What is Buddhism? (အပိုင္း ၅)

Rebirth

The Buddha remembered his past lives. Even today there are monks, nuns and others who can remember their previous existences. Such a strong memory is a result of deep meditation and mental training. For those who can recall their past lives, the idea of rebirth becomes an established fact which puts this present life in a meaningful perspective.

The law of kamma can only be fully understood in the framework of many lifetimes, because sometimes it takes this long for kamma to bear its fruit.

Rebirth is not limited merely to the human realm. The Buddha taught that the realm of human beings is but one among many. In addition there are realms of heavens, hells, animals and ghosts. Depending on the kamma one has accumulated, one may be reborn into any of these. Understanding this brings up a sense of empathy and respect for the lives of all beings.

Because no realm is permanent, the repetitive cycle of birth and death and the wandering on from realm to realm is inherently unsatisfying. Eventually one seeks a way out. By following the Noble Eightfold Path to its culmination of enlightenment, the process of rebirth ceases completely.

(to be continued.....)

What is Buddhism? (အပိုင္း ၁)
What is Buddhism? (အပိုင္း ၂)
What is Buddhism? (အပိုင္း ၃)
What is Buddhism? (အပိုင္း ၄)



ဆက္လက္ဖတ္ရႈရန္

ဆရာၾကီး ေရႊဥေဒါင္း၏ ဒိေ႒ဒိ႒မတၱံ လက္ေတြ ့က်င့္စဥ္ (၁၁)

ေလာကႏွစ္မ်ိဳး

ဒိေ႒ဒိ႒မတၱံ ဟူေသာ ဗုဒၶၾသဝါဒအရ အေလ့အက်င့္ ျပဳလုပ္လာခဲ့ေသာ ကၽြႏု္ပ္အျမင္၌ ေလာကသည္ ႏွစ္မ်ိဳးရွိ၏။ ပထမတစ္မ်ိဳးမွာ “ပညတ္ေလာက” သို ့မဟုတ္ အိပ္မက္ေလာက (dream world) ျဖစ္၍ ဒုတိယတစ္မ်ိဳးမွာ “ပရမတ္ေလာက” သို ့မဟုတ္ ဒိ႒ေလာက (actual world) ဟူ၍ ျဖစ္သည္။ သတၱဝါဟူသမွ်သည္ သံသရာလဆန္း တစ္ရက္ေန ့မွစ၍ “အိပ္မက္ေလာက” ထဲ၌သာလွ်င္ တစ္ေလွ်ာက္လံုး ေမြ ့ေလ်ာ္ေပ်ာ္ပိုက္လာခဲ့ၾက၏။ အဘယ္ေၾကာင့္ “အိပ္မက္ေလာက” ဆိုနိဳင္ပါသနည္း။ (ကၽြႏ္ုပ္မွာ စာတတ္ေပတတ္မဟုတ္ေသာေၾကာင့္ စာတတ္သူမ်ား၏ အျမင္၌ အသံုးအႏႈန္း၊ အေခၚအေဝၚမ်ားမွာ မွန္ေကာင္းမွ မွန္ေပ၏။ သို ့ရာတြင္ စာမတတ္ေသာ အရပ္သားမ်ား နားလည္ေအာင္ “စိတ္၀င္စားေအာင္” ေရးသားတင္ျပျခင္းျဖစ္၍ ၄င္းတို ့နားလည္ၾကလ်င္ ျပီးေရာဟု သေဘာပိုက္မိပါေတာ့သည္။)

အိပ္မက္ေလာက

ရွင္းဦးအံ့။
နိဳင္ငံေရးသမား တစ္ေယာက္သည္ (၄င္းတို ့လူစု ေမွ်ာ္မွန္းေသာ ပန္းတံုးတိုင္သို ့ေရာက္၍) ၀န္ၾကီးျဖစ္လာသည္ ဆိုအံ့။ ေမွ်ာ္မွန္းေသာ အရာကို ရခါစ လူမ်ား၏ထံုးစံအတိုင္း “ငါတမူကား ၀န္ၾကီးတစ္ေယာက္ ျဖစ္လာေပျပီ” ဟူေသာ သတိရမႈသည္ မၾကာခဏ ျဖစ္ေပၚလာေပလိမ့္မည္။ အိပ္ရာမွနိဳး၍ မ်က္ႏွာသစ္ေသာ အခ်ိန္မွသည္ မ်က္စိႏွစ္လံုး မွိတ္ေသာ အခ်ိန္တိုင္ေအာင္ (လက္ထပ္ျပီးခါစ သတို ့သားႏွင့္ သတို ့သမီးသဖြယ္) အျခားေသာ အလုပ္ကိစၥမ်ား ေဆာင္ရြက္ခိုက္ အခ်ိန္မ်ားမွတပါး၊ အားလပ္ေသာ နာရီပိုင္း၊ မိနစ္ပိုင္းဟူသမွ်တြင္ မိမိအျဖစ္ကို အၾကိမ္ေပါင္းမ်ားစြာ အနုလံု-ပဋိလံု ျပန္လွန္သတိရ ဆင္ျခင္မိေပလိမ့္မည္။ အိမ္ေရွ ့တြင္ ဆိုဖာၾကီးေပၚ၌ ပက္လက္လွန္၍ ေဆးလိပ္ေသာက္ရင္းလည္း “ငါ၀န္ၾကီးျဖစ္လာေပျပီ။ ငါ့ကို ကူညီေသာ မည္သူအား မည္သည့္ရာထူးေပး၍ ငါ့ကိုေထာက္ခံေသာ မည္၀ါအား မည္ကဲ့သို ့ အက်ိဴးခံစားခြင့္ရွိေအာင္ လုပ္ေပးအံုးမွ ေတာ္မည္။ ငါ့ကို ပမာမခန္ ့ေရးသားေသာ မည္သည့္အယ္ဒီတာကို တရားစြဲျပီး ေထာင္ခ်မည္ဆိုလ်င္ ခ်နိဳင္ေသာ အာဏာ ငါ့လက္ထဲသို ့ ေရာက္လာေပျပီ။ ငါတို ့အဖြဲ ့ျပဳတ္ေအာင္ ၾကံၾကေသာ မည္သူမည္၀ါတို ့အားလည္း ပုဒ္မ ၅ ႏွင့္ ဖမ္းခ်ဳပ္မည္ဆိုက ခ်ဳပ္နိဳင္ေပျပီ” စသည္ျဖင့္ စိတ္ကူးလ်က္ရွိစဥ္ သတင္းစာေရာက္လာ၍ ေကာက္ၾကည့္လိုက္ရာ ျမိဳ ့တစ္ျမိဳ ့သို ့ မိမိေရာက္ခဲ့စဥ္က အရာရွိမ်ားႏွင့္ ျမိဳ ့မိျမိဳ ့ဖဆိုသူမ်ားက ေသာင္းေသာင္းျဖျဖ ၾကိဳဆိုၾကျပီး အမ်ိဳးသမီးကေလးမ်ားက မိမိအား ပန္းစည္းဆက္ေနၾကေသာ ဓာတ္ပံုကိုျမင္လိုက္ရ၍ ၀န္ၾကီးတစ္ေယာက္ျဖစ္ရျခင္းအတြက္ တိုး၍ၾကည္နဴးျပန္သည္။ တဖန္သတင္းစာထဲ၌ မိမိေျပာခဲ့ေသာ မိန္ ့ခြန္းကို ေတြ ့ရ၍ ဖတ္ၾကည့္ရာ ၾသဘာလက္ခုပ္တီးၾကေသာ အသံမ်ားပင္ နားထဲသို ့၀င္လာ၍ “တယ္ေတာ္တဲ့ ငါေပတကား” ဟု ဆထက္ထမ္းပိုး စိတ္ၾကည္နဴးျခင္း ျဖစ္မိျပန္သည္။ ထိုအခိုက္တြင္ ၀န္ၾကီးကေတာ္ ေျပး၀င္လာ၍ “ေကာင္းနိဳင္ၾကေသးရဲ ့လားရွင္၊ တင္တင္္ျမင့္ေက်ာင္းအသြားမွာ ကားေမွာက္ျပီး ေဆးရံုေရာက္ေနျပီတဲ့။ တယ္လီဖုန္းလာေနတယ္။” ဟုေျပာလိုက္ရာတြင္ ပန္းစည္းဆက္သျဖင္းမ်ား ခံယူေနသည့္အသြင္အျပင္ႏွင့္ မိန္ ့ခြန္းကို ခ်ီးက်ဴးၾကသည့္ ၾသဘာလက္ခုပ္သံမ်ားသည္ (အိပ္ယာမွ လန္ ့နိဳးသူ၏ အိပ္မက္ကဲ့သို ့) ၀န္ၾကီး၏ မ်က္စိထဲ၊ နားထဲမွာ ရုတ္တရတ္ခ်က္ခ်င္း ကြယ္ေပ်ာက္ သြားၾကေလေတာ့သည္။

ႏိႈင္းယွဥ္ခ်က္

ဤေနရာ၌ ဆိုဖာေပၚတြင္ ၀န္ၾကီး၏စိတ္ကူးႏွင့္ လူတစ္ေယာက္၏ အိပ္မက္မက္ျခင္းတို ့သည္ မည္ကဲ့သို ့ျခားနားျခင္း ရွိပါသနည္း။

၀န္ၾကီး၏ စိတ္ကူးမွာ တကယ့္အျဖစ္အပ်က္ျဖစ္၍ အိပ္မက္မွာ တကယ္မဟုတ္ဟု ဆိုခဲ့လ်င္ အိပ္မက္ထဲက အျဖစ္အပ်က္မွာလည္း မနိဳးေသးမီ အခိုက္အတန္ ့တြင္ အဟုတ္တကယ္ပင္ ထင္ရသည္ မဟုတ္ပါေလာ။ အိပ္မက္ထဲတြင္လည္း ၀မ္းသာစရာရွိလ်င္ ၀မ္းသာရသည္။ ၀မ္းနည္းစရာရွိလ်င္ ၀မ္းနည္းရသည္။ ေၾကာက္စရာရွိလ်င္ တကယ္ေၾကာက္ရသည္ပင္ မဟုတ္ပါေလာ။ နိဳးလာေသာအခါ၌ ထိုအျခင္းအရာမ်ား ေပ်ာက္ကြယ္ရသည့္နည္းတူ ၀န္ၾကီးမွာလည္း သမီးကားေမွာက္သည္ဆိုေသာ သတင္းကိုၾကားရေသာအခါတြင္ ပန္းစည္းဆက္ေသာ အမ်ိဳးသမီးကေလးမ်ားႏွင့္ ၾသဘာလက္ခုပ္သံမ်ားသည္ ခ်က္ခ်င္း ကြယ္ေပ်ာက္ သြားေတာ့သည္ မဟုတ္ပါေလာ။ ဤမွ်သာမကေသး၊ ပန္းစည္းဆက္ေသာ ရူပါရံုႏွင့္ ၾသဘာလက္ခုပ္တီးေသာ သဒၵါရံုတို ့ေၾကာင့္ ျဖစ္ေပၚခဲ့ေသာ ၾကည္နဴးမႈလည္း ကြယ္ေပ်ာက္သြား၍ သမီးအတြက္ ရတက္ေပြရသည့္ ေသာကစိတ္ ၀င္ေရာက္လာေတာ့သည္ မဟုတ္ပါေလာ။ တခဏခ်င္း ကြယ္ေပ်ာက္နိဳင္၍ တခဏခ်င္း ေျပာင္းလဲနိဳင္ေသာ အျခင္းအရာကို အဟုတ္တကယ္ဟူ၍ မွတ္ယူထိုက္ပါသေလာ။ အိပ္မက္ထက္ ဘယ္ေလာက္မ်ား ပိုျပီးခိုင္ျမဲမႈ ရွိပါေသးသနည္း။

ဆက္လက္ဖတ္ရႈရန္

သူငယ္ေတာ္ေတာရ ဆရာေတာ္၏ ေန ့စဥ္ေဟာျပ ၾသ၀ါဒ (၁၁)

အရယူတတ္ၾကပါေစ

ယခုလိုရခဲလွေသာ လူ ့ဘ၀ၾကီးကို ရေနရုံတင္မကဘဲ ၾကံဳခဲလွေသာ ဗုဒၶၿမတ္စြာသာသနာေတာ္ၾကီးနဲ ့ ၾကံဳေနတုန္း ဒါနကို ဧရာတည္၊ သီလၿဖင့္ တန္ဆာဆင္၊ ဘာ၀နာၿဖင့္ အထြဋ္တင္ၿပီးေတာ့ အခြင့္ေကာင္းၾကီးကို လက္မလြတ္ၾကေစနဲ ့။ အရယူတတ္ၾကပါေစ။

ကုသိုလ္ေလရြက္ အထက္ကိုဆန္

ဘုန္းၾကီးတို ့ ေယာဂီသူေတာ္စင္ေတြ တရားစခန္း၀င္ၿပီး အရိယာသူေတာ္ေကာင္းၾကီးေတြ နည္းမွီးၿပီး ခႏၶာဥာဏ္စိုက္၍ ၀ိပႆနာတရားေတြ ၾကိဳးစားက်င့္ၾကံေနတာဟာ မိမိတို ့ရဲ ့ ကုသိုလ္ေလွရြက္ၾကီးကို အထက္ကို ဆန္တက္ေအာင္ ၿပဳလုပ္ေနၾကတာပဲ။ နိဗၺာန္ထိေအာင္ ဆန္တက္ၾကရမယ္ မဟုတ္လား။

တရားအားထုတ္ရၿခင္းအေၾကာင္း

ဘုန္းၾကီးတို ့ ေယာဂီသူေတာ္စင္ေတြ ဘာေၾကာင့္ တရားအားထုတ္ရတာလဲလို ့ ေမးရင္ အရိယာ သူေတာ္ေကာင္းၾကီေတြ ၿမင္ေတာ္မူ၊ ရေတာ္မူတဲ့ သႏိၱသုခ နိဗၺာနဓာတ္ (အၿငိမ္းဓာတ္) ၾကီးကို ရၿပီး အုိနာေသဇာတ္ အၿမစ္ၿပတ္ခ်င္လို ့ တရားအားထုတ္ရၿခင္း ၿဖစ္တယ္လို ့ ေၿဖရပါလိမ့္မယ္။

ဆက္လက္ဖတ္ရႈရန္

What is Buddhism? (အပိုင္း ၄)

The Law Of Kamma

The Buddha said, "Monks, kamma is intention." According to the natural law of kamma (or karma), there are inescapable results of our intentional actions. Certain acts, things said or thought will lead to hurting others or harming oneself if the intention behind them is unwholesome. This 'bad kamma' is motivated by selfish desire, anger or delusion. Because the result is unpleasant and painful, wise people don't follow impure intentions. Similarly there are actions, speech and thoughts which stem from wholesome intentions. This 'good kamma' leads to the well-being of both oneself and others. Motivated by generosity, compassion, clarity of understanding and other positive states of mind, wise people cultivate and follow up on their pure intetions.

Much, though not all, of what one experiences is the result of one's previous kamma. So when one finds oneself in an unpleasant situation, rather than projecting blame on others one can examine one's own past conduct and take responsibility for the causes that led up to the situation. Likewise when one is feeling happy, instead of taking it for granted one looks to understand the previous causes and conditions that brought it about. Understanding how happiness originates encourages further good kamma.

The Buddha pointed out that no being, divine or not, has the power to stop the consequences of good or bad kamma. One reaps exactly what one sows. So if you want to be wealthy, then be generous, hard-working and trustworthy. If you want to go to heaven, be virtuous, be kind and meditate. If you want to be enlightened, develop insight based on deep peace of mind.

The only escape from the results of kamma is enlightenment. Until then however, it is possible to attenuate the severity of the consequences of bad kamma by increasing the good. The Buddha gave the simile of a spoon of salt mixed in a glass of water compared to a spoon of salt mixed in a large river. The glass of water becomes undrinkable while the taste of the water in the river is hardly affected. Similarly, the results of bad kamma for a person only doing a small amount of good kamma is very painful, while the result of the same bad kamma for a person habitually doing a great deal of good kamma is much less severe.

Understanding this natural law of cause and effect leads to an ethical, compassionate and wise life. Furthermore, a wider embracing of the law of kamma would lead any country towards a stronger, more caring and virtuous society.

(to be continued....)


ဆက္လက္ဖတ္ရႈရန္

နိဗၺာန္အယူအဆကို ေထရ၀ါဒ ရႈေထာင့္မွေလ့လာသံုးသပ္ျခင္း (ဆရာေတာ္ ဦးဓမၼပိယ Ph. D.)

Nibbana In Theravada Perspective

By

Sayadaw U Dhammapia, Ph. D.

Nibbana
ဆက္လက္ဖတ္ရႈရန္

What is Buddhism? (အပိုင္း ၃)

The Middle Way

The path to the ending of all suffering is called the Middle Way because it avoids the two extremes of self-indulgence and self-torment. Such extreme behavior does not lead to peace of mind. This pathway consists of cultivating virtue, meditative serenity and wisdom and is further elaborated as the Noble Eightfold Path:

1. The perfection of understanding: right view of the basic truths of existence.
2. The perfection of intention: thoughts motivated by loving-kindness, compassion and renunciation.
3. The perfection of speech: truthful, harmonious, gentle and meaningful.
4. The perfection of behavior: non-violence, not stealing and responsible sexual conduct.
5. The perfection of employment: earning a living in a way that does not harm or exploit others or oneself.
6. The perfection of effort: cultivating and maintaining wholesome states of mind while overcoming unwholesome states and keeping them at bay.
7. The perfection of conscious awareness: mindfulness of ones body, feelings, mind and objects of mind.
8. The perfection of meditative concentration: deep unification, peace and purity of mind.

When all eight factors of the path are brought to maturity, one penetrates the true nature of existence with insight and reaps the fruit of the Buddha's teachings: perfected wisdom and unshakable liberation.

(to be continued....)
ဆက္လက္ဖတ္ရႈရန္

What is Buddhism? (အပိုင္း ၂)

The Four Noble Truths

The central teaching of the Buddha, around which all his other teachings revolve, is the Four Noble Truths:

1. Life involves suffering. All beings are subject to old age, sickness and death. They will inevitably experience some disappointment, discomfort, sadness, anxiety or pain.

2. The root cause of suffering is craving for sensual pleasure, for existence, for non-existence or for things to be different than they are. Craving is fueled by likes and dislikes, driven by the illusion of 'me' and 'mine', which in turn is due to misunderstanding the true nature of reality.

3. Suffering ends with the ending of craving. This is the attainment of enlightenment, Nibbana (or Nirvana). Enlightenment is the complete letting go of the illusion of a permanent and independent self or soul. An enlightened person is called an Arahant.

4. Enlightenment is achieved through a gradual training, a path called the Middle Way, or the Noble Eightfold Path.

Buddhism is a realistic religion in that it faces up to the fact of life's many imperfections, and optimistic in that it offers a practical solution: enlightenment in this very life.

Because all things that arise from a cause are in a constant state of change, they are inherently unable to provide permanent happiness or reliable satisfaction. Grasping and clinging onto any aspect of experience leads to friction, stress or disappointment when those things, people or situations fade and disappear. As long as suffering is seen as something unnatural or abnormal that is to be feared, avoided or rejected, it will be impossible to uproot its causes and live a truly happy life. To the degree that the subtle and all-pervasive nature of suffering is recognized, one can accept and be free from it. This is why the reflection on suffering is emphasized as the key to ultimate liberation, and those who have realized enlightenment are inspiring examples of profound happiness, loving-kindness and compassion.

(to be continued...)
ဆက္လက္ဖတ္ရႈရန္