The SignatureThe Two LiberationsThe Three Knowledges and Six PowersThe Eight Liberations and CessationNo-More-Becoming and the Worthy
14

Part 4 · The Eight Liberations and Cessation

Arhat’s Mastery · 1 papers

Part Three settled the account of the powers: positive competence is not where the mastery lies. Yet one positive attainment has been held back, not yet faced directly — Part Two n[ from the book's part intro ]

論Study the papersfootnotes · abstracts
06Cessation-AttainmentThis paper opens Part 4, "The Eight Liberations and Cessation-Attainment," treating the aspect, within the arhat's mastery, of the deepest concentration — cessation-attainment (the cessation of perception-and-feeling, nirodha-samāpatti). P03 already established that "concentrative mastery is a distinct face, not the face of taints," and P05 broke "positive competence is where mastery lies"; this paper must answer a sharper question: cessation-attainment being the deepest concentration (the eighth of the eight liberations, the summit of the nine successive attainments, gained by the noble alone), what is it within the arhat's mastery? The "highest mastery," or still only "one face of concentrative mastery"? The thesis: cessation-attainment is the deepest signature of concentrative mastery, yet still a face of "concentrative mastery," not a higher "mastery of exhaustion" — holding to the frame of P01 and P03. Its distinctiveness is twofold, both concerning "freedom within stilling": the three formations of body, speech, and mind all cease, yet life-warmth does not depart and the faculties are not broken, unlike death (the deepest stilling, yet not annihilation); and only the noble gain it by the power of the noble path (the worldling cannot arouse it, fearing annihilation), and to gain it is to become liberated both-ways — so it is the demarcating mark of "liberation both-ways," the apex of concentrative mastery. The argument runs in three layers: the sequence and nature of the eight liberations, nine successive attainments, and cessation-attainment; cessation-attainment's distinctiveness as "stilling yet not death, supreme bliss surpassing neither-perception-nor-non-perception"; and the criterion of mastery — cessation-attainment is the apex of concentrative mastery as "freedom in arousing-and-ceasing," the deepest signature within the reach of liberation both-ways, yet not an augmentation of the mastery of exhaustion. Conclusion: within stilling there is yet freedom — one in cessation-attainment, within the deepest stilling, still gains "freedom in arousing-and-ceasing," the deepest seal of concentrative mastery; yet what the seal seals is still exhaustion (only the exhausted enter without fear), so the deepest concentrative signature too turns, in the end, about the pivot of exhaustion.
書Read in the book
Arhat’s Mastery · in the bookcontinuous prose · apparatus removedRead from here →
Able to Sink, Able to SurfacePart 4 · Ch. 1

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