Transition Two · From the Two Liberations to the Three Knowledges and Six Powers

Part Two is walked; take the inventory.

One depth: unshakable. The name of the liberation come to its floor — no falling-back (nothing from which it could fall), no waiting upon occasion (concentration entered without conditions permitting). Not a firmness added on top of the liberation, but the last two lodging-places of anxiety removed; of the king's thirty possessions, this alone could be the named jewel. One breadth: two kinds. Liberated by wisdom, liberated both ways — apart by one clause, "the eight liberations traversed forward and in reverse, witnessed in one's own person": apart in concentration, not in exhaustion. The two obstructions divide cleanly — the obstruction of the defilements ended in both alike (one and the same exhaustion), the obstruction to the deepest attainments cleared in one and not the other (the presence or absence of a meditative mastery). The count of five hundred on the full-moon night, the Buddha gathered into one sentence: this assembly has no twigs and no leaves. The seal is one and equal; there is no upper and lower table.

But one thing has been pressing since the first chapter, held back and not yet faced.

At the door a sentence was set down: the name of the mastery is tied to the exhaustion of taints, not to any power — the account between powers and freedom was left to Part Three. The account now falls due. And it cannot be dodged: the very first number in that full-moon count was "ninety monks have attained the three penetrating knowledges" — the three knowledges belong to the arhat by the canon's plain word; the six supernormal powers are recorded just as plainly. And the world's picture of the arhat is drawn mostly from here: he can fly; he knows past lives; he reads minds.

Part Three settles the account in two chapters.

The first finds the pivot. The three knowledges and six powers are not six abilities laid side by side; one among them is the axle, and the rest turn around it. Which one? The canon's adjudication is brisk: of the six powers, the first five are gained by worldlings and outside meditators too; only the sixth — the power of the exhaustion of taints — belongs to the noble ones alone. A ring of six keys: five can be cut by any locksmith; the sixth alone opens the inner room.

The second settles the account face to face. The canon itself staged two scenes: on the summit of Gayā, the Blessed One, before a thousand monks who had once tended the sacred fires, first displayed a sky full of wonders and then spoke a single discourse — and which of the two unbound them? And at Kuśinagara, the elder foremost in the divine eye, Aniruddha, pronounced the divine eye, with his own mouth, "no wonder at all." With those two scenes seen, the world's oldest confusion — powers taken for mastery — is cleared.

The pivot first.