traditions of ancient India (most notably those of Mahavira and Gautama Buddha) arhat (Sanskrit) or arahant (Pali) signified a spiritual practitioner who had—to use an expression common in the tipitaka—"laid down the burden"—and realised the goal of nibbana, the culmination of the spiritual life (brahmacarya).
Such a person, having removed all causes for future becoming, is not reborn after biological death into any samsaric realm.
The Buddha himself is first named as an arahant, as were his enlightened followers, since he is free from all defilements, without greed, hatred, and delusion, rid of ignorance and craving, having no "assets" that will lead to a future birth, knowing and seeing the real here and now.
This virtue shows stainless purity, true worth, and the accomplishment of the end, nibbana.
Buddhists see the Buddha himself as the ideal towards which one should aim in one's spiritual aspirations.
Hence the arhat as enlightened disciple of the Buddha is not regarded as the goal as much as is the
bodhisattva.
Bodhisattva carries a different meaning in Mahayana
Buddhism to Theravada Buddhism.
In the Pali scriptures the Tathagata when relating his own experiences of self-development uses a stock
phrase "when I was an unenlightened bodhisattva".
Bodhisattva thus connotes here the absence of enlightenment (Bodhi) of a person working
towards that goal.
In Mahayana Buddhism, on the other hand a
bodhisattva is someone who seeks to put the welfare of others before their own, forfeiting their own enlightenment until all beings are saved.
Such a person is said to have achieved a sort of
proto-enlightenment called bodhicitta.
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