It is time to reveal the truth behind the urban legend regarding “Theresa Banyan” and the question of hell’s endothermic/exothermic nature. This legend in fact derives from a real incident in the life of St. Theresa of Banyan, the famous Indian saint and mystic, known by this name because of her custom of meditating and praying under a banyan tree (all the spots under bodhi trees were taken).
St. Theresa posed the question of whether hell was exothermic or endothermic to a would-be disciple. Like so many of Jesus’ questions and retorts, the intention was not to get this young man to reason an answer, but to realize that there could be no rational solution to this paradox, this koan, and that it was the start of a path leading onward to mystical truth.
Alas, the young man took her question in a crassly literal fashion, and went away to study thermodynamics, hoping to find an answer. Apparently he did write his famous answer on an exam, but the question he was answering was “Provide an example of heat transfer by convection”, and he received a D-.
Apparently he did remember another snippet of St. Theresa’s mystical teachings, albeit once again in a purely literalistic fashion. She had the custom of telling her disciples that “It will be a cold day in hell when I will sleep with you”, not as a statement of fact or a reference to a desire for physical union, but to teach them symbolically that when one experiences mystical union with the One, the fear of hell and in a sense hell itself is extinguished.
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