ဗုဒၶဘာသာမ်ား၌ပင္ သီဟုိဠ္ဗုဒၶဘာသာက ေဗာဓိပင္ကုိ ပုိ၍ အေလးထားသည္။ ဘုရားရွိခုိးရာ၌ပင္ ေဗာဓိပူဇာ (ေဗာဓိပင္ ရွိခုိးပူေဇာ္ျခင္း) ျဖင့္ အစျပဳတတ္ၾကသည္။ အျငင္းပြားဖြယ္ေတာ့ မရွိ။ သူတုိ႔ ဗုဒၶဘာသာကုိ ရလုိက္ျခင္းကပင္ ေဗာဓိပင္ႏွင့္ တြဲ၍ ရခဲ့ျခင္းေၾကာင့္ပင္။ သဃၤမိတၱာႏွင့္ ေဗာဓိပင္တုိ႔ သီရိလကၤာႏုိင္ငံ (သီဟုိဠ္ကြ်န္း) ေရာက္ရွိသည္ဟု ယုံၾကည္ၾကသည့္ ေဇ႒နကၡတ္ ယွဥ္ခုိက္၊ ျမန္မာလုိ တန္ေဆာင္မုန္းလျပည့္ေန႔ကုိ သဃၤမိတၱာေန႔ဟု သက္မွတ္ၾကျခင္း ျဖစ္သည္။
ဤေန႔ကုိ ဂုဏ္ျပဳေသာအားျဖင့္ “မဟိႏၵႏွင့္ သဃၤမိတၱာ” ဟူေသာ ဇာတ္လမ္းေလးကုိ “Asoka, the Great” စာအုပ္မွ ယူ၍ တင္ေပးလုိက္ပါသည္။
ျမန္မာျပန္အက်ဥ္း
မဟိႏၵမေထရ္၏ မိခင္သည္ ဝိဒိသၿမိဳ႕သူ မဟာေဒဝီ ျဖစ္သည္။ သူမက သူေ႒းသမီးျဖစ္ၿပီး အေသာကမင္းသားကုိ ခမည္းေတာ္ ဗိႏၵဳသာရက ဝိဒိသၿမိဳ႕သုိ႔ ေစလႊတ္ရာ ႏွစ္ေယာက္ေတြ႔ဆုံၿပီး ခ်စ္ခင္ စုံမက္သျဖင့္ လက္ဆက္ခဲ့ၾကသည္။ သူတုိ႔မွ သား မဟိႏၵႏွင့္ သမီး သဃၤမိတၱာတုိ႔ ဖြားျမင္ခဲ့သည္။
မဟိႏၵမင္းသား (၁၄) ႏွစ္သား အရြယ္၌ အေသာကမင္း ပါဋလိပုတ္ျပည့္ရွင္ ျဖစ္လာခဲ့သည္။ ထုိ႔ေနာက္ အေသာက က ပါဋလိပုတ္၌ ေရြ႕ေျပာင္းေနထုိင္ခဲ့ေသာ္လည္း မိဘုရား မဟာေဒဝီကေတာ့ မိဘမ်ားႏွင့္အတူ ဝိဒိသၿမိဳ႕မွာပင္ ေနရစ္ခဲ့သည္။
အေသာက နန္းတက္ၿပီး (၇) ႏွစ္ေျမွာက္၌ အသက္ (၂၁) ႏွစ္အရြယ္ရွိ မဟိႏၵ ရဟန္းျပဳခဲ့သည္။ ပရိယတၱိစာေပမ်ား သင္ၾကားၿပီးေသာအခါ အျခား ရဟန္းေတာ္မ်ားႏွင့္အတူ သီရိလကၤာႏုိင္ငံ (သီဟုိဠ္) သုိ႔ သာသနာျပဳရန္ၾကြရန္ တာဝန္ေပးခဲ့ရသည္။ သီရိလကၤာ မသြားမီ ျပင္ဆင္သည့္အေနျဖင့္ ရာဇၿဂိဳဟ္တဝုိက္ရွိ ဘုန္းႀကီးေက်ာင္းတုိက္မ်ားသုိ႔ သြားေရာက္ကာ ပညာတတ္ ရဟန္းေတာ္မ်ားထံမွ ဗုဒၶေဒသနာေတာ္မ်ားကုိ ဆက္လက္ ေလ့လာခဲ့သည္။
မဟိႏၵမေထရ္ သီရိလကၤာအၾကြ လမ္းခရီး၌ ဝိဒိသၿမိဳ႕ရွိ မယ္ေတာ္ မဟာေဒဝီကုိ ဝင္ေရာက္ ေတြ႔ဆုံ ႏႈတ္ဆက္ခဲ့သည္။ မဟာေဒဝီက သားေတာ္ကုိ ရဟန္းတစ္ပါးအေနႏွင့္ ဖူးျမင္ရျခင္း၊ သီရိလကၤာႏုိင္ငံသုိ႔ သာသနာျပဳ ၾကြေရာက္ျခင္းအေပၚ မ်ားစြာ ေက်နပ္ ျဖစ္မိသည္။ သုိ႔ေသာ္ သီရိလကၤာသုိ႔ မၾကြမီ မယ္ေတာ္ႏွင့္ တစ္လခန္႔အတူ သီတင္းသုံးရန္ ေလ်ာက္ထားသျဖင့္ မဟိႏၵမေထရ္ကလည္း လက္ခံခဲ့သည္။
ထုိအခ်ိန္ သီရိလကၤာႏုိင္ငံ၌ ေဒဝါနံပိယတိႆဘုရင္ မင္းျပဳေန၏။ ႏွစ္ႏုိင္ငံ ၿမဲျမံေသာ သံတမန္ေရး ရွိႏွင့္ၿပီး ျဖစ္သည္။ အေသာကမင္းႀကီးက မဟိႏၵမေထရ္ႏွင့္ အျခား ရဟန္းေတာ္တုိ႔ကုိ သီရိလကၤာသုိ႔ သာသနာျပဳ ေစလႊတ္ခဲ့သည္။ တိႆဘုရင္ကုိလည္း အေၾကာင္းၾကားလႊာ ပါးခဲ့သည္။ မဟိႏၵမေထရ္ ရဟန္း (၄) ပါးႏွင့္အတူ သီရိလကၤာေရာက္ေသာ သကၠရာဇ္က ဘီစီ (၂၅၄) ျဖစ္ၿပီး ထုိအခ်ိန္၌ မေထရ္၏ သက္ေတာ္ (၃၂) ႏွစ္ ရွိၿပီး ျဖစ္သည္။
မဟာဝံသက်မ္းအဆုိအရ မဟိႏၵမေထရ္ တမၺပ႑ိ (သီရိလကၤာ) ေရာက္သည့္ေန႔မွာ လျပည့္ေန႔ ျဖစ္ၿပီး တိႆဘုရင္က အေျခြအရံမ်ားႏွင့္ နကၡတ္ပြဲသဘင္ ဆင္ယင္ က်င္းပေနသည္။ မဟိႏၵမေထရ္က ထုိသတင္းကုိ ၾကားရၿပီး တိႆဘုရင္ရွိရာ မိႆကေတာင္သုိ႔ ၾကြေရာက္ ေတြ႔ဆုံခဲ့သည္။ ဇမၺဴဒီပဘုရင္ အေသာကမင္းႀကီးက ေစလႊတ္လုိက္သည့္ သာသနာျပဳ ရဟန္းေတာ္မ်ား ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း မေထရ္က ေျပာျပသည္။ ထုိအေၾကာင္းကုိ သိႏွင့္ၿပီးသား ျဖစ္ေသာ ေဒဝါနံပိယတိႆမင္းႀကီးက မေထရ္ႏွင့္တကြေသာ သာသနာျပဳ တစ္ဖြဲ႔လုံးကုိ ဝမ္းေျမာက္ဝမ္းသာ ႀကိဳဆုိခဲ့သည္။
ထုိ႔ေနာက္ မေထရ္လည္း သာသနာျပဳလုပ္ငန္း စတင္ေတာ့သည္။ တိႆဘုရင္ႏွင့္ အေျခြအရံမ်ား အားလုံးကုိ အရွင္သာရိပုတၱရာမေထရ္ သာဝတၳိၿမိဳ႕၌ ရဟန္းေတာ္တုိ႔ကုိ ေဟာၾကားခဲ့သည့္ ဟတၳိပေဒါပမသုတ္ကုိ ေဟာၾကားခဲ့ၿပီး ေဒသနာအဆုံး၌ မင္းႀကီးႏွင့္တကြ ေလးေသာင္းေလးေထာင္ေသာ မင္းခစားတုိ႔ ဗုဒၶဘာသာအျဖစ္ ခံယူၾကသည္။ ထုိ႔ေနာက္ တိႆဘုရင္၏ ေထာက္ပံ့မႈျဖင့္ သီရိလကၤာႏုိင္ငံ သာသနာျပဳ လုပ္ငန္းကုိ ဆက္လက္ ေဆာင္ရြက္ေတာ္မူခဲ့သည္။
ေဒဝါနံပိယတိႆ၏ ခယ္မေတာ္ျဖစ္သူ၊ ညီေတာ္၏ ၾကင္ယာေတာ္ အႏုလာမင္းသမီးသည္ သူမကုိယ္တုိင္ ရဟန္းျပဳခြင့္ရရန္ ဘုရင္ႀကီးထံ ခြင့္ပန္သည္။ မင္းႀကီးက ဝမ္းသာမဆုံးျဖစ္ၿပီး မဟိႏၵမေထရ္ကုိ ေလွ်ာက္ထား ေတာင္းပန္ရာ “အမ်ိဳးသမီးကုိ ရဟန္းျပဳေပးရန္ ငါ့မွာ အခြင့္အာဏာ မရွိ၊ သာသနာေတာ္ ျပန္႔ပြားေရး ျဖစ္သျဖင့္ တားလည္း မတားျမစ္အပ္၊ ဤအေၾကာင္းကုိ ခမည္းေတာ္ အေသာကမင္းႀကီးထံ အေၾကာင္းၾကားၿပီး သဃၤမိတၱာကို ေစလႊတ္ေပးရန္ ေမတၱာရပ္ခံေပးမည္” ဟု မေထရ္က မိန္႔လုိက္သည္။
မေထရ္၏ ဩဝါဒအတုိင္း ေဒဝါနံပိယတိႆက ပါဋလိပုတ္သုိ႔ တမန္ေတာ္မ်ား ေစလႊတ္ၿပီး အေသာကမင္းႀကီးထံ သဝဏ္လႊာ ဆက္သသည္။ သားရဟန္းေတာ္၏ ေအာင္ျမင္ေသာ သာသနာျပဳခရီးကုိ ႏွစ္ေထာင္းအားရ ရွိလွေသာ အေသာကမင္းႀကီးက သမီးေတာ္ သံဃမိတၱာႏွင့္အတူ ဗုဒၶဂယာမွ ေညာင္ကုိင္းတစ္ကုိင္းပါ လက္ေဆာင္ ေပးလုိက္ေလသည္။ ထုိေညာင္ပင္ငယ္ကုိ ဓမၼသေကၤတ တစ္ခုအေနျဖင့္ သီရိလကၤာ၌ စုိက္ပ်ိဳးေစသည္။ ထုိေညာင္ပင္က ကမၻာေပၚတြင္ သက္တမ္း အရွည္ၾကာဆုံး သစ္ပင္ဟု ဆုိႏုိင္သည္။
သဃၤမိတၱာေထရီ သီရိလကၤာသုိ႔ ေရာက္သည့္အခ်ိန္တြင္ ႀကီးက်ယ္စြာ ႀကိဳဆုိခဲ့ၾကသည္။ အိမ္ေရွ႕မင္းသား၏ ၾကင္ယာေတာ္ အႏုလာေဒဝီႏွင့္ အလုပ္အေကြ်း ေမာင္းမမိႆံ ငါးရာတုိ႔ ဘိကၡဴနီသာသနာထဲ ဝင္ၾကစဥ္ မဟိႏၵမေထရ္ကလည္း ဘုရင္၏တူေတာ္ အရိ႒ႏွင့္ သူငယ္ခ်င္း ငါးရာတုိ႔ကုိ သူေတာ္ေကာင္းတရား၌ တည္ေစခဲ့သည္။
အႏုရာဓပူရၿမိဳ႕ရွိ မဟိႏၵမေထရ္ သီတင္းသုံးခဲ့ရာ ေက်ာင္းေတာ္သည္ ယေန႔တုိင္ ဗုဒၶဘာသာဝင္တုိ႔ အတြက္ အထြဋ္အျမတ္ ထားရာ ေနရာတစ္ခု ျဖစ္ေနဆဲ ျဖစ္သည္။
မဟိႏၵမေထရ္ သီရိလကၤာ သာသနာျပဳကာလသည္ (၃၈) ႏွစ္ ျဖစ္ၿပီး သက္ေတာ္ (၇၀)၊ ဘီစီ (၂၀၀) ၌ ပ်ံလြန္ေတာ္ မူခဲ့သည္။
ထုိ႔ေနာက္ ႏွစ္ႏွစ္ခန္႔အၾကာတြင္ သဃၤမိတၱာမေထရ္လည္း ပ်ံလြန္ေတာ္မူခဲ့ေလသည္။ ဤေမာင္ႏွမ ႏွစ္ေယာက္တုိ႔ ႀကိဳးစား သာသနာျပဳခဲ့မႈ႕ေၾကာင့္ အလွမ္းေဝးကြာလွေသာ သီရိလကၤာကြ်န္း၌ ဗုဒၶသာသနာလည္း ထြန္းလင္းေတာက္ပ လာခဲ့ရေတာ့သည္။
ဤကား အေသာကမင္းႀကီး၏ သာသနာျပဳ အစီအမံ တစ္ခုပင္တည္း။
Mahinda and Sanghamitta
Mahinda’s mother’s name was Devi or Mahadevi, and she belonged to Vidisa. While a prince, Asoka was sent by Bindusara as a regent to Vidisa, where he married the daughter of a ‘setha’ or millionaire. The girl was named Devi. She bore Asoka a son, Mahinda, and a daughter, Sanghamitta, in that order. Asoka was crowned the king at Pataliputra when Mahinda was fourteen. Though Asoka settled there, Rani Devi lived in her parental home at Vidisa.
Mahinda was initiated by sthavira Mahadeo in the seventh year of Asoka’s coronatin. Mahinda was twenty-one by then. After his initiation, Mahinda was dispatched to Sri Lanka with some monks to preach dhamma. During the six months preceding his mission to Sri Lanka, Mahinda went about visiting the Buddha Viharas around Rajagriha and gained knowledge in the company of learned monks. He met his mother at Vidisa on his way to Sri Lanka. His mother gave him a reception fitting a noble sramana. She was glad that her son was going to preach dhamma in Sri Lanka. His mother’s affection compelled Mahinda to stay a month at Vidisa.
It happened during the reign of King Devanampiya Tissa in Sri Lanka. He had strong friendly ties with King Asoka. As Asoka dispatched Mahinda to Sri Lanka in the company of some monks to preach dhamma, he sent his emissary to inform the king. Asoka was crowned in 272 BC, and Mahinda landed at Singhala dweepa in 254 BC in the company of four monks. Mahinda was thirty-two at the time.
According to the Mahavansa, when Mahinda arrived in Tamraparni, it was the Full-moon’s day in the lunar month of Jyestha – a day of festive celebrations in the land. King Devanampiya Tissa had gone to the Misraka mountain to hunt and celebrate the occasion with forty-four thousand men. When Mahinda received the information, he joined the king at the mountain with the monks. He told the king – “I am a preacher sent by Asoka from Jambudeepa.” The kind, who already had Asoka’s message, received Mahinda with sheer warmth. Mahinda started his work at once. He preached to the king the Hastipadopamasutta, which was originally delivered by Sariputta in the presence of the order of the monks at Savatthi. Consequently, Devanampiya Tissa was instantly converted to Buddhism along with his forty-four thousand men.Subsequently, Mahinda completed his task in Sri Lanka with the help of the king.
Devanampiya Tissa’s wife’s name was Anuloma or Anula. Inspired by the wave of Buddhism in the land, Queen Anuloma sought the king’s permission to join the dhamma. Tissa was too happy to refuse her. But, Mahinda said – “I am not authorized to initiate women. But, it is not fair to obstruct the expansion of the dhamma either.” He added – “I will send a message to my father, and you should also ask him that he may send Sanghamitta here for the purpose.”
Accordingly, Devanampiya Tissa dispatched a messenger to Pataliputra. Asoka was delighted to receive the news of his son’s success. He asked for a branch of the bodhi-tree from Bodhgaya and dispatched Sanghamitta to Sri Lanka with it. The Branch was planted there as a symbol of dhamma. The tree still stands in Sri Lanka and is, incidently, the oldest tree in the world.
In Sri Lanka, a royal welcome was extended to Sanghamitta with the branch. Queen Anuloma Devi and another five hundred inmates of the harem were initiated by Sangha, while Mahinda initiated the king’s nephew, Arista and his five hundred friends into dhamma. Mahinda stayed at Anuradhpur Vihara, which has become a pilgrim’s place for the Buddhists. In Sri Lanka, Mahinda preached for thirty-eight years and established Buddhism as the official religion of Sri Lanka. Landing in Sri Lanka at the age of thirty-two years, Mahinda died there at seventy, i.e. in 200 BC. The place of his death is still held sacred by the Sri Lankans. Sanghimitta passed away two year after Mahinda’s death. The two were dedicated to the propagation of Buddhism in a remote land by their righteous father. Such was the greatness of Asoka.
ဤေန႔ကုိ ဂုဏ္ျပဳေသာအားျဖင့္ “မဟိႏၵႏွင့္ သဃၤမိတၱာ” ဟူေသာ ဇာတ္လမ္းေလးကုိ “Asoka, the Great” စာအုပ္မွ ယူ၍ တင္ေပးလုိက္ပါသည္။
မဟိႏၵမေထရ္၏ မိခင္သည္ ဝိဒိသၿမိဳ႕သူ မဟာေဒဝီ ျဖစ္သည္။ သူမက သူေ႒းသမီးျဖစ္ၿပီး အေသာကမင္းသားကုိ ခမည္းေတာ္ ဗိႏၵဳသာရက ဝိဒိသၿမိဳ႕သုိ႔ ေစလႊတ္ရာ ႏွစ္ေယာက္ေတြ႔ဆုံၿပီး ခ်စ္ခင္ စုံမက္သျဖင့္ လက္ဆက္ခဲ့ၾကသည္။ သူတုိ႔မွ သား မဟိႏၵႏွင့္ သမီး သဃၤမိတၱာတုိ႔ ဖြားျမင္ခဲ့သည္။
မဟိႏၵမင္းသား (၁၄) ႏွစ္သား အရြယ္၌ အေသာကမင္း ပါဋလိပုတ္ျပည့္ရွင္ ျဖစ္လာခဲ့သည္။ ထုိ႔ေနာက္ အေသာက က ပါဋလိပုတ္၌ ေရြ႕ေျပာင္းေနထုိင္ခဲ့ေသာ္လည္း မိဘုရား မဟာေဒဝီကေတာ့ မိဘမ်ားႏွင့္အတူ ဝိဒိသၿမိဳ႕မွာပင္ ေနရစ္ခဲ့သည္။
အေသာက နန္းတက္ၿပီး (၇) ႏွစ္ေျမွာက္၌ အသက္ (၂၁) ႏွစ္အရြယ္ရွိ မဟိႏၵ ရဟန္းျပဳခဲ့သည္။ ပရိယတၱိစာေပမ်ား သင္ၾကားၿပီးေသာအခါ အျခား ရဟန္းေတာ္မ်ားႏွင့္အတူ သီရိလကၤာႏုိင္ငံ (သီဟုိဠ္) သုိ႔ သာသနာျပဳရန္ၾကြရန္ တာဝန္ေပးခဲ့ရသည္။ သီရိလကၤာ မသြားမီ ျပင္ဆင္သည့္အေနျဖင့္ ရာဇၿဂိဳဟ္တဝုိက္ရွိ ဘုန္းႀကီးေက်ာင္းတုိက္မ်ားသုိ႔ သြားေရာက္ကာ ပညာတတ္ ရဟန္းေတာ္မ်ားထံမွ ဗုဒၶေဒသနာေတာ္မ်ားကုိ ဆက္လက္ ေလ့လာခဲ့သည္။
မဟိႏၵမေထရ္ သီရိလကၤာအၾကြ လမ္းခရီး၌ ဝိဒိသၿမိဳ႕ရွိ မယ္ေတာ္ မဟာေဒဝီကုိ ဝင္ေရာက္ ေတြ႔ဆုံ ႏႈတ္ဆက္ခဲ့သည္။ မဟာေဒဝီက သားေတာ္ကုိ ရဟန္းတစ္ပါးအေနႏွင့္ ဖူးျမင္ရျခင္း၊ သီရိလကၤာႏုိင္ငံသုိ႔ သာသနာျပဳ ၾကြေရာက္ျခင္းအေပၚ မ်ားစြာ ေက်နပ္ ျဖစ္မိသည္။ သုိ႔ေသာ္ သီရိလကၤာသုိ႔ မၾကြမီ မယ္ေတာ္ႏွင့္ တစ္လခန္႔အတူ သီတင္းသုံးရန္ ေလ်ာက္ထားသျဖင့္ မဟိႏၵမေထရ္ကလည္း လက္ခံခဲ့သည္။
ထုိအခ်ိန္ သီရိလကၤာႏုိင္ငံ၌ ေဒဝါနံပိယတိႆဘုရင္ မင္းျပဳေန၏။ ႏွစ္ႏုိင္ငံ ၿမဲျမံေသာ သံတမန္ေရး ရွိႏွင့္ၿပီး ျဖစ္သည္။ အေသာကမင္းႀကီးက မဟိႏၵမေထရ္ႏွင့္ အျခား ရဟန္းေတာ္တုိ႔ကုိ သီရိလကၤာသုိ႔ သာသနာျပဳ ေစလႊတ္ခဲ့သည္။ တိႆဘုရင္ကုိလည္း အေၾကာင္းၾကားလႊာ ပါးခဲ့သည္။ မဟိႏၵမေထရ္ ရဟန္း (၄) ပါးႏွင့္အတူ သီရိလကၤာေရာက္ေသာ သကၠရာဇ္က ဘီစီ (၂၅၄) ျဖစ္ၿပီး ထုိအခ်ိန္၌ မေထရ္၏ သက္ေတာ္ (၃၂) ႏွစ္ ရွိၿပီး ျဖစ္သည္။
မဟာဝံသက်မ္းအဆုိအရ မဟိႏၵမေထရ္ တမၺပ႑ိ (သီရိလကၤာ) ေရာက္သည့္ေန႔မွာ လျပည့္ေန႔ ျဖစ္ၿပီး တိႆဘုရင္က အေျခြအရံမ်ားႏွင့္ နကၡတ္ပြဲသဘင္ ဆင္ယင္ က်င္းပေနသည္။ မဟိႏၵမေထရ္က ထုိသတင္းကုိ ၾကားရၿပီး တိႆဘုရင္ရွိရာ မိႆကေတာင္သုိ႔ ၾကြေရာက္ ေတြ႔ဆုံခဲ့သည္။ ဇမၺဴဒီပဘုရင္ အေသာကမင္းႀကီးက ေစလႊတ္လုိက္သည့္ သာသနာျပဳ ရဟန္းေတာ္မ်ား ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း မေထရ္က ေျပာျပသည္။ ထုိအေၾကာင္းကုိ သိႏွင့္ၿပီးသား ျဖစ္ေသာ ေဒဝါနံပိယတိႆမင္းႀကီးက မေထရ္ႏွင့္တကြေသာ သာသနာျပဳ တစ္ဖြဲ႔လုံးကုိ ဝမ္းေျမာက္ဝမ္းသာ ႀကိဳဆုိခဲ့သည္။
ထုိ႔ေနာက္ မေထရ္လည္း သာသနာျပဳလုပ္ငန္း စတင္ေတာ့သည္။ တိႆဘုရင္ႏွင့္ အေျခြအရံမ်ား အားလုံးကုိ အရွင္သာရိပုတၱရာမေထရ္ သာဝတၳိၿမိဳ႕၌ ရဟန္းေတာ္တုိ႔ကုိ ေဟာၾကားခဲ့သည့္ ဟတၳိပေဒါပမသုတ္ကုိ ေဟာၾကားခဲ့ၿပီး ေဒသနာအဆုံး၌ မင္းႀကီးႏွင့္တကြ ေလးေသာင္းေလးေထာင္ေသာ မင္းခစားတုိ႔ ဗုဒၶဘာသာအျဖစ္ ခံယူၾကသည္။ ထုိ႔ေနာက္ တိႆဘုရင္၏ ေထာက္ပံ့မႈျဖင့္ သီရိလကၤာႏုိင္ငံ သာသနာျပဳ လုပ္ငန္းကုိ ဆက္လက္ ေဆာင္ရြက္ေတာ္မူခဲ့သည္။
ေဒဝါနံပိယတိႆ၏ ခယ္မေတာ္ျဖစ္သူ၊ ညီေတာ္၏ ၾကင္ယာေတာ္ အႏုလာမင္းသမီးသည္ သူမကုိယ္တုိင္ ရဟန္းျပဳခြင့္ရရန္ ဘုရင္ႀကီးထံ ခြင့္ပန္သည္။ မင္းႀကီးက ဝမ္းသာမဆုံးျဖစ္ၿပီး မဟိႏၵမေထရ္ကုိ ေလွ်ာက္ထား ေတာင္းပန္ရာ “အမ်ိဳးသမီးကုိ ရဟန္းျပဳေပးရန္ ငါ့မွာ အခြင့္အာဏာ မရွိ၊ သာသနာေတာ္ ျပန္႔ပြားေရး ျဖစ္သျဖင့္ တားလည္း မတားျမစ္အပ္၊ ဤအေၾကာင္းကုိ ခမည္းေတာ္ အေသာကမင္းႀကီးထံ အေၾကာင္းၾကားၿပီး သဃၤမိတၱာကို ေစလႊတ္ေပးရန္ ေမတၱာရပ္ခံေပးမည္” ဟု မေထရ္က မိန္႔လုိက္သည္။
မေထရ္၏ ဩဝါဒအတုိင္း ေဒဝါနံပိယတိႆက ပါဋလိပုတ္သုိ႔ တမန္ေတာ္မ်ား ေစလႊတ္ၿပီး အေသာကမင္းႀကီးထံ သဝဏ္လႊာ ဆက္သသည္။ သားရဟန္းေတာ္၏ ေအာင္ျမင္ေသာ သာသနာျပဳခရီးကုိ ႏွစ္ေထာင္းအားရ ရွိလွေသာ အေသာကမင္းႀကီးက သမီးေတာ္ သံဃမိတၱာႏွင့္အတူ ဗုဒၶဂယာမွ ေညာင္ကုိင္းတစ္ကုိင္းပါ လက္ေဆာင္ ေပးလုိက္ေလသည္။ ထုိေညာင္ပင္ငယ္ကုိ ဓမၼသေကၤတ တစ္ခုအေနျဖင့္ သီရိလကၤာ၌ စုိက္ပ်ိဳးေစသည္။ ထုိေညာင္ပင္က ကမၻာေပၚတြင္ သက္တမ္း အရွည္ၾကာဆုံး သစ္ပင္ဟု ဆုိႏုိင္သည္။
သဃၤမိတၱာေထရီ သီရိလကၤာသုိ႔ ေရာက္သည့္အခ်ိန္တြင္ ႀကီးက်ယ္စြာ ႀကိဳဆုိခဲ့ၾကသည္။ အိမ္ေရွ႕မင္းသား၏ ၾကင္ယာေတာ္ အႏုလာေဒဝီႏွင့္ အလုပ္အေကြ်း ေမာင္းမမိႆံ ငါးရာတုိ႔ ဘိကၡဴနီသာသနာထဲ ဝင္ၾကစဥ္ မဟိႏၵမေထရ္ကလည္း ဘုရင္၏တူေတာ္ အရိ႒ႏွင့္ သူငယ္ခ်င္း ငါးရာတုိ႔ကုိ သူေတာ္ေကာင္းတရား၌ တည္ေစခဲ့သည္။
အႏုရာဓပူရၿမိဳ႕ရွိ မဟိႏၵမေထရ္ သီတင္းသုံးခဲ့ရာ ေက်ာင္းေတာ္သည္ ယေန႔တုိင္ ဗုဒၶဘာသာဝင္တုိ႔ အတြက္ အထြဋ္အျမတ္ ထားရာ ေနရာတစ္ခု ျဖစ္ေနဆဲ ျဖစ္သည္။
မဟိႏၵမေထရ္ သီရိလကၤာ သာသနာျပဳကာလသည္ (၃၈) ႏွစ္ ျဖစ္ၿပီး သက္ေတာ္ (၇၀)၊ ဘီစီ (၂၀၀) ၌ ပ်ံလြန္ေတာ္ မူခဲ့သည္။
ထုိ႔ေနာက္ ႏွစ္ႏွစ္ခန္႔အၾကာတြင္ သဃၤမိတၱာမေထရ္လည္း ပ်ံလြန္ေတာ္မူခဲ့ေလသည္။ ဤေမာင္ႏွမ ႏွစ္ေယာက္တုိ႔ ႀကိဳးစား သာသနာျပဳခဲ့မႈ႕ေၾကာင့္ အလွမ္းေဝးကြာလွေသာ သီရိလကၤာကြ်န္း၌ ဗုဒၶသာသနာလည္း ထြန္းလင္းေတာက္ပ လာခဲ့ရေတာ့သည္။
ဤကား အေသာကမင္းႀကီး၏ သာသနာျပဳ အစီအမံ တစ္ခုပင္တည္း။
Mahinda’s mother’s name was Devi or Mahadevi, and she belonged to Vidisa. While a prince, Asoka was sent by Bindusara as a regent to Vidisa, where he married the daughter of a ‘setha’ or millionaire. The girl was named Devi. She bore Asoka a son, Mahinda, and a daughter, Sanghamitta, in that order. Asoka was crowned the king at Pataliputra when Mahinda was fourteen. Though Asoka settled there, Rani Devi lived in her parental home at Vidisa.
Mahinda was initiated by sthavira Mahadeo in the seventh year of Asoka’s coronatin. Mahinda was twenty-one by then. After his initiation, Mahinda was dispatched to Sri Lanka with some monks to preach dhamma. During the six months preceding his mission to Sri Lanka, Mahinda went about visiting the Buddha Viharas around Rajagriha and gained knowledge in the company of learned monks. He met his mother at Vidisa on his way to Sri Lanka. His mother gave him a reception fitting a noble sramana. She was glad that her son was going to preach dhamma in Sri Lanka. His mother’s affection compelled Mahinda to stay a month at Vidisa.
It happened during the reign of King Devanampiya Tissa in Sri Lanka. He had strong friendly ties with King Asoka. As Asoka dispatched Mahinda to Sri Lanka in the company of some monks to preach dhamma, he sent his emissary to inform the king. Asoka was crowned in 272 BC, and Mahinda landed at Singhala dweepa in 254 BC in the company of four monks. Mahinda was thirty-two at the time.
According to the Mahavansa, when Mahinda arrived in Tamraparni, it was the Full-moon’s day in the lunar month of Jyestha – a day of festive celebrations in the land. King Devanampiya Tissa had gone to the Misraka mountain to hunt and celebrate the occasion with forty-four thousand men. When Mahinda received the information, he joined the king at the mountain with the monks. He told the king – “I am a preacher sent by Asoka from Jambudeepa.” The kind, who already had Asoka’s message, received Mahinda with sheer warmth. Mahinda started his work at once. He preached to the king the Hastipadopamasutta, which was originally delivered by Sariputta in the presence of the order of the monks at Savatthi. Consequently, Devanampiya Tissa was instantly converted to Buddhism along with his forty-four thousand men.Subsequently, Mahinda completed his task in Sri Lanka with the help of the king.
Devanampiya Tissa’s wife’s name was Anuloma or Anula. Inspired by the wave of Buddhism in the land, Queen Anuloma sought the king’s permission to join the dhamma. Tissa was too happy to refuse her. But, Mahinda said – “I am not authorized to initiate women. But, it is not fair to obstruct the expansion of the dhamma either.” He added – “I will send a message to my father, and you should also ask him that he may send Sanghamitta here for the purpose.”
Accordingly, Devanampiya Tissa dispatched a messenger to Pataliputra. Asoka was delighted to receive the news of his son’s success. He asked for a branch of the bodhi-tree from Bodhgaya and dispatched Sanghamitta to Sri Lanka with it. The Branch was planted there as a symbol of dhamma. The tree still stands in Sri Lanka and is, incidently, the oldest tree in the world.
In Sri Lanka, a royal welcome was extended to Sanghamitta with the branch. Queen Anuloma Devi and another five hundred inmates of the harem were initiated by Sangha, while Mahinda initiated the king’s nephew, Arista and his five hundred friends into dhamma. Mahinda stayed at Anuradhpur Vihara, which has become a pilgrim’s place for the Buddhists. In Sri Lanka, Mahinda preached for thirty-eight years and established Buddhism as the official religion of Sri Lanka. Landing in Sri Lanka at the age of thirty-two years, Mahinda died there at seventy, i.e. in 200 BC. The place of his death is still held sacred by the Sri Lankans. Sanghimitta passed away two year after Mahinda’s death. The two were dedicated to the propagation of Buddhism in a remote land by their righteous father. Such was the greatness of Asoka.
သီဟနာဒ
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