Deepening Insight: Teachings on vedanā in the Early Buddhist Discourses
About this ebook
A metaphor that can offer considerable help when facing vedanās describes bubbles arising on the surface of a pond during rain...they arise and soon enough burst and disappear. Contemplation of the changing nature of vedanā provides a firm foundation for the growth of insight into not self. Such insight proceeds through successive layers of the mind’s ingrained habit of self-referentiality. Based on relinquishing the explicit view of affirming the existence of a permanent self, increasingly subtler traces of conceit and possessiveness need to be successively overcome until with full awakening all selfing in any form will be removed for good.
Deepening Insight is based on textual sources that reflect “early Buddhism,” which stands for the development of thought and practices during roughly the first two centuries in the history of Buddhism, from about the fifth to the third century BCE. These sources are the Pāli discourses and their parallels, mostly extant in Chinese translation, which go back to instructions and teachings given orally by the Buddha and his disciples. In those times in India, writing was not employed for such purposes, and for centuries these teachings were transmitted orally. The final results of such oral transmission are available to us nowadays in the form of written texts. Bhikkhu Anālayo's presentation is meant to provide direct access, through the medium of translation, to the Chinese Āgama parallels to relevant Pāli discourses. In commenting on such passages, his chief concern throughout is to bring out practical aspects that are relevant to actual insight meditation.
Endorsements
In spring 1990 S.N. Goenka initiated an international seminar named The Importance of Vedanā and Sampajañña. It had the purpose to disseminate the prominence of sensations (vedanā) as a core object of meditation to recognize the intrinsic nature of change and impermanence.
Venerable Bhikkhu Anālayo now provides a thorough, comprehensive and well selected collection on vedanā as maintained in the original early Pāli Canon. Along with the comparison to the Chinese Āgama, otherwise hardly available, this collection if adapted and applied to practice may indeed serve as an inspiring source for deepening insight.
—Klaus Nothnagel, Pāli teacher and Center Teacher for Dhamma Pallava in Poland
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About the author
Bhikkhu Anālayo was ordained in Sri Lanka where he completed his Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies. His thesis was published as Satipaṭṭhāna: The Direct Path to Realization. With over 400 academic publications, Ven. Anālayo is a leading scholar in research on Early Buddhism with a special interest in the topics of the position of women in Buddhism and Buddhist meditation. Recently retired from his position as a university professor in Germany, he is now a resident scholar at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies in MA, USA, and spends most of his time in meditation
