Bhikkhu Anālayo

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The present book serves as a complement to my Early Buddhist Meditation Studies, which in four chapters explored the topics of mindfulness, the path (to awakening), absorption, and brahmavihāra. The present book takes up the same or closely related topics, but from the diachronic perspective of their historical development. In other words, whereas in the previous book my main concern was to delineate the early Buddhist position, in the present study I proceed from exploring that to discerning changes and reinterpretations that appear to have taken place in the course of Buddhism’s long history. Apart from this different focus, my procedure is closely similar, in that I have put together revised shorter or longer extracts from previously published articles that are relevant to my main topics and combined these with some new material.1 The main topics are: the trajectory that led from the detailed instructions on mindfulness of breathing in sixteen distinct steps to the practice of exclusively focusing just on the breath; the notion of the mind’s intrinsic luminosity as a key element in conceptions that no longer give a prominent place to the idea of a meditative progress along a path; a reevaluation of the significance of absorption attainment as indispensable for progress to the first stage of awakening and at times even inherently liberating in itself; and the arising of the notion that the immeasurable or boundless state of compassion should be meditatively directed toward oneself. With all of these trajectories, my intention is not to posit what is early as right and what comes later as wrong. In fact, some of the developments surveyed here have yielded intriguing new perspectives that have won widespread appeal. In full acknowledgment of that, my aim is only to provide a text-historical perspective, in particular with a view to highlighting a dynamic interplay between theory and practice. I attempt to show how changes during textual transmission led to new per- spectives on meditation practices, whose outcome in turn influenced textual accounts. Discerning such developments reveals a fascinating cross-fertilization between the texts and meditation practices, similar in kind to a cross-fertilization that can be observed between the texts and ancient Indian art. From a practice-related viewpoint, my presentation is meant to enable meditators to position the teachings and practices they follow within a historical perspective. Such a perspective can help to accommodate different traditions within its purview as equally justified articulations of meditative cultivation of the mind, being the result of a dynamic interplay between actual practice and its theoretical, social, and cultural embedding. In other words, my exploration intends to invite applying the principles of conditionality and not self (in the sense of non-identification) to meditation teachings and lineages themselves, viewing them as the product of conditions, without appropriating them with clinging. In the end, any meditation technique or practice is best viewed as a raft, which has only an instrumental purpose in leading onward on the path to freedom.