Stream-Entry, and the Three Fetters

T1606 clarifies exactly what "twice free" and "entirely free" mean here: a practitioner may, prior to ever entering the path of seeing at all, have already used the ordinary mundane path to suppress a certain number of the nine graded levels of affliction bound to the desire realm. One who has already suppressed the first six of these nine grades through the mundane path alone is called "twice free of desire," and such a person, upon reaching the sixteenth mind-instant of the path of seeing, attains the fruit of once-returning directly, skipping over the fruit of stream-entry entirely. One who has already suppressed all nine grades through the mundane path is called "entirely free of desire," and such a person likewise attains the fruit of non-returning directly at that same sixteenth instant. This is why the very same sixteenth mind-instant of the path of seeing can mark three entirely different fruits depending on what mundane progress a given practitioner had already made beforehand — the path of seeing itself is identical in every case, but what it delivers depends on the ground already covered before it began.

T1606 explains why self-view specifically prevents anyone from even beginning the journey toward liberation: one who grasps the five appropriated aggregates as constituting a self, or as belonging to a self, comes to deeply cherish that very self, and consequently never develops genuine disenchantment with the great mass of suffering these aggregates actually involve — without disenchantment, the mind never inclines toward liberation in the first place. Some beings do get further than this, genuinely setting out toward liberation, but two further errors can still derail even a sincere search: attachment to rules and rituals leads a practitioner to mistake some other, incorrect practice for the genuine path to purity, taking a distorted view for a clean way out — a mistaken form of deliverance; and doubt leaves a practitioner unable to settle with certainty on the three jewels as the actual correct antidote, wavering indefinitely instead — an incorrect form of deliverance. Taken together, then, these three fetters cover the three points at which the entire enterprise can go wrong from the very start: confusion about the object of knowledge itself (self-view, distorting the very aggregates that are to be correctly known), confusion in correct view (attachment to rules and rituals, substituting a wrong view of the path for the right one), and confusion regarding the genuine antidote (doubt, preventing confidence in the three jewels that alone can actually counteract affliction). It is specifically because overcoming these three removes every obstacle capable of blocking the path at its very root — even though every other affliction belonging to the path of seeing is, in strict fact, equally and simultaneously severed at this same moment — that these three alone are singled out as what defines the attainment of stream-entry.