The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha - Bhikkhu Nanamoli [19]
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).
KAMMA AND REBIRTH
According to the Buddha’s teaching, all beings except the arahants are subject to “renewal of being in the future” (punabbhava), that is, to rebirth. Rebirth, in the Buddhist conception, is not the transmigration of a self or soul but the continuation of a process, a flux of becoming in which successive lives are linked together by causal transmission of influence rather than by substantial identity. The basic causal pattern underlying the process is that defined by the teaching of dependent origination (see above, pp. 30–31), which also demonstrates how rebirth is possible without a reincarnating self.
The process of rebirth, the Buddha teaches, exhibits a definite lawfulness essentially ethical in character. This ethical character is established by the fundamental dynamism that determines the states into which beings are reborn and the circumstances they encounter in the course of their lives. That dynamism is kamma, volitional action of body, speech, and mind. Those beings who engage in bad actions—actions motivated by the three unwholesome roots of greed, hate, and delusion—generate unwholesome kamma that leads them to rebirth into lower states of existence and, if it ripens in the human world, brings them pain and misfortune. Those beings who engage in good actions—actions motivated by the three wholesome roots of non-greed, non-hate, and non-delusion—generate wholesome kamma that leads them to higher states of existence and ripens in the human world as happiness and good fortune. Because the deeds a person performs in the course of a single life can be extremely varied, the type of rebirth that lies ahead of him can be very unpredictable, as the Buddha shows in MN 136. But despite this empirical variability, an invariable law governs the direct relationship between types of actions and the types of results they yield, the basic correlations being sketched by the Buddha in MN 57 and laid out in greater detail in MN 135.
In several suttas of the Majjhima Nikāya the Buddha refers to various planes of existence into which rebirth can occur and he also gives some indication of the types of kamma that lead to those planes. This cosmological typography is not, from the Buddhist standpoint, the product of conjecture or fantasy but a matter directly known to the Buddha through his “Tathāgata’s powers of knowledge” (MN 12.36); to some extent the process is also verifiable by those who gain the divine eye (e.g., MN 39.20). A brief overview may be given here of the planes of rebirth recognised in Buddhist cosmology and of their kammic antecedents, as systematised in the developed Theravāda tradition.
The Buddhist cosmos is divided into three broad realms—the sense-sphere realm, the fine-material realm, and the immaterial realm. Each of these comprises a range of subsidiary planes, amounting to a total of thirty-one planes of existence.
The sense-sphere realm, so called because sensual desire predominates there, consists of eleven planes divided into two groups,