The SignatureThe Two LiberationsThe Three Knowledges and Six PowersThe Eight Liberations and CessationNo-More-Becoming and the Worthy
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Part 1 · The Signature

Arhat’s Mastery · 1 papers

This part has a single chapter, and two tasks.[ from the book's part intro ]

論Study the papersfootnotes · abstracts
01The Exhaustion of Taints Is MasteryThis paper opens The Mastery of the Arhat and serves as the seam paper between the Attainment axis and the Realization axis: it reads, two-facedly, the same passage on the exhaustion of taints (āsavakkhaya) that the Realization axis's "The Approach to the Exhaustion of Taints" reads. The Realization axis asks how the last cut settles (inside the threshold); this paper asks what kind of existence stands once that cut has settled (beyond the threshold). The thesis: the arhat is not someone who has finished but a mode of being free — what the exhaustion of taints signs is precisely the mastery of the twofold liberation of mind and wisdom; freedom is the signature of exhaustion, not a power acquired beyond it. Scripture renders the completion as "the realization-knowledge of the exhaustion of taints" and the mastery as "the taints all exhausted, the burdens laid down, one's own good attained, the fetters of being all ended, rightly liberated by perfect knowledge." The argument runs in three layers: exhaustion and mastery appear in one passage as two faces of one instant (read by Realization as completion, by Attainment as the inception of freedom); the time-structure of that instant, following the Abhidharmakośa's teaching that the knowledge-of-exhaustion co-arises with the exhaustion of all taints, is taken as co-arising without before-or-after, so that mastery is the freedom-face of the very event of exhaustion, not an effect produced after it; and the content of that mastery is a negative freedom of "nothing left to obstruct" (burdens laid down, fetters ended, taints gone), not an accumulated power. The Attainment axis does not re-narrate how severance happens; it takes up the freedom that severance is. The last step of exhaustion is the first step of mastery — and this paper sets out from the threshold.
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Arhat’s Mastery · in the bookcontinuous prose · apparatus removedRead from here →
The First Look Inside the DoorPart 1 · Ch. 1

Same part, two ways in — papers keep the scholarly apparatus; the book is continuous prose for reading. Same source.