of Dhamatā. Put quite simply, the seeds of the Alaya-receptacle need to be allayed. Otherwise rebirth in the karmadhatu of Samsara is inevitable. For instance, Dante’s Inferno describes what it’s like when residual karmic-actions are allowed to flow unchecked within the stream of the Body Consciousness. It vividly portrays what a spirit goes through when consigned to the foul and darkened bowels of the Hell Regions—the lowest of the six realms of samsaric existence. These unhappy denizens are suffering the consequences of their diseased and much aggrieved karmic misdeeds. They have to endure the seeds of retribution. Their painful and karmically-allotted punishments are heavy-material ones—as weighed through the residual actions accumulated through untold Alayic-connections that permeate their own polluted stream of consciousness. Consequently, they are tormented by demons actually created from the residual-material pool of this damnable stream. The only way to transcend this hellish position is to thoroughly transcend this polluted mind stream of the alayavijñāna. A Purer-Stream of Consciousness is the only salvation. read more