Welcome to Gaia! ::

Honestly? No one knows what's post cessation. Half the fun is getting there. And the point of leaving is to let other people know it's possible to leave the suffering - you have to keep in mind the Four Noble Truths when considering cessation. Specifically, that life is suffering. Why continue to suffer repeatedly if you knew the way to quit doing so?

And Kwan Yin's a bodhisattva. If she were a Buddha, she'd be well gone and not still in the cycle. Sometimes they call her the Buddha of compassion, but technically she's not a Buddha 'til she leaves the cycle altogether. She's delaying her enlightenment right now, on purpose. Can't be a Buddha without total enlightenment, they tell me. biggrin

He eventually walked the middle path. During his road to enlightenment he actually went from being quite well fed to surviving on a few grains of rice a day.

Buddha himself actually started out Hindu. Buddhism was originally a new sect of Hinduism but it seems to have turned into much more. One of the main points he did not agree with in Hinduism was the caste system and with his religion was able to end that idea due to the fact that he actually moved between each caste in his lifetime.