This episode moves beyond the non-returner to the last awakening of the arahant. An arahant is a final awakened one whose standing in awakening is equal to that of a Buddha. What, then, does it mean to say that such a person has awakened completely? An arahant has reached a final and certain answer to the questions that first set the seeker on the path: What are life and death? How should one live? Who am I, and what are we?
At the center of the answer is dependent origination, which I have discussed for a long time. An arahant understands dependent origination wholly and without a point of doubt. Impermanence, not-self, aging and death, and the relation between self and world are not separate teachings to memorize. They are seen through as one reality. The questions that sustained an entire life of practice therefore disappear.
Nothing more to learn and nothing more to seek
This is where non-learning begins. It does not mean disliking study or refusing to learn facts about the world. It means that, with respect to the fundamental questions that created the path, there is nothing further to learn. The arahant no longer supposes that some awakening higher than the one now known must exist. One knows directly that the matter has been understood completely.
Non-seeking arrives with non-learning. Much of the suffering described in Buddhism comes from wanting something and failing to obtain it. This does not mean that an arahant or Buddha never builds a temple, helps people, participates in society, or acts compassionately. Such a person lives a self-authored life, yet does not seek with the demand that a particular result must be secured.
Action without that demand is non-doing. It does not mean inactivity. It is action free of the insistence that its outcome be possessed. Imagine someone who never planned to fish but happens to follow others to the sea and sits with a line in the water. There is no urgent purpose of catching a fish. Listening to the waves and gulls, the person becomes peaceful. Ordinary people occasionally experience this condition in which nothing is being forced.
An arahant lives from such a mind continually. With nothing sought, there is no suffering over failure to obtain it. Having understood impermanence, the wish for things not to be impermanent has gone out. Knowing that self and world continually change within dependent origination, the arahant’s life rests in this very moment.
Liberation of mind occurs anew in every moment
For an arahant, liberation of mind is not a past event stored as a possession. It occurs anew with each inhalation and exhalation, each step, each sentence, each meal, washing, and sleep. Every moment is an entirely new life. If a non-returner observes the mind slowly and rigorously, the arahant carries this rigor to its utmost completion.
Questions about awakening have also ended. Some people speak as if they were arahants without being arahants. Parts of what they say may point in a useful direction, but from the vantage point of the final stage one can see where the direction eventually veers. At the very last point, something must be known with certainty.
The final state is not the abandonment of intelligence
People sometimes say awakening has nothing to do with knowing—that it leaves intellect, concepts, sensation, and cognition behind. I do not agree. Buddhism’s final state requires complete intellectual understanding. Here, intellectual understanding does not mean memorizing phrases. It means an unerring understanding of how self and world actually exist. Without complete understanding, a person eventually says something that sounds profound but is mistaken.
One may say, for example, “The world comes into existence when I open my eyes,” or “If I do not perceive the world, it does not exist.” From one angle in epistemology this can sound plausible, and one might invoke modern scientific discussions of what can be said about an unobserved object. Yet saying that an unobserved state cannot be determined is not the same as saying that nothing exists when it is unobserved.
Before my father died, he sometimes told me that my world would end with my death, and that I therefore had to live as its owner. When he died, the world he perceived ended, yet the world continued and so did mine. Are my father’s world and mine therefore wholly unrelated? Does the world cease when I close my eyes, or does it remain? Judgment made without sufficient understanding goes wrong at precisely this point.
The world is reality in dependent origination, not an illusion
We may call it delusive inversion when our thoughts and concepts are projected onto the world and then received as the world itself. We mistake something for “mine,” and we mistake something for “me.” Breaking this confusion and seeing things as they are is the path to becoming a Buddha or an arahant. But breaking confusion does not mean dismissing the entire world as a fantasy or dream.
Denying rebirth, souls, and an afterlife can make a person appear scientific. Others call anyone who rejects them an annihilationist. Merely choosing one side through labels is not seeing reality as it is. A human being dies. Facing that death, one must follow the question of what “I” am all the way through dependent origination.
I am not an independent entity separated from the world
We ordinarily regard the self as separate from father and mother, spouse and children, and everyone else. Deep understanding of dependent origination shows that I cannot be detached from the world. Some say that mind alone is an independent true self distinct from the body. Yet can any mind be found that exists alone, outside conditions and relationships? Mind and body are themselves interrelated.
Without my parents I could not exist. Without grandparents and innumerable ancestors, without incalculable coincidences and conditions, the present me would be impossible. Even within this body, the boundary of self is not simple. Vast numbers of microorganisms live in our intestines. They digest what we cannot and help make nutrients available. Microorganisms transmitted from mother to infant and substances in breast milk reveal a long history of symbiosis between humans and bacteria.
Are those organisms me or not me? Life as I know it would be difficult without them, yet we draw a clean conceptual line between “my body” and everything else. Every breath, every act of eating and excretion, continually joins world and self. The illusion lies in grasping at something fixed and independent as me. Not-self is not the destruction of a person; it is the complete study of what a person is according to dependent origination.
An unusual mental state is not enough
Experiencing a state in which thought, concepts, and ordinary recognition fall silent can be an important condition in practice. But if that state alone is called awakening, an experience accessible through concentration is confused with complete awakening. Entering thoughtlessness does not by itself mean that self and world have been seen rightly. Without full understanding, the mental state itself is mistaken for the destination.
At Buddhism’s end, there must be a certain understanding of dependent origination, impermanence, not-self, self, and world. One no longer needs to ask another person about awakening or about oneself. Whatever question is presented, one must be able to answer without sending anyone in a false direction. That is an arahant.
An arahant is not an owner of mystical experience. This is a person who has carried life’s originating questions to their end, completely understood the dependent nature of self and world, and now acts without anything more to learn or seek. Because of that understanding, freedom is new in every moment. The world is not escaped by calling it a dream; it is described accurately as it is. This is what I mean by the awakening of the final awakened one.
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