The Foundations of Buddhism

200 The Buddhist Path

the academic level this kind of thinking is reflected in an author-

itative modern scholarly treatment of Theravada meditation by

Winston King that presents the dhyiinas as taken over by the

Buddhist tradition from pre-existing Indian brahmanical yogic

practices.^42 What Buddhism added was the practice of insight

meditation.

In a controversial but at least in part convincing study,

Johannes Bronkhorst has argued precisely the opposite: what is

innovative and distinctive about early Buddhist meditation is the

attainment of peaceful and pleasant states through the practice

of the dhyiinas.^43 There is no evidence that this kind of medita-

tion existed in India prior to the appearance of Buddhism, and

non-Buddhist Indian writings conceive of meditation or yoga

not as something peaceful and pleasant, but rather as a painful

austerity which burns off accumulated karma and thereby even-
tually removes the cause of further rebirths and thus brings lib-
eration from sarp.sara.
Bronkhorst, like a number of scholars such as La Vallee Poussin,
Frauwallner, Schmithausen, Vetter, Griffiths, and Gombrich, goes
on to see certain inconsistencies in the earlytexts' presentation

of, on the one hand, the dhyiinas as the path of meditation lead-

ing to arhatship and, on the other hand, discriminating insight

into the four truths, dependent arising and the three marks as

the way to arhatship.^44 For such scholars what underlies the early

texts is a certain tension between the advocates of the practice

of meditation in the form of the dhyiinas and-the advocates of

a more intellectual and rational approach. The later systematic

accounts of the path would thus represent a compromise which

tries to reconcile what were in origin quite different conceptions

of the nature of the Buddhist path.

The arguments and textual analyses of these scholars are com-

plex and often extremely philologically sophisticated and I can-
not begin to review them here; a general comment will have to

suffice. That some tension between rival approaches underlies

the texts may be so. Yet, as Lance Cousins has indicated, from

the point of view of the later manuals it is a mistake to see the

tension in terms of either the practice of calm or the practice of