Here is the basis of this piece, an article (from a broader series I haven't read) about the nature of charnel grounds, which exposes a very different view than we have in the West about suffering. The idea is that hoping that suffering can disappear from your life is the real fantasy. Learning to play while in Hell is the real philosophy. It's a short one, so I would recommend anyone who is interested in that direction to read the whole thing and contemplate about the implications.
From the piece:
Many people reject Buddhist Tantra in favor of Consensus Buddhism, or modernized Theravada or Zen, because those seem realistic. These modernist Buddhisms sweep under the rug all the monsters, miracles, demons and deities of the Pali and Mahayana scriptures. Buddhism is supposed to be rational, scientific, and pragmatic. Tantra, by contrast, seems incurably infested with magical superstitions.
I take the opposite view. Tantra is brutally realistic—because reality is brutal. It is Sutra (non-tantric Buddhism) that is a fantasy. Sutra promises the path beyond all suffering. If you do everything right, you can escape this vale of tears into Neverland Nirvana. Now there is a magical superstition. That fantasy runs far deeper than mere gods and demons. Spooks, after all, can be exorcised easily by declaring them to be psychological metaphors.
Tantra offers no salvation, no escape, no alternative, and no hope. Now that's scientific, pragmatic, and sensible.
I find this view much more pragmatic and grounded in truth. Hoping for some path of salvation is a fantasy that consumes so many people, and ironically perpetuates their suffering. There's also the secondary point in this piece that nothing could possibly be the single answer to Life and Everything. As is written there:
Many Western Buddhists implicitly imagine that Buddhism can somehow be The Answer To Life, The Universe, And Everything. Otherwise, we’d be totally fucked. This is absurd. Life is diverse, and couldn’t have a single solution. Moreover, life is not a problem, so 'solution' or 'answer' is beside the point.
Being obsessed with problems drives people to reject the situations they are in, claiming that they "shouldn't" be happening. And yet they are. The real problem is not being able to see beyond problems, and getting stuck in cycles of "this shouldn't be happening". This is the nature of Hell according to that piece, which is fascinating in what it reveals, and also incredibly simple as a way to discern when we are perpetuating our own Hell. In that piece:
The charnel ground—i.e., everyday reality—is not a hell. Traditional Buddhism does have hells, several of them, but the charnel ground is quite different.
The difference is not in the degree of suffering. Some Buddhist hells might be less bad than some lives in the real world. The difference is that the inhabitants of hell are so busy feeding their rage that they see no possibility of curiosity, creativity, or celebration.
In hell, nearly everyone has the attitude: "I shouldn’t be here! It wasn’t supposed to be this way! I hate these demons who are torturing me! I hate everyone who had a better rebirth—they think they are so superior! God is a mean motherfucker! It’s not fair!"
So there is no hope and there is suffering everywhere. Acceptance of this allows some experience which is beyond that, of allowing beauty, curiosity, love, creativity and gratefulness into your life. Because otherwise you spend your entire life complaining about how awful everything is.
This is something I see a lot in doomer circles, which I am somewhat adjacent to. I spend some time reading about the details of societal collapse, something which I might stop because it hardly does anything for me since the global trend is inevitable, and what I notice again and again is the underlying tone beneath it all: "It's not fair that some people are so rich while the world is collapsing! Why can't the politicians do something about these problems we have been talking about for decades?! Why can't we just love one another?"
The last sentence, or at least the tone and intention behind it, is particularly common in 'spiritual' scenes that try to make the world better. If human beings loved one another at a global scale, then we could solve all the major problems! Yeah but people don't. Only a blind person could pretend otherwise. It's already difficult to love the people close to you, though it is of course possible, but loving billions of people you've never interacted with? Impossible. That's a religious fantasy.
There was a massive famine in 1921 and 1922 in Saint Petersburg, due to the impacts of the Revolution and the civil war (Lenin came into power in 1917, shortly after the last Tsar Nicholas II abdicated from his throne). It led to millions of deaths (always difficult to make good estimations when a country is in such a crisis), and a majority of people starving for food, leading to widespread cannibalism across the country, and piles of corpses found in several cities. It was horrible.
This is just one event alongside many, many that are similar in History. Massive starvations and the desperation it leads to aren't all that rare all things considered. They have happened in the past, and of course they will happen now, because our agricultural system is reliant on cheap, abundant fossil fuels for the fertilizers, the transportation, and the energy to run the machines. As those become more scarce, there will be shortages in food (and crop failures due to anthropogenic climate change), and all of those awful things will not be magically resolved through positive thinking and the belief that love will solve all.
The charnel grounds, as explained in the text, are
[...] places where unclaimed human corpses are dumped to rot, or be eaten. The bodies are not buried or burned; they are just left out. That’s a delightful buffet for the local carrion-eaters: jackals and hyaenas, tigers and bears, vultures and ravens. Charnel grounds are dangerous, horrifying, chaotic places. None of the meat-eaters are picky about whether you are dead (except vultures). They are happy to eat living visitors. Unburied corpses also attract demons—in the Indian imagination—and are likely to produce ghosts and vetalas (zombies).There is also no escape from all of this. All of Reality is seen as a charnel ground, there wasn't a glorious period in the past where everything was beautiful, there is no salvation in the future, no metaphysical realm to escape to, no, it's all rot, decay, corpses, and things feeding on them.
Even accepting the reality of charnel grounds is not some Jedi mind-trick to reach some super secret state of enlightenment(TM) that will free you of all suffering, but that we can't talk about explicitly. No, there really is no hope! Hope distorts our perception because it makes us cling to what life ought to be. Without hope, there isn't a state of magical redemption, but rather, opportunity to live in a way which isn't bound purely by wishful thinking, hatred of one's situation, and clinging to futile endeavors.
Reality is not just horrific, it's also fantastical, far weirder than we usually perceive it to be. This mystery is not some glimpse at an eternal paradise of goodness that can allow us to escape from suffering forever. Nope. There will always be suffering, but there can be something else besides it. Reality is interesting and worth living for, I am not preaching for some abhorrent nihilistic view of Reality here. Once you give up the obsession with suffering and the desperation with having to remove it at all costs, you can appreciate just how diverse and fascinating Reality is, the people we share our lives with, and the things we can find in it.
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Spirituality Buddhism Suffering Hope Death Collapse
2026-06-29