Blessings All,
I’d like to know whether Anagami can be attained through sense restraint by itself, without cessation or insight. If one abstains from sense pleasures, essentially non-reactivity to sankharas, can this alone break the Anagami fetters? Also, if this is possible, how would one know? Within a monastic context, the conditions mean that the sankharas should naturally become weaker, but how would one know wether the the fetters are actually broken?
No. You can’t even attain Stream Entry without some breakthrough of insight!
It can be tricky! There are many anecdotes in Thailand of monks with samādhi overestimating themselves in this regard. The typical story is that they get busy teaching, stop meditating as much, and when their samādhi weakens, lust comes back.
Thanks for the reply Bhante, that’s interesting. The insights regarding Stream Entry is obvious- would you happen to have examples of insights that may arise for someone breaking Anagami fetters? Noted regarding lust coming back (anecdotally)- that’s what I expect could happen.
What do you mean by this? I’d point you to SN 12.60 The insights are all there in the suttas. Easy enough to say them. But to actually realize them is an entirely different matter!
The insight regarding no-self, emptiness and so forth. I appreciate the Sutta. It seems the insights around this path would be regarding craving and so on, which makes sense.
Exactly so! 
Craving.
I believe that Ven. Buddhaghosa in the commentaries takes the four perversions (vipallāsa) in AN 4.49 and—flipping the order of the last two—explains that the key insight at the four stages of enlightenment are respectively: anicca, dukkha, asubha, and anatta. So if you’re looking for what the key insight is at each stage of awakening, that’s the traditional answer iirc.
This is quite reasonable. You can see how asubha lines up with craving. Obviously, you won’t crave for something that is ugly.
This is what the Hindu religion has been trying to do forever without a technique you can’t experience Nibanna. Maybe you might be reborn back into the world as a person who understands Anatta, im my opinion a prime example would be Krishnamurti. He was seemingly able to explain Anatta very clearly, and all the people that listened closely to what he said nobody attained any stages of Nibanna just by listening to him. He didn’t have a technique so now he’s teachings are distant memories, the Buddha taught lots of techniques for people to develop their Paramis but there is only one direct route to Nibanna and that’s through the observation of sensations and the touch of the breath both these are linked to the subconscious where the conditioning is stored and learning to observe the nature of change at the deepest level is the way to Nibanna if you add anything to Anapana which developed Samadhi you block the door to Nibanna , like Sariputta said the last faculty you have left when you die is the awareness of breath so at the time of death your mind will naturally link with the breath but if you practice anything that uses verbalisation or visualisation, you will never develop a faculty that will naturally arise at the time of death. This is the faculty that allows you to experience Anatta and Nibanna, this is the faculty that when you experience any traumatic event either near death experience or really bad news a sensation starts somewhere in the body, I mean somewhere in the body because it’s hard to pinpoint it but once you become aware of it it floods your whole body and the panic goes away. This is a faculty that develops well before experiencing Nibanna, and just to know this as a normal human being, somebody that actually experiences Nibanna knows this because the way they feel all the time is different from how they felt before
