Part Five · The Fruit of Arahantship (Approach) · Written to the Threshold

The last part. Its shape differs from the four before it, as the transition has said: the four earlier stations were written to the fruit; this one is written only to the approach—to the person standing on the threshold, where the pen stops.

Two chapters. Chapter one looks at the last five walls: craving for form, craving for the formless, conceit, restlessness, ignorance—the five higher fetters. They are, by common consent, the hardest five of the ten to sever, and the chapter must set straight a point easily gotten backwards: their difficulty lies not in coarseness but in hiddenness. The coarse fetters were torn down long ago; what remains has withdrawn to the deepest places, where a fetter looks least like a fetter—hidden in the bliss of absorption, in the single thought "I have attained," in the last faint stirring of a perfectly stilled mind. The nearer the end, the finer the work must be—not the fiercer.

Chapter two walks the last stretch: the final cut of the five higher fetters, and the instant it settles—the exhaustion of the taints. That instant has a property none of the eight steps before it had: it is at once an end and a beginning. The last wall down is, in the same moment, no wall remaining. This book writes the first face; the second belongs to another volume.

Nine chapters of this book gather here. Go in, see the five finest walls clearly, and walk to the threshold.