mindfulness

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Soon Loon Sayadaw

作者：mindfulness 於 2014-2-25 22:18 發表於最熱鬧的華人社交網路--貝殼村

通用分類:英文分享

關鍵詞：Theravada, Buddhism

Soon Loon Sayadaw's opinion about the clarity level
By Dr. Mehm Tin Mon

In Myanmar, there was a popular Arahat monk, Soon Loon Sayadaw. He lived most of his life as a simple farmer, never having learned any of Abhidhamma or meditation methods. But at some point in his life (around middle age), he became really afraid of death and unreliable afterlives. So he learned from his friends how to meditate and kept meditating whenever possible. To build up concentration, he focused his mind on one point at current moment for example, concentrating on the contact of his feet and ground while walking, the up or down chopping movement of hand while cutting grass to feed cows. He also meditated whenever he was not working in the farms, by sitting and focusing on the air touching his nose during breathing. After some months, he built up enough concentration to see human organs with his eyes and could predict the disease and death of people in the community. After that, he continued meditating to build up enough concentration to experience all four noble truths. He became a monk and an Arahat.

The news of his becoming an Arahat caused many popular educated monks and scholars including the President of Myanmar to come and question him. Amazingly, it is said that he could answer all of the detailed phenomenon of mind, mental factors, matter and energy up to the four noble truths, without having studied previously from Abhidhamma books or from teachers. His answers amazed the educated community and the whole country accepted him as an Arahat. Near the end of his life, he correctly predicted the time of his death and asked his followers to leave his body alone without doing anything. The body doesn't decay and became hard like a wood. Even today, people still come to pay homage to his strangely preserved body.

According to Soon Loon Sayadaw, there are three levels of clarity necessary to achieve the four noble truths, or the three levels of clarity to "see" ultimate reality. He said that the degree of clarity can be crude, average, or refined. We can assume crude clarity as a dim view on the ultimate reality, average clarity as a somewhat detailed view and refined clarity as a very vivid view on every single citta, cetasika and rupa. It seems that all three levels of clarity can lead to the realization of the characteristics of ultimate existences such as impermanence, non-ownership and unsatisfactoriness. The books described this wisdom as Udayabbaya nana, one of the ten wisdoms of meditation. Soon Loon Sayadaw regarded all three levels as achievements of Udayabbaya wisdom. So it can be concluded that all three levels of clarity can lead to Nibbana.

A Detailed Account of the Life Story of the late Sun Lun Gu Kyaung Sayadaw (Soon Loon Sayadaw)

http://www.dhammaweb.net/sunlun.html