“Further, Ānanda, the monk—not attending to the perception of the dimension of nothingness, not attending to the perception of the dimension of neither-perception-nor-non-perception—attends to the singleness based on the themeless concentration of awareness. His mind takes pleasure, finds satisfaction, settles, & indulges in its themeless concentration of awareness.

“He discerns that ‘This themeless concentration of awareness is fabricated & mentally fashioned.’ And he discerns that ‘Whatever is fabricated & mentally fashioned is inconstant & subject to cessation.’ Thus knowing, thus seeing, his heart is released from the effluent of sensuality, the effluent of becoming, the effluent of ignorance. With release, there is the knowledge, ‘Released.’ He discerns that ‘Birth is ended, the holy life fulfilled, the task done. There is nothing further for this world’.”—Cūḷa Suññatā Sutta

Namaste. So, this is Enlightenment. Complete, pure, and final. This is the thing toward which we have been striving and progressing for many, many lifetimes, and this is how the Buddha attained it himself. So, immediately after this, then he spoke the verse:

etaṃ santaṃ, etaṃ panītaṃ,

“This is peaceful, this is excellent: the stilling of all fabrications; the

You see, but it’s not like he was sitting there trying to stop the sankhārā. Rather, he was concentrating on these progressively more and more subtle layers of emptiness.

Some people wrongly accuse the Buddha of being a śuññyāvādī as it’s called, śuññyāvādī means that ‘emptiness is the truth.’ But if emptiness was the truth, he wouldn’t say that “these states of concentration are fabricated and mentally fashioned.” Because the truth is not fabricated, the truth is not mentally fashioned; the truth is the truth, and it’s always the truth.