Do enlightened monks who vow to stay in the cycle of rebirth until all sentient beings are free get reborn enlightened?

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To be enlightened is to have the realization that you are but one part of an amazingly huge and complicated world. You are at the same time immensely valuable, and simultaneously totally unneeded for the proper functioning of the world.

The vows you make in this lifetime lose their meaning as soon as you die. It’s not the same thing as breaking your vows. It’s like promising to fix your neighbors fence then a landslide comes and obliterates both your houses. You didn’t break your promise, the promise became meaningless.

Death changes everything. Once you die, you’re reduced down to your very essence. You have as much of an afterlife as your earthly life has prepared you for, then you get kicked back into another body. The body inherits your essence, and nothing more.

The world would eventually grind to a halt if the things we did in this life made a serious impact on the next.

Enlightenment describes a manner of thinking, an unflowering of spirit. It has little to do with the temporal.

The cycle of rebirth is eternal. Everything is reborn. The idea that it can be escaped comes from the dual frame of mind. “Real” worlds, with real rules and real limitations and real situations, are really amazing and cool and can encapsulate everything needed for any kind of agency to exist.

There are areas that are not real and do not operate by rules, but they grow less interesting over time. This includes places like Heaven.