THE ARAHANT

The ideal figure of the Majjhima Nikāya, as of the Pali Canon as a whole, is the arahant. The word "arahant" itself derives from a root meaning "to be worthy." Ven. Nānamoli renders it "accomplished" and "Accomplished One" when it is used as an epithet of the Buddha, probably to be consistent with his practice of translating all the Buddha's epithets. In its other occurrences he leaves it untranslated. The word seems to have been of preBuddhist coinage but was taken over by the Buddha to designate the individual who has reached the final fruit of the path.

The suttas employ a stock description of the arahant that summarises his accomplishments: he is "one with taints destroyed, who has lived the holy life, done what had to be done, laid down the burden, reached the true goal, destroyed the fetters of being, and is completely liberated through final knowledge" (MN 1.51, etc.). Variant descriptions emphasise different aspects of the arahant's attainment. Thus one sutta offers a series of metaphorical epithets that the Buddha himself interprets as representing the arahant's abandoning of ignorance, craving, and conceit, his eradication of fetters, and his freedom from the round of births (MN 22.30-35). Elsewhere the Buddha ascribes a different set of epithets to the arahant - several of brahmanical currency - deriving these terms by imaginative etymology from the arahant's elimination of all evil unwholesome states (MN 39.22-29).

The Majjhima records differences of type among the arahants, which are ascribed to the diversity in their faculties. In MN 70 the Buddha introduces a basic distinction between those arahants who are "liberated-in-both-ways" and those who are "liberated-by-wisdom": whereas the former are capable of abiding in the immaterial attainments, the latter lack that capacity. Arahants are further distinguished as those who possess, besides the knowledge of the destruction of the taints necessary to all arahants, all three of the true knowledges and all six of the direct knowledges. In MN 108 the venerable Ānanda indicates that those arahants who possessed the six direct knowledges were accorded special veneration and authority in the Sangha following the Buddha's passing away.

Beneath these incidental differences, however, all arahants alike share the same essential accomplishments - the destruction of all defilements and the freedom from future rebirths. They possess three unsurpassable qualities - unsurpassable vision, unsurpassable practice of the way, and unsurpassable deliverance (MN 35.26). They are endowed with the ten factors of one beyond training - the eight factors of the Noble Eightfold Path augmented by right knowledge and right deliverance (MN 65.34, MN 78.14). They possess the four foundations - the foundations of wisdom, of truth, of relinquishment, and of peace (MN 140.11). And by the eradication of lust, hate, and delusion all arahants have access to a unique meditative attainment called the fruition attainment of arahantship, described as the unshakeable deliverance of mind, the immeasurable deliverance of mind, the void deliverance of mind, the deliverance of mind through nothingness, and the signless deliverance of mind (MN 43.35-37).