Early Indian and Theravada Buddhism: Soteriological Controversy a ...

of saṁsāra was the key to liberation, this more easily discerned realization could have rendered the difficult-to-attain jhānas and the concomitant cultivation of supernormal powers and higher knowledges (abhiññās) unnecessary.¹⁸ Schmithausen further noted that in contrast to texts that support what I am calling samatha-oriented paths, many of the texts that support what I am calling the vipassanā-oriented path cast the cessation of cognition and feeling rather negatively, as a state closely akin to death.¹⁹ Furthermore, the Pāli Nikāyas oftentimes demonstrate an ambivalent if not hostile attitude toward the samāpatti stages of the samatha-based path. In accounts of the Buddha’s life, he is always portrayed as rejecting the high samāpatti states taught by his two early samaṇa teachers, Ārāḍa Kālāma and Uddaka Rāmaputta, as unconducive to dispassion, insight, and nibbāna (MN 26, 36, 85, 100). And, in accounts of the Buddha’s night of awakening (bodhi), he attains the four jhānas as a basis from which liberating insights come, but no use of the five samāpattis is made.

Two of the most prominent types of noble person, who will be portrayed in more detail in the next chapter, see through the jhānas and samāpattis of the samatha-oriented path by using insight to see them as impermanent, unsatisfactory, and without self, which results in not abiding in these samatha states, just as they do not cling to anything else in saṁsāra. The noble person known as “liberated in both ways” (ubhatobhāgavimutta) actually attains all the jhānas and samāpattis but ultimately emerges from them and transcends them by seeing them in terms of the three characteristics of existence. The noble person known as “liberated by insight” (paññāvimutta), who is the epitome, as shall be seen, of the vipassanā-oriented path, never attains any of the jhānas or samāpattis but still understand them to be marked by the three characteristics of existence.

The early poems of arahant monks and nuns (Theragāthā [Thag] and Therīgāthā [Thig]) seem to favor the insight technique of mindfulness (sati) as supreme. There are exceptions to this; Thag 112 has Vacchagotta