The Arhat Ideal

The Pali canon describes awakening as the progressive severing of ten fetters that bind a being to samsara: wrong view of self, doubt, and attachment to rites and rituals fall away at the first stage, stream-entry, which guarantees no more than seven further rebirths and none below the human realm. The once-returner weakens sensual desire and ill will further; the non-returner eliminates them entirely and will not be reborn in the human or lower heavens again; the arhat eliminates the five remaining fetters, desire for fine-material and immaterial existence, conceit, restlessness and ignorance, ending rebirth altogether.

The canon presents named arhats as historical figures rather than an abstract ideal: Sariputta and Moggallana, the Buddha's chief disciples, Maha Kassapa, who presided over the first council after the Buddha's death, and Ananda, his attendant, who is said to have attained arhatship on the eve of that council. The Theravada monastic tradition of Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia holds arhatship as the attainable, canonically described goal of a fully realized practitioner, monastic or lay, and forest meditation lineages within Theravada continue to identify individual monks, living and recently deceased, as having reached it, though the tradition treats such claims with considerable caution.

From roughly the first century BCE, Mahayana sutra literature began contrasting the arhat's path with the bodhisattva's, using the term Hinayana, the lesser vehicle, for the aim of individual liberation the arhat represents. The Lotus Sutra's parable of the burning house has a father lure his children from a fire with the promise of three different carts, a goat cart, a deer cart and an ox cart, standing for the paths of the disciple, the solitary realizer and the bodhisattva, only to give every child the same great ox cart once they are safe, its narrator explaining that the three paths were always skillful means toward the single buddha vehicle. Read plainly, the parable frames arhatship as a real but provisional and ultimately superseded goal.

Theravada Buddhism has never accepted this framing of its own tradition. Its position, consistent from the Pali canon onward, is that the arhat and the Buddha reach the identical nirvana, differing only in that a Buddha discovers the path unaided and teaches it to others, while an arhat reaches the same cessation by following a Buddha's teaching; nothing in the Pali sources treats the goal as lesser or the path as merely preparatory to something further. Modern Theravada scholarship and teaching bodies continue to reject the term Hinayana as a polemical label imposed from outside the tradition rather than a description it recognizes of itself.