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Description of  Early Buddhist Meditation: The Four Jhanas as the Actualization of Insight (Routledge Critical Studies in Buddhism)

This book offers a new interpretation of the relationship between 'insight practice' (satipatthana) and the attainment of the four jhnas (i.e., right samdhi), a key problem in the study of Buddhist meditation. The author challenges the traditional Buddhist understanding of the four jhnas as states of absorption, and shows how these states are the actualization and embodiment of insight (vipassan). It proposes that the four jhnas and what we call 'vipassan' are integral dimensions of a single process that leads to awakening. Current literature on the phenomenology of the four jhnas and their relationship with the 'practice of insight' has mostly repeated traditional Theravda interpretations. No one to date has offered a comprehensive analysis of the fourfold jhna model independently from traditional interpretations. This book offers such an analysis. It presents a model which speaks in the Nikyas' distinct voice. It demonstrates that the distinction between the 'practice of serenity' (samatha-bhvan) and the 'practice of insight' (vipassan-bhvan) a fundamental distinction in Buddhist meditation theory is not applicable to early Buddhist understanding of the meditative path. It seeks to show that the common interpretation of the jhnas as 'altered states of consciousness', absorptions that do not reveal anything about the nature of phenomena, is incompatible with the teachings of the Pli Nikyas. By carefully analyzing the descriptions of the four jhnas in the early Buddhist texts in Pli, 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, Asian philosophies and religions, as well as Buddhist practitioners with a serious interest in the process of insight meditation.