Part Three · The Three Knowledges and Six Powers · The Most Dazzling Face

The most dazzling face of the arhat's mastery is the supernormal powers — and the face most apt to dazzle the eye into error. The canon does not hush the powers up: the three knowledges and the six powers stand plainly in the suttas, and this book goes to look at them plainly. But the looking must keep its order: among the powers, which is the pivot? And which are only worldly-shared competences turning around it?

Both chapters of this part happen to rest on the testimony of a single elder — Aniruddha, foremost among the Buddha's disciples in the divine eye.

The first chapter: the day of the robe-making. The Blessed One cut the cloth for Aniruddha's robes with his own hands, and three robes were finished in a day; afterward, the Buddha's back paining him, he lay down to rest, and Aniruddha recounted to eight hundred monks his own road, station by station — the six powers, each one witnessed in his own person, the telling arriving at the sixth upon four familiar sentences. This chapter watches why, of the six, only the sixth is the key to the inner room.

The second chapter: speaking fire amid fire. On the summit of Gayā, before a thousand monks who had once tended the sacred fires, the Blessed One first displayed a sky of transformations — fire from his body, water from his body — and then spoke one discourse: "all is burning." The wonders shown, the thousand marveled, no more; the discourse spoken, the thousand were freed of the taints. And on the other side, the elder foremost in the divine eye pronounced the divine eye "no wonder at all." This chapter settles, face to face, the account of "powers taken for mastery."

Go in; the ring of keys first.