Early Buddhist Meditation

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.

Keren Arbel holds a PhD in Buddhist Studies and teaches at the Department of East Asian Studies in Tel Aviv University, Israel. Her research interests include early Buddhism, Buddhist Meditation, Indian contemplative traditions and South Asian Buddhism.

Bibliography:
Keren Arbel. Early Buddhist Meditation: The Four Jhanas as the Actualization of Insight. New York: Routledge, 2016.