I like this post by balder on newbuddhist.com
On the one hand, I see the bodhisattva vow as a pedagogical device,
as skillful means for helping to inspire a boundless spirit of
compassion. It works skillfully and playfully with paradox to crack
open the heart and mind. There are ultimately "no" sentient beings
to be saved, and yet the universe is filled with suffering beings.
Sentient beings are numberless (none? inexhaustible?), and yet you
vow to save them all.
The aim of the vow is, in part, to counter the rather insulated,
individualist approach to salvation, where everyone is responsible
for and ultimately concerned with his or her own salvation -- with
getting off the wheel and getting the heck outta here. This is the
Mahayana critique of the arhat ideal, at least. It appears to
commit you forever to samsara for the sake of love; and yet
paradoxically, it shows you that nirvana really is nowhere
else.
Whether or not you believe there are really bodhisattvas, as
enlightened living entities at work in the cosmos, depends in part
on whether or not you believe in reincarnation and the continuation
of the stream of consciousness after the death of the individual
body. Not all schools of Buddhism believe that bodhisattvas put off
enlightenment altogether; they are as enlightened as Shakyamuni
was, in this view, but they consciously elect to keep reentering
karmically generated realms of suffering for the benefit of others.
According to the Tibetan Buddhist perspective, while there is no
abiding, singular, atomic self that continues from moment to
moment, there is a continuous stream of individual consciousness
that continues, and has continued, from beginningless time. The
Dalai Lama talks about this in a little book called Buddha Nature,
and it is also discussed in Reginald Ray's Secret of the Vajra
World.
Best wishes,
Balder
