The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha - Bhikkhu Nanamoli [18]
The fourth and last supramundane path is the path of arahantship. This path eradicates the five higher fetters: desire for rebirth in the fine-material realm and in the immaterial realm, conceit, restlessness, and ignorance. By realisation of the fruit of this path the practitioner becomes an arahant, a fully liberated one, who “here and now enters upon and abides in the deliverance of mind and deliverance by wisdom that are taintless with the destruction of the taints.” The arahant will be discussed further in the next section.
The commentaries (often referred to in the notes to this translation) develop an interpretation of the paths and fruits based upon the systemisation of the Buddha’s teachings known as the Abhidhamma. Drawing upon the Abhidhamma depiction of the mind as a sequence of discrete momentary acts of consciousness, called cittas, the commentaries understand each supramundane path to be a single occasion of consciousness arising at the climax of a series of insights into the Dhamma. Each of the four momentary path cittas eliminates its own fixed set of defilements, to be followed immediately by its fruition, which consists of a string of momentary cittas that enjoy the bliss of Nibbāna made accessible by the breakthrough of the path. Though this conception of the paths and fruits is regularly employed by the commentators as an hermeneutical tool for interpreting the suttas, it is not explicitly formulated as such in the old Nikāyas and at times there even appears to be a tension between the two (for example, in the passage at MN 142.5 describing the four persons on the path as distinct recipients of offerings).
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. Ñāṇamoli 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 pre-Buddhist 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 his own 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