Heaven and Hell.

I recently found an article by zen master Wu Kwang explaining the difference between heaven and hell. I found this description to be kind of nifty. A pretty nice description of Boddhisattva action.

"At the end of a one-day retreat recently, I told the story of a man who encounters a genie, or supernatural being, who says, "I will fulfill one wish for you." The man says, "I'd like to get a view of the difference between heaven and hell." The genie says, "O.K., I'll show you." He takes him to a door and they enter a huge banquet hall. On the table is everything you might wish to eat, and if something is not there you only have to think about it to make it appear. But there's one injunction in this setting: You have to use special utensils. These utensils have a glove that fits up to the elbow, and attached to this glove is a fork that is so long that the food doesn't reach your face when you bend your elbow. All these people are sitting at the table trying to feed themselves, but they can't get the food to their mouths.
Then the genie takes this man through another door, and they find an identical setting. Again, the same utensils are being used - so long that the food never reaches the people's mouths. But in this particular room the people are seated across from each other at the table, and the person on this side of the table picks up a piece of food and extends it over to the person sitting across from him. Because the fork is extremely long, it just reaches the other person's mouth, and likewise the man or woman sitting on the other side of the table picks up a morsel of food and extends it across the table and the person opposite eats it."

Here is the link to the actual talk ---> Stepping off a hundred foot flagpole.