17.2 Of Arahants and Untimely Death (KV17.2)

Controverted Point: That an Arahant cannot have an untimely death.

Theravādin: Then are there no murderers of Arahants? You admit there are. Now when anyone takes the life of an Arahant, does he take away the remainder of life from a living man, or from one who is not living? If the former, then you cannot maintain your proposition. If the latter, there is no murder, and your admission is wrong.

Again, you admit that poison, weapons, or fire may get access to the body of an Arahant. It is therefore clear that an Arahant may suffer sudden death. But if you deny, then there can be no murderer.

Rājagirika, Siddhatthika: But was it not said by the Exalted One:

“I declare, bhikkhus, that there cannot be destruction of karmic energy ere the outcome of deeds that have been deliberately wrought and conserved has been experienced, whether that destruction be under present conditions, or in the next or in a subsequent series of conditions”?

Hence there is no untimely dying for an Arahant.

The Points of Controversy, an English translation of the Pali Abhidhamma Kathāvatthu. Translated by Shwe Zan Aung and C.A.F. Rhys Davids. First published by Pali Text Society, 1915.

This SuttaCentral edition was prepared by Manfred Wierich and Ven. Vimala and proofread by Josephine Tobin. Some changes were introduced:

Abbreviations, i.e., those of cited works and the participants in the controversies, were expanded.

Cross-references were linked.

Some typographic changes were introduced, among others, i.e.: the phonetic symbol “ŋ” was changed to the Pāli diacritical letter “ṃ”, “ô” to “o”, single quotes to double quotes, and “:—” to “:”.

Letter-spacing with fixed spaces was replaced with bold font.

The corrigenda were merged into the text. Some could not be resolved, though.

This electronic version is published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 3.0 licence (CC BY-NC 3.0) as found here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/

All copyright is owned by the Pali Text Society. See also the statement under http://www.palitext.com/ → Publications → Copyright Announcement. For non-commercial use only.