Nikaya Buddhism and Early Chan

While it has long been acknowledged that Chan differs in many ways from more mainstream forms ofBuddhism, recent scholarship has also resulted in an increasing awareness of the originality of earlyBuddhist teachings found in the Nikayas and their distinctiveness from the later doctrine of classicalTheravada. This book is inspired by passages in Nikaya and early Chan texts that can be read asexpressing surprisingly similar and at the same time very unconventional ideas about meditation,consciousness, and reality. While due to their unorthodox character, these passages have often beenignored or explained away when studied in the context of just one tradition, the new perspectiveprovided by their comparative analysis allows a more direct reading to be considered, therebydrawing out their radical implications. This book argues that the unconventional concepts found in Nikaya and early Chan texts are part of aunique and coherent meditative paradigm that is very different from the one commonly associatedwith Buddhism and dominant in its history. One of its central ideas is that certain crucial meditativestates cannot be directly attained through methods involving acts of will and mental effort such asactive concentration, but their occurrence is dependent on a specific way of life, state of mind andexistential condition. To make better sense of Nikaya and early Chan views that are often at odds withcommonly held beliefs about mental functioning and the structure of reality, and to assess theirplausibility, they are compared with relevant developments in Western philosophy and cognitivescience.