RAINS RETREAT PERIOD - ၀ႆာ၀ါသ

RAINS RETREAT PERIOD Vassᾱvᾱsa

၀ႆာ၀ါသ - ၀ါဆုိျခင္း၊ ၀ါကပ္ျခင္း၊ မုိးသုံးလအတြင္း ၀ါဆုိသည့္ေက်ာင္းတုိက္ အာရာမ္တြင္းမွာ ေနရျခင္း။

၀ါဆုိမႈသည္ ျမတ္စြာဘုရားရွင္ သက္ေတာ္ထင္ရွားရွိစဥ္ကပင္ ရွိခဲ့သည္။ ၀ါဆုိ ၀ါကပ္ ဥပေဒ မပညတ္မီက ရဟန္းမ်ားသည္ ဥတုသုံးလီ ေနပူမုိး႐ြာမေရွာင္ လွည့္လည္သြားလာေနခဲ့ၾကသည္။ မုိးကာလ လူတုိ႔စုိက္ပ်ဳိးထားေသာ စုိက္ပ်ဳိပင္မ်ားကုိ ရဟန္းတုိ႔ ေက်ာ္ျဖတ္နင္းၾကသျဖင့္ စုိက္ပ်ဳိးပင္မ်ား ပ်က္စီးေသာေၾကာင့္ လူတုိ႔က ရဟန္းမ်ားကုိ ကဲ့ရဲ႕ၾကသည္။ ျမက္သစ္ပင္ ေရေပါက္ငယ္မ်ားကုိပင္ အသက္ရွိသည္ဟု ယူဆသူမ်ားလည္း ရွိေနသည္။ အဘယ့္ေၾကာင့္ ဘုရားသားေတာ္ ရဟန္းမ်ားသည္ အပင္ငယ္မ်ားႏွင့္ ပုိးမႊားမ်ားကုိ နင္းေျခဖ်က္ဆီးလ်က္ တစ္ႏွစ္ပတ္လုံး ခရီးသြားေနၾကပါသနည္း။ သာသနာျပင္ပ တိတၳိတုိ႔ေသာ္မွ မုိးဥတုတြင္ ခရီးမထြက္ဘဲ ေၾကာင့္ၾကမဲ့ ေနႏုိင္ၾကသည္။ ယုတ္စြအဆုံး ငွက္တိရစၧာန္တုိ႔ေသာ္မွ မုိးကာလတြင္ အသုိက္၌ေနၾကသည္။ အပင္ငယ္မ်ား သတၱ၀ါငယ္ေလးမ်ား ပ်က္စီးေသေၾက ၾကရသည္ဟု ကဲ့ရဲ႕ျပစ္တင္ ႐ႈတ္ခ်ၾကသည္။

ထုိ႔ေၾကာင့္ ဘုရားရွင္က ရဟန္းေတာ္မ်ား မုိးသုံးလကာလပတ္လုံး ခရီးမထြက္ရေသာ ၀ါဆုိ ၀ါကပ္ ဥပေဒကုိ ပညတ္ခဲ့ရသည္။

၀ါကပ္ျခင္း ႏွစ္မ်ဳိးရွိသည္ -

(၁) ပုရိမ၀ႆာ၀ါသ - ပထမ၀ါကပ္ျခင္း၊ ၀ါဆုိလျပည့္ေက်ာ္တစ္ရက္ေန႔၌ ၀ါကပ္၍ သီတင္းကၽြတ္ လျပည့္ေန႔တြင္ ၀ါကၽြတ္သည္။

(၂) ပစၧိမ၀ႆာ၀ါသ - ဒုတိယ၀ါကပ္ျခင္း၊ ၀ါေခါင္ လျပည့္ေက်ာ္တစ္ရက္ေန႔၌ ၀ါကပ္၍ တန္ေဆာင္မုန္းလျပည့္ေန႔တြင္ ၀ါကၽြတ္သည္။

Observing the rains retreat period: confining oneself to a specific monastic dwelling for the three month rainy period

During the three months of monsoon rains, bhikkhus go into retreat at a monastery designated beforehand at the start of the rainy season. The practice was introduced during the life-time of the Buddha. Before the Buddha decreed the rains retreat period, bhikkhus walked across fields under cultivation. People started to criticize them as some people believed that plants and even drops of water were living beings. Why is it that the disciples of the Buddha go on travels all the year round and trample young plants and insects into oblivion while even member of other sects do not go on journeys during the rains? Even birds and animals have the good sense to stay in their nets or dens during the rains, people complained. To an end to this controversy the Buddha decreed that the rains-retreat period be observed. Rains retreat period may be observed by taking up the designated residence during one of the two periods:-

(1) Earlier rains retreat period (purimavassᾱvᾱsa), commencing from the day after the fullmoon of Wazo (roughly corresponding to July) and ending on the fullmoon day of Thadingyut (roughly corresponding to October);

(2) Later rains retreat period (pacchimavassᾱvᾱsa), commencing from the day after the fulmoon of Wagaung (roughly corresponding to August) and ending on the fullmoon day of Dazaungmon (roughly corresponding to November).