[Buddha-l] Re: Filtered Buddhism

[Richard Hayes]

On Thursday 28 June 2007 11:27, Tom Head wrote:

> If someone has overcome maana, and therefore is no longer comparing
> herself to others (including, one presumes, her former self), then how
> the heck does she know that overcoming maana has brought her further
> along on the road to liberation than she was before?

That's an excellent question. It's a version of a somewhat larger question, 
one that has troubled anyone who has bothered to think about it.

One of the things that is claimed about being an arhant is that one knows one 
is an arhant. But how can this be? The state of being an arhant is defined 
purely in negative terms. An arhant is one in which all the afflictions are 
absent. But how can one possibly know that all latent tendencies to think and 
act in unskillful and pain-producing ways ways have been wholly eradicated 
and are not simply lying dormant? 

This is not a trivial problem at all. It led to a cottage industry among 
Buddhist epistemologists, who worried themselves sick over the question of 
how one can know for sure that something is absent. (Their worry, I assure 
you, shows they were not arhants and hence probably not worth listening to.)

-- 
Richard P. Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico
http://www.unm.edu/~rhayes