Counted, Timed, and with an Exit

The hells of Indian religion are enumerated. Texts list them by name, describe the offence that sends a person to each, and give the duration, and the durations are enormous but they are numbers. Sources disagree on the count, with different Puranas and different Buddhist and Jain treatises giving different totals, and the disagreement itself tells you what kind of scheme this is: a moral taxonomy being worked out in detail rather than a revelation received whole.

The governing principle is that this is a consequence, not a sentence. Karma of a particular weight produces a particular result of a particular length, and when it is exhausted the being is reborn elsewhere. There is no judge exercising discretion and no possibility of a permanent assignment, which makes the machinery closer to physics than to law.

That structure is shared across Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism with different populations and different names, and it travelled with Buddhism into China, Japan and Tibet, where local bureaucratic imagery attached to it and produced the courts and registers of the East Asian hells. A Chinese hell scroll and a Sanskrit list of narakas describe the same underlying idea through completely different institutions.