Do Buddhists Believe in Heaven and Hell?

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 7 September 2026

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Yes. Buddhist heaven and hell are both real places in the traditional cosmology — many of each. But neither is eternal and neither is a sentence handed down by a god. They are temporary results of a being’s own actions, and you stay only until that karma is exhausted.

That is why Buddhism aims past heaven, not at it — see our guide to Buddhist cosmology.

Does Buddhism have a heaven and a hell?

It has both. The Theravāda map summarised at Access to Insight numbers hell (niraya) as plane 1, groups the four realms of suffering above it as “States of Deprivation (apaya)”, and gathers the rest of the sensuous world — humans and the six deva heavens — under “Happy Destinations (sugati)”: eleven planes in all, with sixteen fine-material and four immaterial above. Of the hells it warns: “Should not be confused with the eternal hell found in other religious traditions, since one’s time here is — as it is in every realm — temporary.” Rebirth anywhere is karma ripening, and it runs out.

What are the Buddhist heavens?

The six lowest are the deva worlds of the sensuous realm, in a fixed order: the Devas of the Four Great Kings (catumaharajika), the Thirty-three Gods (tavatimsa), the Yama devas, the Contented devas (tusita), the Devas Delighting in Creation (nimmanarati), and the Devas Wielding Power over the Creation of Others (paranimmita-vasavatti). Above them rise the sixteen heavens of pure form — the brahmā worlds — and the four formless planes; the full ladder is on the 31 planes of existence.

Their inhabitants are the devas — radiant and long-lived, but not creators, not saviours and not immortal, which is why Buddhism is called non-theistic rather than atheist (see do Buddhists believe in God?).

What are the Buddhist hells?

In the Devadūta Sutta (MN 130) the Buddha describes the Great Hell as a vast iron box: “It’s four-cornered & has four gates set in the middle of each side. It’s surrounded by an iron fortress wall and roofed with iron” (trans. Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu). Beyond the gates lie further hells: the Excrement Hell, the Hot Ashes Hell, the Simbali Forest, the Sword-leaf Forest and the Lye-water River. One refrain returns: “There he feels painful, racking, piercing feelings, yet he does not die as long as his evil kamma is not exhausted.”

The discourse Kokālika (Sn 3:10) adds ten more names, each a lifespan twenty times the last — Abbuda [Swelling], Nirabbuda, Ababa, Ahaha, Aṭaṭa, Kumuda, Sogandhika, Uppalaka, Puṇḍarīka and Paduma [Red Lotus] — and the monk Kokālika is reborn in the last of them “for engendering hatred in his heart against Sāriputta & Moggallāna.” The sutta calls each of the ten a hell. The Pali commentary does not: it reads them as “not separate hells, but simply different periods of time in the single Avīci hell” — an assertion for which, Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu notes, it “gives no explanation or justification.”

Are there cold hells in Buddhism?

In some traditions, yes — but not in the Pali passage usually cited. Sn 3:10 never calls its ten hells cold: the word is absent from the discourse and the translator’s notes, and its verses run the other way — a blazing mass of fire, food resembling “a ball of heated iron,” a sword-leaf forest.

They belong to the Sanskrit and Tibetan transmission. The Sūtra on the Limits of Life (Āyuḥparyanta, Toh 307 in the Kangyur) tells the same simile and the same twenty-fold chain, but with eight names rather than ten: Blistering, Bursting Blister, Chattering Teeth, Lamentation, Cold Whimpering, and three that split open like a blue lotus, a lotus and a great lotus. It also carries the Kokālika story, sending him to the last of the eight — which is why the two lists are so easily run together. The 84000 translation’s introduction names the sūtra’s subcategories as “the eight hot and the eight cold hells,” and its glossary explains the flower-names — of the last it says: “The extreme cold of this hell turns the skin of its denizens blue, red, and then extremely red until they crack apart … like the petals of a great lotus.”

Tibetan practice inherited that. In his Precious Instructions on the Common Preliminaries, Longchen Rabjam tells the practitioner to “consider the extreme heat and cold of the hells” alongside the hunger of the pretas and the death of the gods — a contemplation meant to turn the mind from saṃsāra (trans. Adam Pearcey). Hell here is an object of reflection, not a lever of fear.

How long do the heavens and hells last?

In the Muluposatha Sutta (AN 3.70) the Buddha scales each heaven against human time: fifty human years make one day for the Four Great Kings, a human century one day for the Thirty-Three, doubling upward.

Hells are measured by simile.

Even the gods run out: the Itivuttaka (Iti 83) lists five omens that appear when a deva is about to pass away — “his garlands wither, his clothes get soiled, sweat comes out of his armpits, a dullness descends on his body, he no longer delights in his own deva-seat.”

Is anyone judging you? King Yama in MN 130

MN 130 stages something like a trial: hell-wardens present the wrongdoer to King Yama, asking him to decree a punishment, and Yama questions him about five “deva messengers” — a newborn infant, an aged person, a sick person, a criminal being punished, a corpse. But Yama decrees nothing. After the fifth question he “falls silent,” and his conclusion is about causation, not sentencing:

Yama is a being inside the system, not a god above it: surveying the tortures, the thought once occurred to him, “O that I might gain the human state!”

Are the realms places or states of mind?

Both readings are live. The classical texts are literal, and for most of Buddhist history that is how they were understood; a strong modern current, especially in the West, reads them psychologically. Thich Nhat Hanh writes that mind consciousness “can submerge us in the hell realms or lead us to liberation, because both hell and liberation are the result of the ripening of their respective seeds” — the same mechanism, a different timescale. We take that up on are the realms literal or psychological? and map the six-realm version on the six realms.

Do Buddhists today believe in heaven and hell?

Not uniformly. Reporting its 2014 Religious Landscape Study, the Pew Research Center said in November 2015 that 72% of US adults believed in heaven — defined for respondents as a place “where people who have led good lives are eternally rewarded” — and 58% in hell. Buddhists sat well below that: “Roughly half or fewer of Hindus, Buddhists and Jews believe in heaven.” That is partly a quarrel with the definition: eternal reward is not what the Buddhist heavens are.

Where the traditions differ — and the short answer

Theravāda works from the Pali map: 31 planes, entered by kamma. Tibetan traditions put the hells into the preliminary contemplations and the Wheel of Life. East Asian Mahāyāna adds a destination often mistaken for a heaven, Amitābha’s Sukhāvatī (Pure Land Buddhism), and venerates Kṣitigarbha (Jizō), whose vow concerns the hells. The lower realms hold the hungry ghosts too, and every realm is a stage in rebirth. None is permanent — as the 84000 translators of that Kangyur sūtra put it, “Buddhism does not have the notion of eternal damnation.”

So: yes — but what the texts refuse is the part most people mean by the words: permanence, and a judge. Both end, and both leave you still circling, which is why the goal is not a better seat on the wheel but nirvāṇa. (For dying itself, see what happens after death in Buddhism.)