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Thursday, February 18, 2010

Do we stay in a Heavenly realm forever? Is Heaven the ultimate goal?

Beings who have done much good and accumulated much positive kamma may be reborn in a Heavenly realm. If one is not yet able to achieve Nibbana, the Buddha encouraged all of us to lead upright and virtuous lives in order for us to be reborn in a Higher realm, and more importantly to protect ourselves from rebirth in a Lower realm.

While existence in a Heavenly realm may be for an extremely long time, it is still not forever. Beings in such realms will also eventually pass away and be reborn once their positive kamma has been exhausted.

As such, Buddhists do not consider rebirth in a Heavenly realm to be the ultimate goal. For most Buddhists, the ultimate objective would be to attain Nibbana.

It is said that Nanda, the Buddha's half-brother, was discontented and told the Buddha he wanted to give up the holy life. The Buddha then brought him to one of the Heavenly realms and showed him all its delights. The Buddha promised him that he would be able to enjoy all these delights if he practiced the Dhamma well. This inspired Nanda and he practiced very hard so that he could be reborn in that heavenly realm.

While practicing, Nanda gradually realized that Nibbana is a far greater happiness than being in Heaven, and he then released the Buddha from his earlier promise.

What if we have already done many bad things? Can we ask the Buddha to forgive us?

The Buddha is considered our Teacher and not someone that we pray to for forgiveness. Buddhists do not believe in any external agencies that we must ask forgiveness from, or worship for salvation.

If Buddhists were to ask for forgiveness, it would be to the person that we wronged, and not to a third party or external agency. If it were not possible to be forgiven by the person we wronged or to make amends, then we should let the matter go, learn from it and forgive ourselves, of course provided that we are sincere about it.

The Buddha teaches us that we are each responsible for our own actions, and that we are each capable of shaping our own destinies. We should thus consider carefully before doing anything wrong, and instead try to do right at all times.

If you are unsure whether an action is right or wrong, you can apply this simple rule of thumb as taught by the Buddha : if the action harms either yourself or another, or both; then avoid doing that action. If not, then go right on ahead!

Abraham Lincoln :


"When I do good, I feel good.


When I do bad, I feel bad.


That's my religion."

The Buddhist Texts

The Buddhist Texts

The Teachings of the Buddha, known also as the Dhamma, were collated into three separate sets of books. These books are collectively known as the Tipitaka. The total amount of material is vast and is estimated to be more than twice that of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Although some changes and revisions in the Tipitaka are inevitable over the 2,500 years or so it has been in existence, it is estimated that up to 90% of the Teachings remain unaltered. This is because when it was recited, it was done so with several hundred monks reciting together at the same time. When it was finally committed to writing around 80 BC, large groups of monks also undertook this task in unison. This made changing or altering the Tipitaka very difficult. Reproductions of the original texts survive today and are well preserved in Sri Lanka.

The Sutta Pitaka

Subdivided into five separate collections, the Sutta Pitaka contains all of the Buddha's discourses as well as several from his most senior disciples. The Buddha was extremely successful in his Teachings as he used the language of the common people, which is called Pali.

He adapted the manner and style of His discourses such that he used simpler concepts for the ordinary folk, and more complex ideas for educated and intellectual audiences. He taught everyone from peasants to kings.

The Teachings range from guidelines for individual behaviour to highly sophisticated commentaries on politics and social philosophy. They are pragmatic and readily applicable to daily life. And despite being taught more than 2,500 years ago, His Teachings are still very much pertinent today.


The Vinaya Pitaka

Also divided into five books, the Vinaya Pitaka lays down the rules and guidelines for the Sangha or the community of monks and nuns. With every monk and nun having equal rights, the Sangha is possibly the earliest form of a democratically governed organization still functioning today.

The Abhidhamma Pitaka

Known as the Higher Teachings of the Buddha, the Abhidhamma Pitaka is a monumental and extremely complex and sophisticated approach to the Dhamma. It contains the Buddhist doctrines arranged and classified in a highly systematic set of seven books.

Although traditionally attributed to the Buddha, many commentators now regard the Abhidhamma as the work of later scholar monks who distilled the Teachings of the Buddha into this amazing set of documents.

It deals with the concepts of existence and reality. It analyzes the human thought processes and examines the constituents of mind and matter. Many of its concepts relating to reality and perception have anticipated the works of modern thinkers and scientists.

သခ်ႋဳင္းေလးတခုရဲ႔ အုတ္ဂူေလးမွာ ေရးထားသည့္စာ

သခ်ႋဳင္းေလးတခုရဲ႔ အုတ္ဂူေလးမွာ ေရးထားသည့္စာ

Remember friends, as you pass by, as you are now,

so once were I, as I am now.

So You must be prepared yourselves and follow me'



မိတ္ေဆြ၊ ငါ့အနားက ျဖတ္သြားတဲ့အခါ သတိျပဳလိုက္စမ္းပါ။

ငါလည္းပဲ တခါတုန္းက မင္းလိုပဲ အသက္ရွင္ခဲ့ဖူးတာပါပဲ။

မင္းလည္းပဲ တေန႔က်ရင္ အခု ငါ့လို ျဖစ္လာမွာပါ။

ျပင္ဆင္စရာရွိသမွ် ျပင္ဆင္ျပီးရင္ ငါ့ေနာက္လိုက္ခဲ့ေပါ့။

ေနမ၀င္ခင္ ရိကၡာျပင္ပါ။ ( အနိစၥ၊ ဒုကၡ၊ အနတၱ )။



အထက္ပါ သံေ၀ဂစာကို ရန္ကုန္ျမိဳ႔ ေရေ၀းသုႆာန္ရွိ နားေရးခန္းမတြင္ ကၽြႏ္ုပ္တို႔ ဖတ္ရႈခဲ့ရသည္။ အခန္းထိပ္တြင္ ကြယ္လြန္သူ၏ ရုပ္ကလာပ္ကို ျပင္ဆင္ထားသည္။ အခန္းတြင္း၌လည္း အသုဘရႈသူမ်ား ၀ိုင္း၀န္းထိုင္ေနၾကသည္။ ထိုအခန္းရွိ ရုပ္ကလာပ္အနီး နံရံေပၚတြင္ ဤသံေ၀ဂစာကို အမ်ားသူငါ ဖတ္ရႈဆင္ျခင္ ႏိုင္ရန္ စာလံုးႀကီးမ်ားျဖင့္ ေရးထားသည္။ အသုဘရႈသူအားလံုးလိုလိုပင္ ဖတ္ရႈဆင္ျခင္မိၾကေပလိမ့္မည္။

အလြန္ထိမိေသာ သံေ၀ဂစာကေလး ျဖစ္သည္။အထူးသံေ၀ဂ ရရွိသျဖင့္ ထိုစာကို ကူးယူကာ အမ်ားသူငါ ဖတ္ရႈဆင္ျခင္ႏိုင္ရန္ ဒါနသံေ၀ဂျပဳထားျခင္းျဖစ္သည္။ အလြန္တန္ဖိုးရွိသည့္ ေကာင္းမႈပင္တည္း။

ဤသံေ၀ဂစာကို ကၽြႏ္ုပ္တို႔ ဖတ္ရႈကာ အမ်ိဳးမ်ိဳး ဆင္ျခင္မိသည္။ ဗုဒၶဘုရားရွင္၏ တရားေတာ္အရ ေသျခင္းအေၾuာင္း ေလးပါးရွိသည္။ ယင္းတို႔မွာ-

၁။ အသက္တမ္းကုန္၍ ေသျခင္း။

၂။ ကံအစြမ္းကုန္၍ ေသျခင္း။

၃။ အသက္တမ္း ကံအစြမ္း ၂-မ်ိဳးကုန္၍ ေသျခင္း။

၄။ ဥပေစၧဒကကံေၾကာင့္ ေသျခင္းတို႔ ျဖစ္သည္။

ဥပမာ-

ဆီမီးျငိမ္းရာ၌ -

၁။ ဆီကုန္ျခင္း။

၂။ မီးစာကုန္ျခင္း။

၃။ ဆီႏွင့္မီးစာ ၂-မ်ိဳးလံုး ကုန္ျခင္း။

၄။ ဆီႏွင့္မီးစာ ရွိေသးပါေသာ္လည္း ေလျပင္းတိုက္ခတ္ျခင္း၊ သို႔မဟုတ္-တမင္ျငိမ္းသတ္ျခင္းဟူ၍ အေၾကာင္းေလးမ်ိဳး ရွိသကဲ့သို႔ ျဖစ္ေပသည္။
( ၁ )

သက္တမ္းကုန္ျခင္း ဆိုရာ၌-

ဘုရားရွင္လက္ထက္ေတာ္တြင္ အသက္တမ္း ၁၀၀-ဟုဆို၏။ ယခု ၇၅-ႏွစ္တမ္း ခန္႔မွန္းၾကသည္။ သင့္ေတာ္ရံု ကံပါလာသူတို႔သည္ သတ္မွတ္ထားအပ္ေသာ အသက္တမ္းကို မေက်ာ္လြန္ႏိုင္ ၾကေပ။ အလြန္ကံထူးသူတို႔သာ အသက္တမ္းကို ေက်ာ္လြန္ႏိုင္ၾကေပသည္။ ဘုရားလက္ထက္ေတာ္၌ အရွင္မဟာကႆပ၊ အရွင္အာနႏၵာ၊ ေက်ာင္းအမ ၀ိသာခါတို႔သည္ အသက္ ၁၂၀-ရွည္ၾက၏။ အရွင္ဗာကုလသည္ အသက္ ၁၆၀-ရွည္၏။ ထိုပုဂၢိဳလ္မ်ားကား အလြန္ကံထူးသူမ်ားတည္း။

ထိုသို႔ ကံအထူးလည္း မပါ။ ပါရွိေသာ သာမန္ေလာက္ကံကလည္း အသက္တမ္းကို ေက်ာ္လြန္ေအာင္ မေဆာင္ေတာ့ဘဲ ၇၅-ႏွစ္တမ္း၌ ၇၅-ႏွစ္ျပည့္၍ ေသရျခင္းကို အသက္တမ္းကုန္၍ ေသရျခင္းဟု ေခၚ၏။ မီးစာရွိေသးေသာ္လည္း ဆီကုန္၍ မီးျငိမ္းရျခင္းႏွင့္ တူ၏။

( ၂ )

ကံအစြမ္းကုန္၍ ေသရျခင္းဆိုသည္မွာ-

အျခားမဟုတ္၊ ဘ၀တခုကို စီမံလိုက္ေသာကံသည္ ပဋိသေႏၵေနရသည့္ အခ်ိန္မွစ၍ မိမိသတၱိ မကုန္ေသးသမွ် ဘ၀မျပတ္ေအာင္ (မေသေအာင္) အစဥ္တစိုက္ အျမဲဖန္တီးလ်က္ရွိ၏။ ထိုမူလ စီမံလိုက္ေသာ ကံ၏အစြမ္းကို အားေပးကူညီေသာ အျခားကံမ်ားလည္း ရွိေသး၏။ ထိုမူလစီမံလိုက္ေသာ ကံႏွင့္ အားေပးကူညီၾကေသာ ကံတို႔၏ အစြမ္းသတၱိ ကုန္လွ်င္ကား အသက္တမ္းက မကုန္ေသးေသာ္လည္း ဧကန္မုခ် ေသၾကရေတာ့မည္။ ၇၅-ႏွစ္တမ္း၌ ကံအစြမ္းက ၅၀-ေလာက္သာရွိလွ်င္ ၅၀-အရြယ္မွာပင္ ေသၾကရသည္။

ဥပမာ-

ဆီမကုန္ေသးေသာ္လည္း မီးစာကုန္လွ်င္ ဧကန္ မီးျငိမ္းရသကဲ့သို႔ ျဖစ္ေပသည္။

( ၃ )

အခ်ိဳ႔ေသာသတၱ၀ါတို႔ကား အသက္တမ္းလည္း ကုန္၊ ကံစြမ္းလည္း ကုန္ျခင္းေၾကာင့္ ေသၾကရသည္။ ဆီလည္း ကုန္၊ မီးစာလည္း ကုန္ျခင္းေၾကာင့္ မီးျငိမ္းရျခင္းႏွင့္ တူ၏။

ဤတြင္ ၇၅-ႏွစ္တမ္း၌ ၇၅-ႏွစ္ေလာက္ေနဖို႔ရန္ ကံပါသူ၏ ၇၅-ႏွစ္ျပည့္၍ ေသရမႈကို အသက္တမ္း၊ ကံစြမ္း ႏွစ္မ်ိဳးစံုကုန္ျခင္းေၾကာင့္ ေသရျခင္း-ဟု ေခၚ၏။

(၄)

အခ်ိဳ႔ေသာသတၱ၀ါတို႔ကား အသက္တမ္းလည္း မကုန္ေသး၊ ကံအစြမ္းလည္း မကုန္ေသး၊ ယခုဘ၀မွာ ျဖစ္ေစ ျပဳမိေသာ အကုသိုလ္ကံက အခြင့္ရသျဖင့္ တနည္းနည္းႏွင့္ ေသရေတာ့၏။ ေျမြကိုက္၍ ေသျခင္း၊ အဆိပ္မိ၍ ေသျခင္း၊ တုတ္ ဓား ေသနတ္ စသည့္ လက္နက္တို႔ေၾကာင့္ ေသျခင္း၊ ေရနစ္ ေသျခင္း၊ မီးေလာင္ ေသျခင္း၊ ကားတိုက္ ေသျခင္း စသည္တို႔သည္ ေရွးမေကာင္းမႈကံေၾကာင့္ ေသရျခင္းျဖစ္သည္။

ဥပမာ-

မီးစာ ဆီ ႏွစ္မ်ိဳးလံု မကုန္ေသးဘဲ ေလျပင္းတိုက္ခတ္မႈ၊ တမင္ျငိမ္းသတ္မႈေၾကာင့္ မီးျငိမ္းျခင္းမ်ိဳးကဲ့သို႔တည္း။

ဤကား ဗုဒၶတရားေတာ္လာ ေသျခင္းအမ်ိဳးမ်ိဳး ျဖစ္သည္။ ကၽြႏ္ုပ္တို႔သည္ တေန႔ေန႔တြင္ ဤေသျခင္းေလးမ်ိဳး အနက္ တမ်ိဳးမ်ိဳးႏွင့္ ေသၾကရမည္မွာ မုခ်ျဖစ္သည္။ ေသျခင္းေလးမ်ိဳးအနက္ တမ်ိဳးမ်ိဳးျဖင့္ ကၽြႏ္ုပ္တို႔ထက္ အသက္ႀကီးသူ၊ အရြယ္ႀကီးသူမ်ားလည္း ေသေနၾကသည္။ ကၽြႏ္ုပ္တို႔ႏွင့္ အသက္တူ၊ အရြယ္တူမ်ားလည္း ေသေနၾကသည္။ ကၽြႏ္ုပ္တို႔ေအာက္ အသက္ငယ္သူ၊ အရြယ္ငယ္သူမ်ားလည္း ေသေနၾကသည္။

ဘုရားေဟာတရားေတာ္လာ အနိစၥ ဒုကၡ အနတၱတို႔၏ သေဘာကို ကြယ္လြန္သူက ေျပာျပေနဟန္ အထက္ပါ သံေ၀ဂစာ၌ ေဖာ္ျပထားသည္။ အလြန္ထိမိလွသည္။ တခါက အသက္ရွင္ခဲ့ဖူးေသာ ယခုကြယ္လြန္သူနည္းတူပင္ ကၽြႏ္ုပ္တို႔သည္ အေႏွးႏွင့္အျမန္ ျဖစ္ၾကရေပေတာ့မည္။ သူက ေရွ႔ကသြားႏွင့္၍ ကၽြႏ္ုတို႔က ေနာက္က လိုက္ၾကရ မည္မွာ မုခ်ျဖစ္သည္။

ဤသို႔ ေနာက္က မလိုက္မီ သံေ၀ဂစာ၌ ေဖာ္ျပထားသကဲ့သို႔ ကၽြႏ္ုပ္တို႔သည္ ျပင္ဆင္စရာ ရွိသမွ် ျပင္ဆင္ၾကရေပမည္။ ယင္းသို႔ ျပင္ဆင္ရာ၌ တမလြန္ဘ၀သို႔ ပါသြားမည့္ရိကၡာကို ေနမ၀င္ခင္ အစြမ္းကုန္ ျပင္ဆင္ထားၾကရေပမည္။ ဤရိကၡာကား အျခားမဟုတ္ ဒါန၊ သီလ၊ ဘာ၀နာ တည္းဟူေသာ ရိကၡာႀကီးမ်ားပင္တည္း။