Of Buddhas and Arahants

Posted onAuthorShi ZhiXing8 Comments

Someone asked a question in facebook

Can someone enlighten me? Arhat in Theravada achieved almost to Buddhahood while in Mahayana they still need to take the route of the Boddhisatva to attain Buddhahood. Does attaining arhat in Mahayana be able for the arhat to have the option of not taking rebirth or reincarnation.

My reply below (corrected for grammar)

Buddhas and Arahants realises the same Truth and attains the same Nibbana, but they differ in terms of their ability.

Consider a swimmer and a swimming coach. Both a swimmer and a swimming coach can swim, but a coach also has the ability to teach others how to swim.

However, knowing that a person is a swimmer speaks nothing about his intention or ability to teach others to swim. A swimmer might well be a swimming coach as well!

An arahant is no longer subject to the cycle of birth and deaths driven by greed, hatred and delusion. This is true regardless of the “yana” or tradition.

Should a person such as an arahant be moved by compassion to guide and teach others, then such an arahant may take on whatever forms needed to teach. On the surface, it may appear like the arahant has taken rebirth like everyone else, but it differs in that, such reappearance is not driven by defilements but motivated by compassion!

Consider a prison with inmates. They are not there by choice, although in a way, they are there due to choices they have made. Then there are those who go to do prison counseling. They are there by choice and not through their misdeeds; they are there out of compassion to help counsel the inmates.

The inmates cannot choose when to leave while the counselors are free to move around the blocks and when their sessions are over, they leave the prison until there is opportunity to counsel again.

Samsara is like the prison, unenlightened ones the inmates, arahants are those who are free of the prison. Like the counselors, there are arahants who voluntarily go back to the prison to provide counsel.

In the Mahayana tradition, we honour these Arahants as Bodhisattvas (Awaken / Enlighten Sentient beings) for they themselves having awakened 覺(自)有情, are taking that step to 覺(他)有情 awaken others by teaching the Dhamma!

Truly, they 自利利他 are of welfare and benefit to themselves and others! They are indeed 大人 Mahasattvas Great Beings! _/|\_

 

So would you like to be totally free of stress, worry and suffering? Are ready to love and care for others with no strings attached?

Do something worthwhile in life, be a Buddha! 😀

The Kind of Student I Was … and the Wonderful Teachers I Had!

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Back in secondary school, there was one time we had art class and the first assignment was to make our own art folder.  We were given a large A3 vanguard sheet and the assignment was to cut out a template, fold it into a folder and decorate the exterior with a designs of shapes.

One possible design would be

Not Van Gogh or Picasso, but it’s good enough.

Below is the folder design I submitted.  My teacher rejected my folder initially dismissing it as stripes and not shapes.  I reasoned that my folder design consist of blue rectangles.

I carried the only art folder with stripes for the year … … I mean blue rectangles! :p

Thank you dear teachers, for not forcing your students to conform into model answers. ^.^

Puja for Boys in Tampines Accident

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As I read about the accident in Tampines where two boys lost their lives, I thought it would be good to do a puja for them.  I don’t know them personally but we can still have a puja and dedicate it to them.

We’ll be having a simple puja at 7:30pm, Thursday 31st January 2013 at the Buddhist Library.

2 LORONG 24A GEYLANG ROADSINGAPORE 398526.

If you cannot make it, do sit silently for a minute and radiate metta to them.

Extend it to all sentient beings, may all beings be safe, healthy, free from fear and harm.
May all beings be Well and Happy.

Reference

 

Simulations by Scientists Suggests Waste Heat Warms Up Climate

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In one microprocessor class back in university, a professor once declared “A cpu is a heater that happens to calculate”.  The cpu in the computer or handphone you are using is a super duper transistor.  Most cpus today consist of billions of transistors and is built around the same fundamental design of logic gates using transistors.

Transistors in an analogue circuit amplify input signals while transistors in a digital circuits make use of the cut-off behaviour of a transistor to act as a switch.  In both cases, heat is unwittingly
produced.

Newer cpus are more “efficient” in that lesser heat is produced, i.e. lesser energy is required to compute while lesser energy is expended as heat.

All the appliances and devices we use, including the screen you are reading this on, dissipates heat.  The heat must go somewhere and it does go somewhere.  The environment.

Air-conditioning

The funny thing is that even the air-conditioners that cools down our rooms also generates heat.  Back in August 2006, I wrote about how air-conditioners do not really produce ‘cold’ or that it is really a displacement of heat [1].  This heat from the air-conditioners and all the other appliances must go some where as well.  It dissipates to the air around, i.e. the atmosphere.

Now consider earth, with its atmosphere as the ‘Room’. The rooms we are cooling are akin to tiny little fridges in this big Room. Owing to heat loss to space, the whole earth cools off at night. But in the day itself, the reverse is true. Heat from sunlight is warming up the surfaces of earth and air, while these little fridges are doing their part to displace heat, and inevitably adding on ambient heat to the environment. Simply put, air-cons do not just ‘cool’ the rooms, it also heats up the environment.

In recent studies by scientists, simulations are pointing to a similar conclusion.

Human-made waste heat warms climate [2]

Energy dissipated as heat in cities can cause regional temperature changes, simulations suggest

The waste heat generated by car engines, power plants, home furnaces and other fossil fuel-burning machinery plays an unappreciated role in influencing regional climates, new computer simulations suggest. By altering atmospheric circulation, human-made heat may raise temperatures by as much as 1 degree Celsius during winter in the northernmost parts of the world.

From the air-conditioning to the pc or mobile, from the television in your living room to the car on the street and the plane in the sky, all appliances, equipments and machineries produce heat, and it is adding up.

Proposing to remove all these modern creature comforts (or to some, necessities) is impractical.  Energy efficient appliances and cars can definitely help to reduce the amount of energy wasted, in most cases as heat.

Earth Day raises awareness by having people around the world turn off the lights for an hour at 8pm once a year.  Perhaps it may be more effective to turn off the air-conditioner as well.  After all, air-conditioners consumes much more energy than than lighting and merely displaces heat while producing heat at the same time!

Are we ready to live without or with lesser air-conditioning?

References