The Buddhist Path 201insight: the question for them is rather how much calm and
how much insight are required at the various stages of the path.^45
Even if there is an increased willingness to countenance the pos-
sibility of complete awakening without the the priqr basis of the
dhyiinas, the later manuals are all agreed that the meditator needs
both, and that the culmination of the path consists in a medi-
tation attainment that consists in the coming together of calm
and insight. To see a certain tension in early Buddhism between
those who emphasize the importance of the dhyiinas and those
who advocate the development of insight without the prior basis
ofdhyiina is not unreasonable. Such a tension does seem to under-
lie the later systematic accounts and is also apparent among
contemporary practitioners. We also perhaps see such a tension
reflected elsewhere, in the history of Mahayana Buddhism: the
Madhyamika approach to 'emptiness' appears more orientated
to insight in comparison to the Y ogacarin focus on the stages
of calm and the deep, hidden levels of the mind; similarly, in
Tibetan Buddhism, the dGelugs emphasis on analytic meditation
on emptiness contrasts with the rNying rna practice of rdzogs chen
(see Chapters 9 and 10). Yet it is not necessary to see such ten-
sjons as originating in fundamentally opposed conceptions of the
nature of the Buddhist path. Such a view assumes, in part at least,
a rather intellectual and rational conception of the nature of insight ·
meditation. It is also perhaps to confuse the issue with another
tension in the history of the practice of Buddhist monasticism:
the tension between the life of the monk as a forest-dwelling med-
itator and a town-dwelling scholar (see above pp. 95-roo).
The systematic and theoretical accounts of the path that I have
focused on in this chapter may not always represent the final word
on meditation practice for practitioners today. Some schools of
China and Tibet have adapted them to bring them in line with
certain principles of Mahayana Buddhism; others such as the Ch'an
and Zen schools on the surface apparently ignore such elaborate
theoretical accounts. But in one way or another these systematic
accounts and the ways of thinking that underlie them have influ-
enced the forms of Buddhist meditation practice of whatever
school.