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

the one hand, it is found that the emphasis throughout Buddhism on the practical guidance needed by the person engaged in religious training has led to the justifiable profusion of path schemes that characterize the religion. For Buddhists, the notion of mārga or “path” has been a valid model for religious endeavors only to the extent that it poses a destination to be reached and that people actively go about pursuing that destination. On the other hand, in efforts to universalize individual experience, Buddhists have often taken mārga out of the realm of the practical and into forms of dramatization or mythic recapitulation, into forms of the process by which ideal persons are said to have achieved liberation.⁹ These two ways of presenting mārga, however, are not mutually exclusive but rather often overlap. The path is often defined in terms of the differences between the ideal person, who has completed the journey and thus become worthy of emulation, and the less-than-ideal person, who is still in training or progress. Buswell and Gimello further added that with experience organized into sequences of stages, the transcendent goal presumed to have been achieved by the spiritual exemplars at the source of the tradition is objectified, codified, and made available to ordinary Buddhist practitioners. The detailed ordering of experience that path schemes provide offers practitioners “an explicit guide to achieving the archetypal goal for themselves.”¹⁰ With regard to the specific paths to be discussed in this and upcoming chapters, it is important to note that they arose before the Abhidharmikas began engaging in the construction of path schemes as scholastic exercises, and so there is good reason to assume that they bore some relation to actual practice. Also, the apparent lack of concern for consistency shown at many points in the Pāli canon in regard to the many different types of meditation described (compared with the demonstrated concern for coherence shown in Buddhaghosa’s works, for example) suggests that the main concern was practical efficacy.

In the early Buddhist tradition in particular, there appear to be at least three distinct noble persons’ paths, these being the ones mentioned in the opening passage, quoted earlier: (1) the path based on faith (saddhā),