| Physical description |
1 online resource |
| Series |
Routledge critical studies in Buddhism
|
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| Contents |
1. The fourfold Jhāna model : Buddhist or not? -- 2. The first Jhāna : a turning point in the spiritual path -- 3. The second Jhāna : non-discursive broad field of awareness -- 4. Awakening Jhāna factors -- 5. The third Jhāna : establishing a specialized form of awareness -- 6. The fourth Jhāna : non-reactive and lucid awareness of the phenomenal field -- 7. Morality (sīla), wisdom (paññā) and the attainment of the Jhānas -- 8. Reconsidering Samatha-bhāvanā, Vipassanā-bhāvanā and Paññā-vimutti. |
| Summary |
This book offers a new interpretation of the relationship between 'insight practice' (satipaṭṭhāna) and the attainment of the four jhānas (i.e., right samādhi), a key problem in the study of Buddhist meditation. The author challenges the traditional Buddhist understanding of the four jhānas as states of absorption, and shows how these states are the actualization and embodiment of insight (vipassanā). It pro-poses that the four jhānas and what we call 'vipassanā'are integral dimensions of a single process that leads to awakening. |
|
Current literature on the phenomenology of the four jhānas and their relation-ship with the 'practice of insight' has mostly repeated traditional Theravāda inter-pretations. No one to date has offered a comprehensive analysis of the fourfold jhāna model independently from traditional interpretations. This book offers such an analysis. It presents a model which speaks in the Nikāyas' distinct voice. It demonstrates that the distinction between the 'practice of serenity' (samatha-bhāvanā) and the 'practice of insight' (vipassanā-bhāvanā) - a funda-mental distinction in Buddhist meditation theory - is not applicable to early Bud-dhist understanding of the meditative path. It seeks to show that the common interpretation of the jhānas as 'altered states of consciousness', absorptions that do not reveal anything about the nature of phenomena, is incompatible with the teachings of the Pāli Nikāyas. |
|
By carefully analyzing the descriptions of the four jhānas in the early Buddhist texts in Pāli, their contexts, associations and meanings within the conceptual framework of early Buddhism, the relationship between this central element in the Buddhist path and 'insight meditation' becomes revealed in all its power. Early Buddhist Meditation will be of interest to scholars of Buddhist studies and Asian philosophies and religions, as well as Buddhist practitioners with a serious interest in the process of insight meditation. |
| Subject |
Meditation -- Theravāda Buddhism.
|
| ISBN |
9781317383994 (electronic bk.) |
|
1317383990 (electronic bk.) |
|
9781315676043 (ebook) |
|
1315676044 (ebook) |
|
9781138937925 |
|
1138937924 |
|
