The arhat (Skt) or arahant (Pali) has been glossed in several ways: literally “able, worthy”, a person who has reached the goal; “worthy of worship”; “one who is entirely free from all evil desire”; “the perfected saint”; “saint worthy of the respect of all”; and so on.

It is part of the received wisdom that pristine Buddhism, possibly a Kṣatriyasponsored protest against Brahmanical claims of superiority on the basis of divinely ordained birth status and ritual functions, and against Brahmanical purity preoccupations in social intercourse, declared that one is a brāhmaṇa by birth, and allowed open recruitment to the order of bhikkhus from all ranks and varṇa status orders.

Though this pristine Buddhism repudiated the Brahmanical assignment of differently evaluated Dhammas (moralities) and vocations for the hierarchized status orders and proclaimed a single liberation quest for all human beings, it nevertheless accepted an inequality of spiritual achievement among human beings and their consequent ranking on the basis of karmic action in past lives and in the present.

On this ladder of achievement, the perfected saints are not only placed at the top but minutely differentiated from one another according to their merits. An apt example is “the jewel discourse” (Ratanasuttam) of the Khuddakapātha, a Theravāda canonical text. For the most part employing binary categories that are asymmetrically evaluated, it proceeds from the inferior to the higher mode of existence, at each level the superior category being the ground for the distinction at the next level.