Exhaustion-Knowledge, and the Truth of the Path Complete

T1606 distinguishes these two knowledges by which half of the causal chain each one looks toward. Exhaustion-knowledge looks backward, toward the cause: it is the knowledge that arises specifically because the origination of suffering — craving itself — has now been permanently exhausted, leaving nothing further behind; equally, it can simply take that very exhaustion as its own object. Non-arising-knowledge looks forward, toward the fruit: it is the knowledge that arises specifically because it is now known, with certainty, that every future fruit of suffering that cause would otherwise have produced will simply never arise at all; equally, it can take that guaranteed future non-arising as its own object. The two together complete a single realization from both ends at once — the cause is exhausted, and therefore the fruit that cause would have produced can never come to be.

This passage sorts the ten factors first introduced back in Part 63's account of the eightfold path — now each one specifically qualified as belonging to one beyond training — into five distinct aggregates that map, unmistakably, onto the treatise's own threefold training in discipline, concentration, and wisdom, extended by two further aggregates unique to the arhat's completed state. The eightfold path's own speech, action, and livelihood become the aggregate of discipline; recollection and concentration become the aggregate of concentration; view, thought, and effort become the aggregate of wisdom. Beyond the eight, two further factors complete the ten: correct liberation, forming its own aggregate of liberation — the very fact of being freed — and correct knowledge, forming the aggregate of the knowledge and vision of liberation — the further, reflexive knowing that one has in fact been freed. It is specifically this last pairing, T1606 implies, that distinguishes liberation as achieved from liberation as merely present but unrecognized: the arhat possesses not only freedom itself but the settled certainty of having attained it.

T1606 glosses each term with a single supporting reason, and the pattern of the previous three truths' closing summaries — suffering, origination, and cessation, each already given four analogous aspects of its own — repeats here for the fourth and final time. It is called the aspect of path because every noble one relies on this very path as their own road to genuinely realizing the true meaning of things. It is called the aspect of rightness because every affliction is, by its very nature, contrary to reason, and it is this path alone that is able to remove it. It is called the aspect of accomplishment because a mind that has not yet awakened to true principle falls into distorted views — taking the impermanent as permanent, and so forth — and it is this path that skillfully corrects that very distortion, allowing the mind to know the true meaning free of any such reversal. And it is called the aspect of deliverance because this noble path alone is capable of leading all the way to that final, true, and constant track which is deliverance's own destination.

This closing passage answers a question that has quietly followed the treatise through its entire account of the four truths: the very same sixteen aspects — four for each truth — have been used throughout to describe both an ordinary mundane practitioner's understanding and a noble one's supramundane direct realization, so what actually distinguishes them, if the list of aspects itself never changes? T1606's answer is that the difference is never in which aspect is contemplated, but in how it is known. The mundane version of "impermanence," for instance, is still bound up with concepts and language — one thinks "this is impermanent," mediated by names, and that very mediation leaves the underlying afflictive tendencies undisturbed and understanding still imperfectly penetrating. The supramundane version sees the very same impermanence directly, with nothing standing between the mind and the fact itself — no naming, no conceptual proliferation, and consequently no obstruction left in its way. With this distinction drawn, the treatise's entire fourfold examination of the noble truths — suffering, origination, cessation, and now the path, each given its own detailed analysis and its own four-aspect summary — comes to its complete conclusion.