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to read the past in terms of the present, to read the early tradition as having its finality in the modern tradition.14 The second, Steven Heine, in discussing Chan/Zen in particular and religious traditions in general, echoed Fauré in stating, “The view of history itself is determined and sculpted in accord with what the past has dictated to have been in terms of a religion’s current truth claims. Therefore, it is not necessarily unusual or surprising to find that a tradition has ‘invented’ itself by writing its history backwards.”15 Furthermore, Fauré has maintained that current scholars have been just as responsible as members of a tradition for creating this “teleological fallacy.” In the same work just referred to, Fauré asserted that modern historical scholarship has tended to simply replicate traditional Buddhist discourse, in that both stress orthodox positions and have an essentially regularizing function.16
I believe that what Fauré and Heine have observed with regard to Chan/Zen Buddhism holds equally well for modern Theravāda Buddhists and the scholars who study their traditions. There has been a similar problematic present in Theravāda studies on meditative soteriology, in which an ultimate form or model of the path has been identified and then anachronistically read back on to the early tradition. To be specific, the model, formulated by Buddhaghosa in the VsM, of a singular meditative path that successively combines and integrates the two major Buddhist forms of contemplative cultivation—samatha-bhāvanā (tranquility meditation) and vipassanā-bhāvanā (insight meditation)—has frequently been uncritically employed as the lens through which early Buddhist meditation should be understood. Indeed, this singular vision has been the one that most Theravāda Buddhists since Buddhaghosa have adopted in seeing their tradition as an unchanging one, that those who have engaged themselves in meditation have put into practice, and that those who study and interpret the tradition today have read back on to even its earliest developments in meditative theory and practice.17
Given the received image of Theravāda as a monolithic religion, I have been surprised and excited to discover in the early materials from the