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Pāli canon an extremely rich and diverse, sometimes overlapping, sometimes contradictory, and sometimes inchoate mass of material on ethical and meditative strategies for salvation, which serves to belie this image. Further research has borne out one of this study’s major hypotheses, which is that there was, in the early phase of Indian Buddhism, much more variety of practice—in the sense that several distinctively different, yet equally valid, paths to liberation were offered—than has been recognized previously by both followers and scholars. Through a reinvestigation of this material, I have come to see that the present understanding of Buddhist soteriology has been too narrow. It has failed to capture the range of what Buddhists throughout history have wanted from their religion and how they have gone about getting it. Consequently, I have directed my research toward “deconstructing” the soteriological system of Theravāda Buddhism in the basic sense of revealing it in its essential multiplicity.
The results of this research are presented in part 1 of this volume, which comprises four chapters. Chapter 1 begins to explore a major hypothesis that will be supported by evidence found throughout this study: that two types of meditation—namely samatha-bhāvana (mental cultivation of tranquility) and vipassanā-bhāvanā (mental cultivation of insight)—which the later tradition almost invariably sees in terms of mutuality, were viewed in at least some major circles within the early tradition as parts of distinct, separate paths. Chapter 2 contains an analysis of how Buddhaghosa’s work came to occupy a place of influence and authority, as well as an investigation of a relatively unexplored but important aspect of early Buddhist soteriological schemes—the categorization of advanced adepts into various classes of ideal spiritual types, known in the tradition as “noble persons.” In particular, the chapter investigates early Buddhist descriptions of the paths of three different noble persons: (1) ubhatobhāgavimutta (“one liberated in both ways”), (2) cetovimutta (“one liberated of mind”), and (3) paññāvimutta (“one liberated by insight”). Not only does this examination aim at revealing a diversity, rather than a singularity, in early Buddhist soteriology that has