In the Chapter – The Destiny of Hells in the Shurangama Sutra, the Buddha talks about 10 things that cause us to fall into the hells when we die. It’s basically the karma from doing 10 habits that create these hells:
What are the 10?
- Lust – if mutual rubbing of your bodies against each other keeps going without cease – it gives rise to a tremendous raging fire – like how your hands get warm when you rub them together.
- Greed – scheming to get things all the time in your life – when you lie, cheat and steal to get things that you did not rightfully earn or pay for (as opposed to rightfully earning it)
- Arrogance – thinking that you’re better than others and looking down on people – this intimidates others
- Hatred – which gives rise to mutual defiance (you have wronged me!), which binds your heart with heat
- Deception – when you try to deceive and mislead others – which gives rise to mutual guile – so shifty people who cheat, deceive, trick and mislead each other back and forth. So you think up some scheme to trick and maneuver to trick and deceive back and forth
- Lying and Fraud with False Accusations – so you become adept and skilled at corruption because you keep accusing totally innocent people of things that are untrue and things that they did not do. This is a form of robbery and murder – as you rob someone of their natural life by destroying their life via false accusations. So you should regard uttering lies and false accusations as if you had just stepped on a venomous snake!
- Animosity and interconnected enmity – which gives rise to grievances. So, resentment – because you resent someone – you can also start falsely accusing them of things – causing suspicions to arise. Holding grudges and grievances – is like holding ill-will in your mouth, refusing to let it go – so you keep speaking ill of someone.
- Wrong views and Misunderstandings about things like Sakkayditthi/Satkyadrishti (view of the body being your self), moral prohibitions, grasping/attachment, deviant insight into different types of karma – which bring about opposition and mutual antagonism – so you keep opposing people and disagreeing with them.
- Engaging in injustice – another type of false accusation! Instigating false charges and libel (saying false things about someone that damages their reputation). So once again, there’s an innocent person but either the government or someone falsely accuses him without cause frames him to be a certain bad way. If you know the person you are accusing is totally innocent and you are fully aware of bearing false witness – this is engaging in injustice. It’s like being a slanderous villain who persecutes people unjustly. Do you should look at harmful false accusations and name them “a treacherous tiger” or a “bolt of lightning” – as dangerous as getting struck by lightning out of the blue.
- Litigation (Taking someone to court) and Mutual Disputations (Arguing back and forth) which give rise to mutual covering (not being open and frank with each other – putting on masks to cover up the full truth and cover up their mistakes whilst bringing up the points where they seem to sound reasonable). So they only put forth 1 side of the story and cover up by avoiding mentioning the other side. So you bicker back and forth – and this gives rise to evil companions and family members. So covering your mistakes and bad points is like a hidden villain and like trying to hold a mountain on top of your head whilst walking on the ocean – the mountain would topple over and you’d fall into the water! There’s no solid foundation to your arguments – that they would topple over and you’d drown in the sea.
So false accusations are involved in MULTIPLE habits in the above list! So 40-50% of the above list of habits that send you to the hells involve false accusations!
So we’re talking about FALSE accusations – not true accusations.
You would not like to be falsely accused of something and have your own life and reputation destroyed – so don’t do it to others or get involved in encouraging others to falsely accuse someone of something that they clearly didn’t do.
1 False accusation can destroy an entire life – or destroy your own entire life. 1 False accusation can start a war between countries that could rage on for years or even decades – this is what propaganda in the news does. 1 False accusation can cause family members to kill and destroy each other. 1 False accusation can start off a legal case that could last for years.
The invasion of Iraq was based on a false accusation – that Saddam had Weapons of Mass Destruction – WMD’s. So all the news outlets and TV and in print and radio kept repeating this lie 24/7. Why? To manufacture consent from the western world’s populations to pre-emptively start a war, unprovoked. So did Saddam have any WMD’s? No. Iraq STILL hasn’t fully recovered, decades later. Maybe hundreds of thousands of millions of refugees displaced, however many thousands of people killed. Creating a power vacuum that led to the rise of ISIS – and the however many thousands of people killed by them for years. So the consequences of even 1 false accusation (both foreseen and unforeseen consequences) – amplified by the world’s media and governments – can last for decades or even more.
The problem is – a lot of people utter false accusations out of spite. You hurt me? I’m gonna destroy your reputation and your life! So they get this evil sense of satisfaction from destroying someone’s life – cos it gives them a 1 up on the person who hurt them.
But if you ever utter a false accusation – know this – you will be responsible for the ensuing karma resulting from that false accusation. Say for example, you clearly and falsely accuse a highly skilled doctor of something bad that they didn’t do – wasting their time and energy in a legal battle – time in court, time preparing their defense, time talking to lawyers – time that they could have spent helping their patients and saving lives! Do you really want to own the evil karma from that?! Maybe the doctor could have treated many, many people and saved many lives during that time that they were taken up in court. In a way, that would be an indirect form of killing multiple people or causing harm to multiple people everyday for months or years until the court proceedings end. Or worse, those false accusations led to that good, innocent doctor to stop practicing – you’ve got to own that sort of karma of having preventing them from helping people and saving lives everyday for the rest of your life.
Source:
Essence of Buddhism 