1. The most complete study of these noble persons and their paths is I. B. Horner, The Early Buddhist Theory of Man Perfected (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1936).

2. The commentary (AA I.353) says here that Saviṭṭha had achieved arahatta by means of faith, and that is why he praises that type of person.

3. Richard Gombrich, How Buddhism Began: The Conditioned Genesis of the Early Teachings (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 1997), 105.

4. Louis de la Vallée Poussin, “Musīla et Nārada,” Melanges Chinois et Bouddhiques 5 (July 1937): 189–222; Paul Griffiths, “Concentration or Insight: The Problematic of Theravāda Buddhist Meditation-Theory,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 49, no. 4 (1981): 605–624; Tillman Vetter, The Ideas and Meditative Practices of Early Buddhism (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1988); and Richard Gombrich, “Retracing an Ancient Debate,” in How Buddhism Began, 96–134.

5. Robert Buswell and Robert Gimello, eds., Paths to Liberation: The Mārga and Its Transformations in Buddhist Thought (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1992), 10.

6. Ibid., 10–11.

7. Ibid., 11.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid., 10–11.

10. Ibid.

11. The term enstatic—to my knowledge first coined by Mircea Eliade in his seminal study of yoga entitled Yoga: Immortality and Freedom (New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1969)—is derived from the Greek en-stasis, meaning “standing within,” and etymologically is the opposite of ecstatic, meaning “standing without.” It is used to denote techniques designed to withdraw the practitioner from contacts with the external world, to establish autonomy, and ultimately to empty the consciousness of all content.

12. Paul Griffiths, On Being Mindless: Buddhist Meditation and the Mind-Body Problem (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1986), 20–21.

13. C. A. F. Rhys-Davids, ed., Visuddhimagga (London: Pali Text Society, 1920–1921), 2:705, sec. 23–30 [hereafter VsM].