Avici, "without waves" or "uninterrupted", is the lowest and most severe of the Buddhist hell realms, Naraka, reserved for those who commit the very gravest offences, most notably the five acts of immediate retribution named across Buddhist scripture: patricide, matricide, killing an arhat, wounding a Buddha, and causing division within the monastic community, the sangha. Its name refers to the uninterrupted, unceasing nature of the suffering experienced there, distinguishing it from other Naraka levels where torment is described as at least occasionally broken, and Buddhist cosmological texts describe beings reborn in Avici as experiencing suffering that is continuous both in time and, in some descriptions, in physical extent, without the gaps or intervals of relief found in less severe hell realms.
As with all Buddhist hell realms, rebirth in Avici is understood as karmically caused and, crucially, temporary rather than eternal, however extraordinarily long its duration is described as being in various sutras, since Buddhist cosmology holds that no state of existence, however terrible, lasts forever, and even a being in Avici will eventually exhaust the specific karma that placed it there and move on to a different rebirth.