Yudhishthira said Tell me what sort of hell is obtained by a Reciter? I am curious, O king, to know this. You should describe this subject to me.'

Bhishma said “You have originated from a portion of the good of righteousness. You are by nature observant of righteousness. Listen, O sinless one, with undivided attention, to these words having righteousness for their root.

Those regions that are owned by the great gods, that are of various aspects and colours, of various descriptions and productive of various fruits, and that are of great excellence, those cars again that move at the desire of the riders, those beautiful palaces and hells, those various pleasure-gardens decorated with golden lotuses, those regions that belong to the four Regents and Shukra and Brihaspati and the Maruts and Vishvedevas and Saddhyas and the Ashvins, and the Rudras and the Adityas and the Vasus, and other dwellers of heaven, are, O sire, spoken of as hells, when compared with the region of the Supreme Self.

The region last spoken of it shorn of fear, increate, without pain of any sort, without any agreeable or disagreeable element, beyond the reach of the three qualities, freed from the eight things (viz., the five primal elements, the senses, the mind, and the intellect), without the three (distinctions between the knower, the known, and act knowing); freed also from the four attributes (seeing, hearing, thinking, and knowing), without the fourfold causes (of knowledge) without joy and delight ard sorrow and disease.

Time makes it appearance there for usc. Time is not the ruler there. That supreme region is the ruler of Time as also of Heaven.

That Reciter who becomes identified with his Soul (by withdrawing everything into it) goes there. He has, after this, never to experience any sorrow. This region is called Supreme. The other regions are hell.

I have not told you of all those regions that are called hell. Indeed, as compared with that foremost of regions all the others are called hell.'