Ever chase something so intensely… that you eventually realize the chase itself was the problem?
This wasn’t a modern burnout story or a mindfulness cliché.
This was Sariputta—Buddhism’s master analyst, the Buddha’s chief disciple—on his ninth and final attempt at awakening. And his breakthrough wasn’t what anyone would expect. It wasn’t about attaining the most exotic mental state in the cosmos. It was about watching that state collapse—and understanding why its collapse mattered more than the achievement itself.
Let’s walk through it.
Sariputta had already done what most practitioners would consider impossible. Eight times in a row, he entered increasingly refined layers of consciousness. He peeled perception down to a whisper. He reduced feeling to its faintest shadow—pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral—but never once did he claim, “This is me.” He didn’t identify with anything arising in the mind.
But non-identification isn’t the whole story.
Because even if he didn’t cling to a state, the very existence of perception and feeling meant the mind still had something to orient itself toward. Something to hope for, to eliminate, to refine, to enhance. A subtle forward-leaning. A whisper of, “Almost there…”
So Sariputta pushes further.
Much further.
On the ninth attempt, he repeats the entire meditative sequence one more time. He lets each factor fall away—attention, intention, recognition, even awareness of perception itself—until he enters the rarest of attainments: the cessation of perception and feeling.
No thoughts.
No categories.
No pleasure, pain, or neutrality.
Not even the ambient hum of existence.
Just… nothing.
And here is where most interpretations go off the rails.
People imagine the cessation of perception and feeling as the “ultimate” state—the finish line, the crown jewel, the final doorway to liberation.
But that’s not what the Aunupada Sutta praises.
The real miracle happens after Sariputta emerges.
When perception flickers back on, when feeling reappears as the faintest tone, when intention and recognition restart like sparks in an unlit room—he watches them arise with pristine clarity. And he watches them vanish. And for the first time, he truly understands the architecture of every meditative state he has ever experienced:
Each one is temporary.
Each one is constructed.
Each one collapses under the weight of its own impermanence.
Even cessation—this majestic, almost mythic state beyond perception and feeling—cannot last.
And that is the moment everything clicks.
Sariputta sees that the problem was never his lack of progress.
It wasn’t that he hadn’t found “the right state.”
It wasn’t that one more refinement would finally break the cycle.
The problem was the ladder itself.
The chase.
The subtle leaning toward “next.”
The hope that somewhere, somehow, there existed a final, permanent, perfected meditative achievement.
He sees that such a destination does not exist.
And the entire project of striving collapses.
Instantly.
Completely.
The illusion of a final meditative solution dissolves.
The last trace of “I am attaining” disappears.
And Sariputta awakens—not inside the deepest state of consciousness, but by watching that deepest state fall apart.
He awakens by recognizing the futility of grasping at the impermanent—even when the impermanent looks divine.
And that is the quiet brilliance of the Aunupada Sutta:
Enlightenment isn’t the crowning jewel of meditation.
It’s the moment you stop trying to crown anything at all.
Sariputta wakes up not by holding on…
but by letting go of the last thing he ever thought he needed,
the last thing he ever thought he was,
and the last state he ever thought could save him—
and he doesn’t look back.
