Part One · The Signature · Where the Freedom Is Read From

This part has a single chapter, and two tasks.

The first: to set the book's frame. "The arhat's mastery" — most of the world reads the phrase backwards, taking the mastery for a set of abilities added on after the attainment. This chapter returns to the places where the Buddha himself defined the arhat — the four truths in the Deer Park, the three knowledges and the seven points of skill at Jeta's Grove, the words on virtue, concentration, and wisdom along the final journey — and watches, place by place, when, where, to whom, and how he said it. One thing emerges from the watching: every definition speaks of exhausted, laid down, nothing left; not one speaks of able to. The mastery is not something gained beyond the exhaustion of taints; it is what that exhaustion looks like — this book calls it the signature of exhaustion.

The second: to receive a threshold. This book has a twin volume, The Four Fruits of the Renunciant's Path, which writes the walking-to — and which set down its pen at the settling of the last cut, saying: what lies inside the door belongs to another volume. This is that volume. The same passage on the exhaustion of taints: that book read "completed"; this book reads "free." That book wrote up to the threshold; this one sets out from it.

Go in, and take the first look inside the door.