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Preface
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, relatively recent times in the context of a religion that is over 2,500 years old, a hotly contested debate broke out between a group of Burmese monks and a group of Sri Lankan monks over the question of what is the orthodox and orthoprax method and path of meditation in the Theravāda Buddhist tradition. Among the many compelling aspects of this debate, perhaps the most interesting is that the terms of the debate were hardly new to this time but in fact could be traced to differences found in the earliest centuries of the tradition. On one side of the debate, there was the school of thought and practice that maintained that two kinds of meditation—namely samatha-bhāvanā (“mental cultivation of tranquility”) and vipassanā-bhāvanā (“mental cultivation of insight”)—needed to be practiced successively in order for the practitioner to reach the religion’s highest goal, nibbāna (Sanskrit: nirvāṇa). On the other side, it was maintained that only the latter form, vipassanā, need be undertaken by the adept. Whereas the debate is clearly a captivating one in its own terms, such that it will merit full treatment in part 2 of this book (alongside a chapter on the history of vocational diversity within the Theravāda monastic community [saṅgha]), part 1 of this book will take four chapters to deal with what I see as the great deal of soteriological diversity that can be found