Keren Arbel - Early Buddhist Meditation

This book offers a new interpretation of the relationship between insight practice ( satipahna) 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 jhnasas states of absorption, and shows how these states are the actualization and embodiment of insight ( vipassan). It proposes that the four jhnasand what we call vipassanare integral dimensions of a single process that leads to awakening.

Current literature on the phenomenology of the four jhnasand 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 jhnamodel 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 jhnasas 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 jhnasin 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 Meditationwill 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 Arbelholds 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.