Arahant · Pāli: arahant; Skt: arhat

Arahant means “worthy one”. The Access to Insight glossary defines one as “a person whose mind is free of defilement”, who “has abandoned all ten of the fetters that bind the mind to the cycle of rebirth” and is “thus not destined for further rebirth”; the word is also “a title for the Buddha and the highest level of his noble disciples”. The defilements meant are lobha (passion), dosa (aversion) and moha (delusion) in their various forms, from greed and malevolence through to conceit and complacency.

In the Buddha’s discourse on the not-self characteristic (SN 22.59), that attainment is marked by a closing formula: the disciple who sees the aggregates as they are grows disenchanted, becomes dispassionate, “is fully released”, and “discerns that ‘Birth is ended, the holy life fulfilled, the task done. There is nothing further for this world.’” (trans. Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu). The five monks who heard that discourse were, the text says, “fully released from fermentation/effluents”.

Traditions differ on the ideal, and it is worth saying so plainly. Most Theravada practitioners “aspire to become Saints”, for whom the life in which they attain it is the last, while “all serious Mahāyānists take the bodhisattva vow, promising to become Buddhas in order to help all beings”. Mahayana texts have criticised the arahant path as seeking nirvana for oneself alone, though the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that “These criticisms may be unfair”, and that “Most lineages of Buddhism, including the Theravāda, value and practice the Four Divine Abidings”, compassion among them. We set the ideals side by side in arahant, buddha and bodhisattva.