What Is an Arahant? The Worthy One in Buddhism

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 5 November 2026

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An arahant (Pali; Sanskrit arhat) is a “worthy one”: in the Pali discourses, a person who has ended greed, hate and delusion, completed the path and will not be reborn. It is the goal the early texts set before the Buddha’s disciples, and one of the Buddha’s own titles. The traditions differ over whether it is the end of the road — for Theravāda it is, while the Lotus Sutra calls the arhat’s nirvana a rest halfway to buddhahood.

The road there is mapped in the four stages of enlightenment, beginning with stream-entry, and how an arahant compares with a Buddha and a bodhisattva is set out in arahant vs Buddha vs bodhisattva.

What does arahant mean?

Arahant is the Pali form and arhat the Sanskrit. The Pali Text Society’s Pali-English Dictionary traces the word to the Vedic arhant, “deserving, worthy”. Before Buddhism, it says, the word was an “honorific title of high officials like the English ‘His Worship’”; at the rise of Buddhism it was “applied popularly to all ascetics”; then Buddhists adopted it for one who has reached nibbāna.

Tradition hears more in the sound. In chapter VII of the Visuddhimagga, Buddhaghosa explains why the Buddha is called arahant — Bhikkhu Ñāṇamoli translates it “accomplished” — in five ways. He is remote (āraka) from all defilements; his enemies (ari), the defilements, are destroyed (hata); the spokes (ara) of the wheel of rebirth are destroyed; he is worthy (araha) of offerings; and there is in him an “absence of secret (rahābhāva) evil-doing”.

The suttas already play on the word. The Mahā-Assapura Sutta (MN 39) says a mendicant is a perfected one because they are “impeccably remote” (ārakā) from bad, unskilful qualities, a passage the dictionary files among “riddles or word-play on the form arahant”. Tibetan translators wrote dgra bcom pa, and 84000’s standard definition keeps both senses: one “worthy of worship”, or one “who has conquered the enemies, the mental afflictions”. Bhikkhu Sujato translates “perfected one”. The title belongs to the Buddha too: in the Mahāparinibbāna Sutta, “Only rarely do Realized Ones arise in the world, perfected ones, fully awakened Buddhas.”

How the suttas describe an arahant

The discourses describe an arahant with a fixed run of phrases, repeated so often that it works as a definition. In the Sutavā Sutta (AN 9.7) it is a mendicant “who is perfected—with defilements ended, who has completed the spiritual journey, done what had to be done, laid down the burden, achieved their heart’s goal, utterly ended the fetter of continued existence, and is rightly freed through enlightenment”. The “defilements” are the āsavas, which Access to Insight’s glossary lists as “sensuality, views, becoming, and ignorance”; the same glossary says an arahant “has abandoned all ten of the fetters that bind the mind to the cycle of rebirth” (see the ten fetters).

The declaration of final knowledge

When monks “declared their enlightenment in the Buddha’s presence” (SN 12.70), they said: khīṇā jāti, vusitaṁ brahmacariyaṁ, kataṁ karaṇīyaṁ, nāparaṁ itthattāya — “Rebirth is ended, the spiritual journey has been completed, what had to be done has been done, there is nothing further for this place.” The Pali-English Dictionary puts this first among the formulae in which “Arahantship finds its expression”. The Mahāparinibbāna Sutta uses it of Subhadda, a wanderer whom Ānanda ordained at the Buddha’s word:

What an arahant cannot do, and what remains

AN 9.7 also lists what such a person is incapable of: “A mendicant with defilements ended can’t deliberately take the life of a living creature, take something with the intention to steal, have sex, tell a deliberate lie, or store up goods for their own enjoyment like they used to as a lay person. And they can’t make decisions prejudiced by favoritism, hostility, stupidity, or cowardice.”

What the arahant is not freed from is the body. Itivuttaka 44 says of one still living: “Their five sense faculties still remain. So long as their senses have not gone they continue to experience the agreeable and disagreeable, to feel pleasure and pain.” What has gone is greed, hate and delusion.

Nor is every arahant a wonder-worker. In SN 12.70 monks who have declared final knowledge are asked about psychic powers, mind-reading, memory of past lives and the formless attainments. They answer “No, reverend” to each, and then: “we are freed by wisdom.”

What happens to an arahant at death?

Itivuttaka 44 distinguishes two moments. The ending of greed, hate and delusion in a living arahant is the “element of extinguishment with residue”; what follows at death is the element “with no residue”, “where all states of existence cease”. That is final nibbāna, the subject of what is nirvana.

The Yamaka Sutta (SN 22.85) rules out the obvious misreading. The monk Yamaka held that “a mendicant who has ended the defilements is annihilated and destroyed when their body breaks up”. Sāriputta asked whether he could find the realised one, the Tathāgata, in any of the five aggregates or apart from them. He could not; so, since “a realized one is not found by you as a genuine fact in this very life”, how could he say one is annihilated at death? Yamaka’s new answer speaks only of the aggregates: “What’s suffering has ceased and disappeared.”

The Buddha declined all four standard answers. In the Aggivaccha Sutta (MN 72) Vacchagotta asks where a freed mendicant is reborn, and is told that “reborn”, “not reborn”, both and neither do not apply. Asked which way a fire went once it was put out, Vacchagotta himself says the question does not apply: the fire was “quenched due to lack of fuel”. Just so, none of the four answers applies to a realised one, who is “deep, immeasurable, and hard to fathom, like the ocean.” Earlier the Buddha rejects all four views on whether a realised one exists after death, a question he left undeclared (see the poisoned arrow); his own passing is told in the death of the Buddha.

Famous arahants

The first disciples. The Vinaya counts them as they appear. When the five monks who had heard the first sermon were freed during the discourse on not-self, “Then there were six perfected ones in the world” (Kd 1): the Buddha and the five. Yasa made seven, and the count goes on to “sixty-one perfected ones in the world”. The Buddha then sends those monks out “for the benefit and happiness of humanity” (see the Buddha’s disciples).

The two chief disciples. Sāriputta’s mind “was freed from the defilements by not grasping” as he stood fanning the Buddha (MN 74). The Buddha named him foremost “with great wisdom” and Mahāmoggallāna foremost “with psychic power” (AN 1.189–190). When both had died, he said that “this assembly seems empty to me now that Sāriputta and Moggallāna have become fully quenched” (SN 47.14).

Ānanda, foremost “as a personal attendant” (AN 1.223), came late. By the Vinaya’s account of the First Council he broke through “between his feet coming off the ground and his head hitting the pillow”, and went to the assembly “as a perfected one” (Kd 21).

Women. Asked by Ānanda whether women who go forth could realise “the fruit of perfection”, the Buddha answers: “Yes, they would” (Kd 20). The Therīgāthā keeps their voices. Uppalavaṇṇā, foremost among nuns “with psychic power” (AN 1.237), has “attained the ending of defilements” (Thig 11.1); Khemā, foremost “with great wisdom” (AN 1.236), is “released from all suffering” (Thig 6.3). Thirty nuns taught by Paṭācārā declare, “Masters of the three knowledges, we are free of defilements” (Thig 5.11), and Mahāpajāpatī says, “now there’ll be no more future lives” (Thig 6.6).

Bāhiya of the Bark Cloth (Ud 1.10) stopped the Buddha on his almsround and was told, “In the seen will be merely the seen”. His mind “was right away freed from defilements by not grasping”; soon after, a cow with a calf charged and killed him. The Buddha declared him “fully quenched” and spoke a verse on the place where “water and earth, fire and air have no footing”. AN 1.216 names him foremost “with swift insight” (see in the seen, only the seen).

Can a lay person become an arahant?

In the Pali texts quoted here, awakening can come to someone in lay life, but lay life is not where the arahant stays. In the Vinaya, Yasa, a merchant’s son, is freed “from the corruptions through letting go” while the Buddha teaches his father. The Buddha reflects that “Yasa is incapable of returning to the lower life to enjoy worldly pleasures as he did while still a householder”, and soon afterwards Yasa asks for ordination (Kd 1). In MN 71 Vacchagotta asks whether there are “any laypeople who, without giving up the fetter of lay life, make an end of suffering when the body breaks up”. The Buddha replies, “No, Vaccha.” Many such laypeople, he adds, go to heaven.

The Questions of King Milinda states it as a rule. The king quotes to the monk Nāgasena what, he says, Nāgasena’s people teach: “Whosoever has attained, as a layman, to Arahatship, one of two conditions are possible to him, and no other—either that very day he enters the Order, or he dies away, for beyond that day he cannot last.” Nāgasena accepts it and explains that “It is laymanship that is at fault, through not being strong enough”. The one-day limit is the Milindapañha’s (in T. W. Rhys Davids’ public-domain translation); neither Yasa’s story nor MN 71 sets one. The commentaries record a case that fits it: G. P. Malalasekera’s Dictionary of Pāli Proper Names, citing the Therīgāthā commentary, says that when the Buddha’s father Suddhodana was about to die, the Buddha came to teach him, and Suddhodana “became an Arahant and died as a lay Arahant” (see the Buddha’s family).

Are there arahants today?

The Buddha’s answer to the wanderer Subhadda is conditional: “Were these mendicants to practice well, the world would not be empty of perfected ones” (DN 16). One modern claim comes from the Thai forest tradition. In his biography of his teacher Ajahn Mun (1870–1949), Ajahn Mahā Boowa narrates the night of Ajahn Mun’s “final attainment” and states that “Ācariya Mun was one of the Arahants of this present age.” Its translator, Bhikkhu Dick Sīlaratano, writes that many Thais “had lost confidence that magga, phala, and Nibbāna were still relevant today” until they read it.

Such claims cannot be checked from outside, and monastic law restricts them. Pārājika 4 expels a monk who “falsely claims for himself a superhuman quality, a knowledge and vision worthy of the noble ones”; its list of such qualities includes “realization of the fruits”. It exempts overestimation, because some monks “declared final knowledge because of overestimation” and later found “their minds inclined to sensual desire, ill will, and confusion”: the Vinaya admits that sincere practitioners can be wrong about this. Pācittiya 8 adds: “If a monk truthfully tells a person who is not fully ordained of a superhuman quality, he commits an offense entailing confession.”

How the traditions differ on the arahant

Theravāda holds the arahant to be the complete goal, and its Abhidhamma book of disputes, the Kathāvatthu, defends that against other early schools. It rejects “That an Arahant can fall away from Arahantship”, a view the Pali Text Society translation assigns to the Sammitiyas, Vajjiputtiyas, Sabbatthivādins and Mahāsaṅghikas. It then rejects claims that an arahant “has impure discharge”, “may lack knowledge”, “may have doubts” or “is excelled by others” (Kv 2.1–2.4).

Sources outside the Pali tradition remember an early dispute linked to a monk named Mahādeva. Wilhelm Geiger, introducing his 1912 translation of the Mahāvaṃsa, notes that the “Northern writings” know of a division “associated with the names of the monks Mahadeva and Bhadra”, who “set up five dogmas”; following Louis de La Vallée Poussin, he adds that these “belong to those which are combated in the Kathavatthu”. Xuanzang’s Record of the Western Regions (completed 646 CE) has Mahādeva write “an elaborate treatise in exposition of theories contrary to the holy teachings” (see Buddhist councils).

Mahāyāna keeps the arhat but moves the finish line. In the Lotus Sutra the Buddha teaches “the two nirvanas through skillful means in order to let them rest halfway to the goal”, then tells those resting there that “the nirvana you have obtained is not the true one” (ch. VII, trans. Kubo and Yuyama). In chapter VIII five hundred arhats receive predictions of buddhahood and confess, “We have always thought we had attained complete nirvana.” For 84000, arhatship is “the fourth and highest of the four fruits attainable by śrāvakas”; the BDK Lotus Sutra glossary glosses śrāvaka as “auditor”. Whether that makes the arahant selfish is weighed in arahant vs Buddha vs bodhisattva and Theravāda vs Mahāyāna.

East Asia and Tibet also venerate arhats as guardians of the teaching. The Cleveland Museum of Art, describing Wu Bin’s handscroll The Five Hundred Arhats, calls the Chinese luohan “disciples of the Buddha and protectors of the Buddha’s law”. Himalayan Art Resources notes that “In the Tibetan system there are only sixteen arhats in contrast to the Chinese reference to eighteen or five hundred arhats (lohan).” Jigme Lingpa, a master of Tibetan Buddhism, composed a practice of homage to the Sixteen Elders by keeping “the words of the Kashmiri Paṇḍita”, his colophon says, and adding verses at the beginning and end. It says the elders “Appear as śrāvakas for the sake of the teachings and beings, / Even though they have attained the level beyond training, / And will remain as long as the teachings endure”, and closes with the wish, “actualizing true cessation, we attain the level of an arhat!” That is what these communities believe and practise, described here rather than vouched for.