OTHER FAITHS, OTHER VISIONS

By Howard Chua-Eoan

Heaven has many cartographers, and through the centuries many different heavens have been charted. To the variety of celestial landscapes in the West, Islam and Buddhism have raised their own particular paradises: the Koran details a heaven filled with beautiful, large-eyed "companions" and youths of perpetual freshness; the sutras speak of a multiplicity of "Buddha fields," pleasant way stations on the journey to Nirvana. Adding to the plenitude, the New Age is now unrolling its own versions of eternity. The best-selling author, internationally renowned medium and healer Rosemary Altea, for example, speaks of her vision: "Heaven is not a place; it's a state of awareness. Heaven is where your heart is, where your soul needs to be." Yet every paradise partakes of the same spiritual journey, and even Altea's shares attributes outlined in one of Islam's most venerable divine proclamations: "My heaven and my earth do not comprise me, but the heart of my faithful servant comprises me."

Islam inherited older traditions of heaven from Judaism and Christianity, including the hierarchy of angels and the seven tiers of paradise. But Muslims have a specific plan of paradise in mind, based on the stories of the Prophet's miraculous night journey to heaven. Rising into the skies on the Buraq, a fantastic creature often described as part woman, part horse, part peacock, Muhammad meets Adam, who resides in the lowest heaven, and Jesus, who is only in the fourth level. Abraham welcomes him in the seventh heaven before the Prophet is ushered into paradise for his encounter with God. It was in heaven, according to one traditional tale, that Muhammad, on Moses' advice, bargained down God's original demand of 50 prayers a day to five, the number of times a day each devout Muslim must face Mecca.

Buddhism has as many paradises as there are Buddhas. Each enlightened being has his or her own heaven, a concept probably borrowed from Hinduism, in which gods and goddesses inhabit a series of heavens. The primal heaven, however, was probably the one called Sukhavati, which may itself have borrowed some elements from the florid paradises of Zoroastrian Persia (whence the word pairi-daeza, or enclosure, the origin of our word paradise). As Sakyamuni, the Buddha of our cosmos, teaches, if the denizens of Sukhavati "desire cloaks of different colors and many hundred thousand colors, then with these very best cloaks the whole Buddha country shines." Presided over by the Amitabha Buddha, Sukhavati, according to the ancient texts, had no ghosts, no beasts, no sickness--and no women. Yet those who reach the Pure Land, as East Asian Buddhists call it, know the journey of their souls is not over. Wrote a 6th century Chinese master: "Although they dwell in seven jeweled palaces, and have fine objects, smells, tastes and sensations, yet they do not regard this as pleasure...[and] seek only to leave that place." Nirvana, the ultimately selfless Buddhist goal of nonbeing, is beyond paradise. Annemarie Schimmel, the great Western scholar of Islam, would agree. She wrote, "Once the journey to God is finished, the infinite journey in God begins."

--By Howard Chua-Eoan. With reporting by Victoria Rainert

With reporting by VICTORIA RAINERT