If I have met an arahant Ajahn Chah definitely was one

 Q: You said you trained under Ajahn Chah and his teaching. Was Ajahn Chah an arahant or not? What are your views on it?

Ajahn Amaro: If I have met an arahant he definitely was one. But you can’t really judge from the outside. If people asked Ajahn Chah if he was an arahant, he would say, ‘It takes one to know one,’ or ‘Why are you asking me that? Instead, you should ask yourself why you are not.’ He certainly seemed like the happiest man in the world. That was one of the most striking things about him.

The scriptures state that one of the qualities of stream-entry is to be ‘independent of others in the training, the practice’. That quality of independence doesn’t mean being isolated or abstracted, or having an egotistical attitude of ‘I don’t care what anybody thinks.’ Rather it is a profound self-reliance, self-confidence. Ajahn Chah didn’t need anyone to like him or to approve of him. If you tried to flatter him, he’d make you look at why on earth you were doing that. You could never second-guess him. He had an extraordinary quality of ease coupled with a tremendous liveliness. He paid close attention to those he was with and what was going on yet he simultaneously displayed an extraordinary relaxation at the same time. He was fully attuned to what was happening but he didn’t need it to be a particular way in order for him to be happy.

Ajahn Chah was an extremely strict and orthodox monk – we practise in a rigorous and traditional religious order that is 2,500 years old – but despite that set of conventional limitations he had an astonishing quality of freedom. He was completely at ease with whatever happened, which doesn’t mean to say that he had ‘checked out’, off in some distracted dream world; he was simply very flexible, responsive and adaptable with respect to how situations unfolded.

Having had a stroke, and pretty much physically paralysed, he was still cracking jokes about his brain function collapsing. Not trying to put a brave face on it out of insecurity, but being genuinely okay with watching what was unfolding in his life. He had enjoyed having his faculties and had made good use of them. He had used them well to help himself and others. Now that those faculties were fading, he was quite okay with them as they disappeared. He did the best he could with them as they were going, but there was no sense of loss as they were fading. The last ever formal Dhamma talk that he gave, in 1981, published in English as Why Are We Here?, spells out this skilful attitude out with great clarity. His stroke and the subsequent brain damage happened shortly thereafter.