4.2 Of Arahantship as conferred by Rebirth alone (KV4.2)

Controverted Point: That one may become Arahant at the moment of rebirth.

Theravādin: You affirm this proposition; yet you deny that one can become at birth either a Stream-Winner, Once-Returner, or Never-Returner.

And you can name none—not even the greatest—who were Arahants from the time of birth—Sāriputta, or the Great Theras: Moggallāna, Kassapa, Kaccāyana, Koṭṭhika or Panthaka. You deny it in fact of all of them.

Consider our consciousness at rebirth: it arises because rebirth has been desired. Now such a mind is worldly, co-intoxicant … corrupt. Can it realize Arahantship? Is it of the kind that is called forthleading, that goes toward extinction, enlightenment, disaccumulating, is free from intoxicants … and corruptions? Can one by it put away lust, and hate, delusion … indiscretion? Is it the Ariyan Path, the applications of mindfulness and the rest of the thirty-seven factors of enlightenment? Can it understand Ill, put away its cause, realize its cessation, develop the path thereto? All this you, of course, must deny.

Or is the last act of consciousness at death the realization of the Topmost Path (of Arahantship) and the ensuing act of consciousness at rebirth the Fruit of that Path (or full realization of Arahantship)? You deny again. Then your proposition is proved false.

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.