OTHER FAITHS ON HEAVEN
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."
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 4th level. Abraham welcomes him in the 7th heaven before the Prophet is ushered into paradise for his encounter with God. It was in heaven, according to one tale, that Muhammad, on Moses’ advice, bargained down God’s original demand of 50 prayers a day to 5, 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 100,000 colors, then with these very best
...