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Updated: June 25, 2025
The first was a youth named Yasa who joined the order, while his father, mother and former wife became lay believers. Then came first four and subsequently fifty friends of Yasa and joined the order. "At that time" says the Mahâvagga. "there were sixty-one Arhats in the world," so that at first arhatship seems to have followed immediately on ordination.
By virtue of deeds done in former births, these deeds now bore their perfect fruit. Just as when burning ashes are sprinkled by water, the water being dried, the flame bursts forth. So now, with those above, the disciples were altogether sixty, all Arhats; entirely obedient and instructed in the law of perfect discipleship.
Give up the fool's paradise of 'This is I'; 'This is mine. It is the great reality you are asked to grasp. Leap forward without fear. You shall find yourself in the ambrosial waters of Nirvana and sport with the Arhats who have conquered birth and death."
When the click of his rosary again broke the hush of the inner court where the calm images of the Arhats stand, a novice whispered, 'Thy chela is here, and the old man strode forth, forgetting the end of that prayer. Hardly had the tall figure shown in the doorway than the Jat ran before him, and, lifting up the child, cried: 'Look upon this, Holy One; and if the Gods will, he lives he lives!
I chose a surer way. Many times when I returned from my Search to this Temple, which has always been a nest to me, there came one seeking Enlightenment a man from Leh that had been, he said, a Hindu, but wearied of all those Gods. The lama pointed to the Arhats. 'A fat man? said Kim, a twinkle in his eye.
This word is the Pali equivalent of the Sanskrit prajñâ and is interesting as connecting early and later Buddhism, for prajñâ in the sense of transcendental or absolute knowledge plays a great part in Mahayanism and is even personified. The Pitakas imply that Buddhas and Arhats can understand things which the ordinary human mind cannot grasp and human words cannot utter.
Tissa then composed the Kathâ-vatthu and presided over a council composed of one thousand arhats which established the true doctrine and fixed the present Pali Canon.
But its twenty-five chapters are consecrated each to some special topic which receives fairly consecutive treatment, though each chapter is a mosaic of short poems consisting of one or more verses supposed to have been uttered by the Buddha or by arhats on various occasions. The whole work combines literary beauty, depth of thought and human feeling in a rare degree.
Since, however, the arhats, or illuminati, of the East, seem to have arrived at the conclusion that the Western mind is at last sufficiently prepared and advanced in spiritual knowledge to be capable of assimilating the occult doctrines of Esoteric Buddhism, and have allowed their pupil to burst them upon a thoughtless and frivolous society with the suddenness of a bomb-shell, I feel released from the obligations to secrecy by which I have hitherto felt bound, and will proceed to unfold a few arcana of a far more extraordinary character than any which are to be found even in the pages of the 'Theosophist' or of 'Esoteric Buddhism.
Hereupon the Arhats and Bhikshus observant of the rules, to the number in all of 700 monks, examined afresh and collated the collection of disciplinary books. It is difficult to tell what was the peculiar form of this vihara from which it gets its name; something about the construction of its door, or cupboards, or galleries. See the explanation of this in the next chapter.
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