moved off a short distance, and floated blissfully up into the sky.
Some of the resentful comments she made when she was
still a formless spirit were too strange to record here, so I’ve been
unable to recount every detail of their conversation; and for that
I ask your forgiveness. I am not really that satisfied with what
has been written here either, but I feel that without it a thought-
provoking story would have been left out.The Most Exalted Appreciation
On the nights subsequent to Ãcariya Mun’s attainment of vimutti,
a number of Buddhas, accompanied by their Arahant disciples,
came to congratulate him on his vimuttidhamma. One night, a
certain Buddha, accompanied by tens of thousands of Arahant
disciples, came to visit; the next night, he was visited by another
Buddha who was accompanied by hundreds of thousands of
Arahant disciples. Each night a different Buddha came to express
his appreciation, accompanied by a different number of Arahant
disciples. Ãcariya Mun stated that the number of accompany-
ing Arahant disciples varied according to each Buddha’s relative
accumulation of merit – a factor that differed from one Buddha to
the next. The actual number of Arahant disciples accompanying
each Buddha did not represent the total number of his Arahant
disciples; they merely demonstrated the relative levels of accu-
mulated merit and perfection that each individual Buddha pos-
sessed. Among the Arahant disciples accompanying each of those
Buddhas were quite a few young novices.^23 Ãcariya Mun was skep-