The Way of Rebirth, Regeneration and Realty of Dancing, Smiling and Hoping.

Zombies, Buddhism, and the Six Realms of Rebirth

Notes from my Asian Zombie Class > Enjoy. . .

I grew up in Korea and Japan, where children are forced to study some fifteen hours a day, seven days a week to prepare for a life working some one hundred twenty hours a week to be paid for only forty hours. They have no father because he is so busy working and paying for my tutors. Elon Musk loves this Asian pattern of overwork and wants his workers to do the same. In Asia, everyone gets drunk after getting off work, and you see men throwing up on the streets.

China is the same. Slavery is a way of life. Both China and Japan buy US bonds to help pay for keeping America open because Congress never balances its budget. Slavery is common everywhere.

I went on to earn many degrees and a PhD, and went on to file for bankruptcy because of my cancer bills, for I had to retire early, after some 30 years, because I had cancer. My medical bills keep going up. I am in a lot of pain and refuse to take meds because they cost too much even though I have medical insurance, and two supplemental drug insurances. Shoot me. Shoot me. Shoot me.

Off to the food pantry to get free food. How will I pay for gas? My life as a retired professor, living the American Dream. Oddly, I taught classes on the Asian Gothic, which were popular. Enjoy my notes. . . .

Buddhism and "Hell Joseon" : Korean HELL

We die and are re-born into six possible realms again and again. In one sense, zombies are creatures of hybridity, for they possess characteristics of hungry ghosts, but they also are animal and sub-human like while seeming to exist in hell, though it might feel like heaven to them. The ideal of rebirth remains vital for Japanese zombie films.

The film Versus (2000) occurs in the Forest of Resurrection. UFO's crashing into Earth cause the dead to resurrect as zombies in Wild Zero (2000) and Zombie Defense Force (2006). Here are the six realms one can be reborn into:

1.    Gods (Heaven)

2.    Humans

3.    Semi-gods

4.    Animals

5.    Hungry Ghosts (Preta)

6.    Hell

In one sense, the hope is that you are able to rise up from the lowest realm of hell and eventually make it up to the highest realm of heaven. However, since existence is in a constant state of flux, one enters into various realms according to karmic actions. All beings die and are  reborn into a different realm each time again and again.

Shintoism and Jigoku: Japanese Hell

The twelve Karmic Formations of Dependent Origination are Craving, Feeling, Contact, Six Senses, Name and Form, Consciousness, Acts of Volition, Ignorance, Old Age and Death, Rebirth, Becoming, Clinging. 

Think of the realms as interacting with each other instead of being separate or think of them as states of consciousness. Thus a hungry ghost, a human, an animal, a quasi-god, and a deity can all participate within the same reality.  However, they might have some communication problems.  Basically, everyone is sort of just transitioning from one realm to another realm.

According to one scholar, "It is a world where the greedy become snakes and debtors take the form of oxen to labor for those they fail to repay, where animals, human, gods and demons constitute, not distinct orders of being, but transitory moments in an unending cycle of rebirth" (Bathgate 11).

Enlightenment (nirvana)  comes by freeing oneself from being reborn into any of these six realms!

 Work Cited

Bathgate,  Michael.  The Fox's Craft in Japanese Religion and Folklore. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Thank you for reading. . .