| Chapter 1: | The Pāli Nikāyas |
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noble truths, the five aggregates, and the twelvefold chain of dependent arising. As such, vipassanā is basically synonymous with paññā, which itself is best defined as active, penetrating, and liberative insight into the nature of existence. Mindfulness involves painstaking observation of all events in order to discern their true nature. Specifically, mindfulness meditation aims at direct awareness of all phenomena in terms of three intrinsic marks or characteristics (ti-lakkhaṇa): all things are said to be suffering or unsatisfactory (dukkha), impermanent or transient (anicca), and “not-self” or selfless (anattā). Fundamentally, when the meditator comes to see that all things—everything about one’s person, all other beings, and all external worldly objects—are marked by the three characteristics, one sees that there is no reason to crave after and cling to anything and thus achieves the freedom from saṁsāra that is Buddhism’s final goal.
Claims of soteriological superiority made by practitioners of vipassanā can also be found in the Nikāyas. In the well-known suttas on the Foundations of Mindfulness (MN 10 [I.155–163] and DN 22 [II.290–315]), it is explicitly stated that these techniques are the only way to nibbāna,16 and it is clearly implied that there is no need for accompanying cultivation of samatha of any kind. There is no mention in these suttas of samatha achievements being necessary and preparatory for mindfulness or insight practice.
Lambert Schmithausen observed that is striking how so many treatments of liberating insight in the Pāli Nikāyas do not indicate that any samatha or samādhi is required.17 Liberation is solely actualized by comprehension of the impermanent, unsatisfactory, and selfless characteristics of things in saṁsāra, or by contemplating their arising and passing away, or by seeing the five aggregates as empty (rittaka), vain (tucchaka), and without any pith or substance (asāraka). The Saḷāyatanasaṃyutta of the SN is one repository of a whole series of suttas that describes liberation in these terms. De la Vallée Poussin and Schmithausen both theorized that if insight into the negative characteristics