Mad Monk II

This Buddhist myth describes Ji Gong as Dragon-subjugating Arahant or Jiang-long luohan (降龍羅漢). The Buddha keeps a giant phoenix, which stands guard by his lotus throne. The sacred bird, however, violated a sacred law and made good its escape down to earth. The Buddha had his arahan reborn as a human to bring back the phoenix. The reborn arhat had to go through untold ordeals to hunt down the sacred bird and take it back to the Buddha. Arhat is a Sanskrit. In the Pali canon, it's arahant, a spiritual practioner who had:laid down the burden and realized the goal of nirvana, which the culmination of the spiritual life (Brahmacarya).

The arhat described in the myth is a little different from the one in either Mahayana or Theravada Buddhism. An arhat in the latter is a person who has removed all causes of future becoming and is not reborn after biological death into any samsaric realm. (Samsara is transmigration.) In the Pali canon, the word is sometimes used as a synonym for Tathagata (如來), who is the Buddha himself. The word means “worthy one.” It is also translated as “foe destroyer” or “vanquisher of the enemy.”

This translation gives rise to the transformation of the arhats in China. In the Chinese temples, arahants have been indeed remembered and honored, more because they have belonged to the pageantry of Buddhism than because they had had any vital religious function to perform. Eighteen of these early saints of Buddhism have been given a place in the temples under the name of the Shiba-luohan (十八羅漢). Arahant was transliterated as Aluohan (阿羅漢). “A” is often omitted. The sounds “r” and “l” are allophones in almost all Chinese dialects. The eighteen arhats often are seated, on either hand, along the side walls of the temples, their images rendered almost grotesque by the realistic touches added to their appearance by the temple artists. Plainly, they are men and not gods, but the worshippers have not regarded them as saviprs. They are there because they area part of Sakyamuni's original company and because many of the Chinese have believed that somewhere in the inaccessible fastnesses of the mountains they still sit in immortal serene, and mindful meditation. They also believe there are many, many more arhats than the original eighteen, one of them being the Dragon-subjugating Arhat, who was reborn as Mad Monk.

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