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which classifies advanced practitioners according to such factors as varying religious propensities, different emotional and intellectual temperaments, and diverse ethical and meditative approaches, clearly presents a very important dimension of Buddhist soteriology.
Herein I propose to provide a problem-solving, corrective reinterpretation of some of the commonly held received wisdom about Buddhist soteriological approaches generally, and about meditative theory and practice specifically, with regard to the history of the Theravāda tradition. The discoveries to which I refer were largely the product of both textual research done on the earliest extant materials available on the noble persons, coming from the Theravāda tradition’s “Pāli canon,” and field interviews done in Sri Lanka with Theravādin monks involved in separate controversies regarding (a) what kind of life most becomes a Theravādin monk and (b) what constitutes “right meditation” (sammā-samādhi).
As is well known, the followers of the Theravāda form of Buddhism that predominates in Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka claim to be the conservators of a set of teachings presented in the Pāli language, which has been perpetuated in unchanged form for 2,500 years, since the time of their original promulgator, Gotama Buddha. The name Theravāda (“Teaching of the Elders”) itself is an affirmation of this claim that its canonical texts exactly and completely preserve the Buddha’s words (buddha-vacana) as they were first orally transmitted and memorized by his foremost senior disciples. Generally supporting this traditional claim, many scholars involved in the critical study of Theravāda Buddhist history and scripture over the last century or so have presented it to be indeed one of the world’s most successively conservative religious traditions, the only school of Buddhism to withstand the reformational influence of the Mahāyāna movement which began sweeping across Asia from India in the early centuries of the Common Era.
It is a central conviction of my work here that the Pāli canon, or tipiṭaka, largely comprises texts that come from the last half of the