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

are based in each of the three, the cultivation of insight is an essential requirement in all the paths.

This little-known sutta, by reason of its clear allowance for and acknowledgment of diverse types of religious practitioners who have adopted markedly different ways leading to the attainment of nibbāna, is an important one for understanding the soteriological concerns of the early Buddhist and the ongoing Theravāda Buddhist communities. It is very often the case in Buddhist literature that a story appears to recapitulate, within the framework of a dramatic episode, broad-scale historical developments in theory and practice. For example, in the Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna traditions are the decades-long (if not centuries-long) disputes between advocates of the gradual and sudden paths, encapsulated in the stories of the poetry contest between Shen-hsiu and Hui-neng in the Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch in Chinese Chan Buddhism, and the Sam-yas debate between Kamalaśīla-ācārya and Ho-shang Mo-ho-yen in Tibetan sources. I would maintain that here is a Theravāda story that crystallizes how diverse soteriological approaches were accepted within the early tradition.

At present, the rather narrow model of Buddhist soteriology fails to capture the range of what Buddhists throughout history have wanted from their religion and how they have gone about getting it. The intention of the next three chapters is to further examine these variant paths in the early Theravāda Buddhist tradition of India and Sri Lanka, as it is evidenced in the received form of the canon in the Pāli language. The soteriological diversities of the early tradition are evident dimensions within this textual corpus, and the absence of a coherent treatment of them is an evident gap in scholarly research. The observation that there appear to be different techniques for attaining liberation in early Theravāda and that historically there has been tension between supporters of the various approaches is not an entirely new one, however. Scholars such as Louis de la Vallée Poussin, Paul Griffiths, Tillman Vetter and Richard Gombrich have discussed this topic before,⁴ and I am greatly