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liberation.10 Indeed, soteriology is precisely what it is being studied here, and this is what the Pāli texts are primarily about. I agree with Gethin that the Nikāyas’ raison d’être is fundamentally soteriological; paths to liberation are the central concern of those who first compiled and used these texts.11 Apart from history, scholars are also trying to understand what actually interested the minds of those who compiled the literature. I am also trying to fill a lacuna in scholarship here. As Gethin observed, “Scholarship has been rather slow in coming forth with attempts at straightforward exposition of the notion of the spiritual path and practice, especially as it is presented in the Pāli Nikāyas and Abhidharma.”12
Furthermore, Gethin added, the Pāli material is very useful in leading us to a proper assessment of early Buddhist thought and practice, both because it represents a relatively full recension and because it is written in one of the Middle Indo-Aryan languages that the early Buddhist traditions apparently preferred as their medium. And the Pāli tradition’s reluctance to Sanskritize may well be indicative of its conservatism.13
Central to this study is another infrequently acknowledged point that nevertheless is still clearly operative in the Theravāda tradition: there is an almost invariable allegiance to the interpretations of the tipiṭaka by a fifth-century CE exegete aptly known as Buddhaghosa (“Voice of Buddha”). Buddhaghosa composed commentaries on the Pāli canon and also systematized its content, along with that of later Sinhalese commentaries, in his encyclopedic treatise on the path, the Visuddhimagga (VsM) (“Path of Purification”), a work that has enjoyed almost absolute authority among Theravāda Buddhists since the time of its composition.
Recently, at least two scholars in Buddhist studies have introduced a problematic, first realized and explicated by some leading thinkers in the larger forum of historical and historiographical studies, to this field, by way of their groundbreaking and innovative work on the Chan/Zen tradition. The first, Bernard Fauré, has spoken of what he called a “teleological fallacy” in Chan/Zen studies, by which he meant a propensity