I completed reading Saddharma­smṛtyupasthāna. I'll share some of how it went; there are some mild spoilers.

It was very lengthy, with an encyclopedic-style tour of the various realms in the Buddhist cosmology - from the hell realms, to the hungry ghosts, then animals/asuras, and finally heavens. This was interjected by many various instructional dharma talks, verses, and series of dharma-categories. The prose gets deeply nested - quotations of quotations of quotations, sections & sub-sub-sections, and contexts that keep invoking new contexts. There's a mystique & implied recall-prowess about how the e.g. Buddha is quoting a king of a heaven realm quoting a dharma talk given to him by another buddha in a past life.

The descriptions of realms - though intriguing & informative - became redundant and were an endurance test continuing to read. Nondualism was everpresent; hells & heavens shared themes. By the last sections of the Heaven Free from Strife, I was skimming over some of the duplicated exposés of forests, play, and so forth.

The last chapter was on the mindfulness of the body, which was a refreshing return after the outward exploration of the cosmos. There's a bulk of information enumerating the bodily winds & worms, which go beyond the Eurocentric model of medicine, and that I haven't seen brought up before. The body in these views is more like a realm in itself, imparting to me a sense of external–internal nondualism. It also describes some of the human realms there. It was almost disappointing how little the human realm resembled our current, direct-observation knowledge of geography - offering a flat-earth view with a mountain in the center and the sun revolving around that. Being a devout follower of the Buddha, the question occurred as to whether & how much this disconfirms the Buddha. It's possible to me the Buddha presented this view of the human realm as truth, knowing it to be non-truth, because it conformed with the beliefs of how the world were at the time in Ancient India; maybe the truth itself was too far-fetched, or somehow too unbeneficial to present. There's also speculative potential to me that this version of the human realm is true, though on some other metaphysical level other than geographically. I skimmed over most of this section on the Saddharma­smṛtyupasthāna human-realm cosmology.

I was surprised at how suited the translation of the Tibetan text to American/Abrahamic culture, as though the Buddha - clairvoyant - was considering the present moment when speaking the sūtra. It directly, several times, denies the existing of an All-Powerful creator deity. In my Buddhist view of God qua Mahābrahmā, this text is an approach to God's heaven realm and describes realms beneath & within that hierarchy.

I was introduced it via a quote regarding male-homosexuality and hell-rebirth. My understanding is that this applies specifically to male-homosexuals that do evil things like breaking the precepts, rather than being somewhere male-homosexuals inevitably go by having sex. Ironically, the dangers of men having sex with women (even e.g. looking at women with lust) were repeated far more than the one time male-homosexuality was mentioned.

I'm happy having finished it.