This volume presents sixteen papers in tribute to the late L. S. Cousins (1942–2015). All the authors have been influenced by Lance’s teachings and publications in a variety of ways.

An Obituary, Appreciation and Bibliography of Lance Cousins, a great scholar of early Buddhism.

A strong strand of the scholarship of Lance Cousins focussed on the jhānas and related matters, and he was also a practitioner and teacher of samatha meditation, which aims at the jhānas. In this dual tradition, this paper explores subtle questions about the nature of each jhāna as dealt with in the Pali Nikāyas, Abhidhamma and commentaries. Its aim is to help illuminate what it is like to be in any of these jhānas: what is going on in them, and what has been transcended? What do the similes for each jhāna convey about the overall situation in them? What kind` of thought and feelings are understood to occur in them? To what extent does breathing stop in deep jhāna? To what extent is hearing transcended in them? What happens in moving between them? How are they related to developing insight?

In 1996, L. S Cousins published a groundbreaking piece on paths of monastic practice titled ‘Scholar Monks and Meditator Monks Revisited’ (Powers and Prebish 2009, 31–46). As the title suggests, this work reconsiders the role of two types of monks, doing so by closely analyzing a famous sutta (Mahācunda Sutta, A III 355–356) that depicts a strong dispute between jhāyins or ‘meditators’ and dhammayogas, whom scholarship has almost universally defined as ‘scholars’. Because of this, almost all have interpreted this debate as the first sign in early Indian Buddhism of a great bifurcation in the saṅgha between those concentrating on book learning (pariyatti) and those concentrating on practice (paṭipatti) — a split that became more and more marked over the centuries until the division became more or less official in medieval Sri Lanka. Cousins convincingly contests this history, with one of his main points being that the dhammayogas were not at all just scholars. Like the meditators, theirs was a practical path that resulted in profound realization of the Dhamma, albeit a different path from that of the meditators. Cousins then goes even further, arguing that the split between scholars and meditators is not very evident in South Asian Buddhist history until the time of Buddhaghosa and thereafter. My intention here is to respond as fully as possible to Cousins’ methods and conclusions, by offering evidence and arguments that sometimes support his work further and sometimes critique his work. This is done in the spirit of spurring on more discussions on this important, complex, and contested issue.

This article draws on the teachings of the Pali Canon and the contemporary lineages that are guided by its principles. In particular, reference is made to the author’s mentors in the Thai Forest Tradition. It explores the respective roles of goal-directed effort and contentment in the process of meditative training, and skilful and unskilful variations on these. Effort is needed, but can be excessive, unreflectively mindless, unaware of gradually developed results, or misdirected. Contentment can be misunderstood to imply that skilful desire has no role in practice, and lead to passivity; though it is needed to dampen down an over-energized mind, or motivation rooted in aversion or ambition, and comes from insight-based non-attachment. Right effort avoids the craving to become or to get rid of, but is associated with a skilful chanda/ desire that is an aspect of the iddhi-pādas, the Bases of Spiritual Power. Mindfulness aids the balance of energy and concentration in the Five Faculties, and the energizing and calming qualities in the Seven Factors of Enlightenment. In the end, from practising Dhamma in a way that is truly in accordance with Dhamma (dhammānudhamma-paṭipatti), progress naturally flows from seeing and becoming Dhamma.

This paper examines function and structure within the religious paths advocated by John of the Cross (1542–1591), and the Buddha, with particular reference to the jhānas and the arūpa states, as represented in selected suttas within the Pāli texts. First, John of the Cross and the jhāna and arūpa states are contextualised. The teaching in The Ascent of Mount Carmel and The Dark Night (John of the Cross), and the Sāmaññaphala Sutta, the Nivāpa Sutta and the Anupada Sutta (Sutta Piṭaka) is then summarised. The two are then brought into conversation with each other to examine the extent to which the religious paths described move within the same landscape of spiritual practice. Differences in context and metaphysical underpinning are recognised. The paper argues, nevertheless, that similarities are more than evident, particularly with reference to attachment to sensory objects, discursive thought, and the idea of the self or the ‘I’. The paper demonstrates that the two speak of mystical paths, which share many of the same practices and fruits, although couched in different metaphors.

Over the last fifty years the study of mysticism has been shaped by the debate between ‘perennialists’, who claim that mystical experiences are the same across different cultures, and ‘constructivists’, who claim that mystical experiences are shaped by, and hence specific to, particular religious traditions. The constructivist view is associated with the ‘discursive turn’ that has dominated the humanities for the last half century, emphasising cultural relativism. Nonetheless, the constructivist position is not without problems. Inspired in part by Lance Cousins’ 1989 comparison of Buddhaghosa’s Path of Purification and Teresa of Ávila’s Interior Castle, the present article seeks to bring out parallels in the contemplative exercises and the progress of the ‘spiritual life’ found in Buddhist accounts of meditation (such as the Cūḷa- Suññata-sutta) and Christian apophaticism (as presented in The Cloud of Unknowing). The article seeks to establish specific parallels in the techniques of and approaches to contemplative practice in both traditions, as well as in the phenomenology of the experiences of the meditator (yogāvacara) or contemplative at different stages in the work of meditation and contemplation.

Every culture is concerned about what happens to people when they die. Even when the dominant religion/ideology provides an answer, an examination of what people actually say and do generally discloses various inconsistences, for example between what they claim to believe and what their actions (notably rituals) suggest that they believe or at least consider possible. In every traditional Buddhist society, adherents are supposed to believe in rebirth, a fate which only those who achieve enlightenment escape, and yet in both the Indian and the Chinese Buddhist traditions people worship and to some extent interact with their dead ancestors and in doing so preserve local pre- Buddhist beliefs and customs. In both traditions there are likewise inconsistencies between what people believe about themselves and what they believe about others, as well as beliefs about how to treat dead parents and how to treat dead strangers. Much in the observable mixture of beliefs and practices may be ascribed to the Buddha himself.

The Alagaddūpama Sutta is the 22nd discourse of the Majjhima-nikāya of the Pali canon. In the sutta itself it is mentioned that the Buddha’s delivery of this discourse was necessitated by the need to refute a wrong view held by one of his disciples named Ariṭṭha. Parallel versions of the sutta are found preserved in the Chinese Āgamas. The two main similes used in the sutta, those of the snake and of the raft, are referred to in the scriptures of a number of non-Theravāda Buddhist traditions as well, showing that the Buddhist doctrine represented in it is early and authentic and the message contained in the sutta was considered to be extremely significant by many early Buddhist traditions. The Alagaddūpama Sutta shows the Buddha’s role as one of the earliest thinkers in the history of philosophy who engaged in a critique of the craving for metaphysics and dogma frequently exhibited in those who propound worldviews. The Buddha did not value a belief or a worldview on grounds of the logical skill with which it was constructed but on grounds of the transformative effect it could have on the character of an individual and the sense of wellbeing it could promote. There are several discourses of the Pali canon which give prominence to this aspect of the Buddha’s teaching. Among them the Brahmajāla Sutta of the Dīgha-nikāya and the Aṭṭhakavagga of the Suttanipāta need special mention. The Buddha is seen to have consistently avoided engagement in speculative metaphysics, pointing out that the goal of his teaching goes beyond all such engagement. The Buddha himself distinguished his own worldview as a Teaching in the Middle (majjhena) avoiding the common tendency of humankind to be trapped by either of the two extremes, Eternalism or Annihilationism. These distinctive standpoints of the Buddha are all seen to be amply represented in the Alagaddūpama Sutta.

With the present paper I study and translate a discourse in the Ekottarikaāgama preserved in Chinese of which no parallel in other discourse collections is known. This situation relates to the wider issue of what significance to accord to the absence of parallels from the viewpoint of the early Buddhist oral transmission. The main topic of the discourse itself is perception of impermanence, which is of central importance in the early Buddhist scheme of the path for cultivating liberating insight. A description of the results of such practice in this Ekottarika-āgama discourse has a somewhat ambivalent formulation that suggests a possible relation to the notion of rebirth in the Pure Abodes, suddhāvāsa. This notion, attested in a Pāli discourse, in turn might have provided a precedent for the aspiration, prominent in later Buddhist traditions, to be reborn in the Pure Land.

The suicide accounts of three bhikkhus in sutta literature probably inspired the formulation of a particular type of person who attains Arahantship at death, later designated as an ‘equal-headed’ (samasīsin) person in the Abhidhamma. The Theravāda tends to depict those bhikkhus as non-Arahants before suicide. The Pali commentary explains that they did not attain Arahantship until their deaths and refers to two of them as each being an ‘equal-header’ (samasīsī). By contrast, the (Mūla-)Sarvāstivāda sūtras and Abhidharma portray them as Arahants during their lifetimes. The Sarvāstivādins deny the concept of samasīsin proposed by the Vibhājyavādins, which include the Theravāda and Dharmaguptaka schools. The Pali commentaries provide various explanations and classifications of samasīsin, which have one idea in common: the term signifies the concurrence of two events, and it denotes at least a person who only becomes an Arahant at death, and sometimes someone who becomes an Arahant at the same time as a certain kind of event occurs. The Paṭisambhidāmagga, a quasi-Abhidhamma text, has a chapter that expounds ‘equal-head’ (samasīsa) in an oblique way by enumerating various kinds of sama and of sīsa separately. The Paṭisambhidāmagga commentary tries to make sense of the term samasīsa by associating this textual exposition of sama and sīsa with the more commonly found term samasīsin.

The article presents five fifteenth- to sixteenth-century Pali inscriptions from Sukhodaya, Thailand. Three of them are engraved in the Khom alphabet on large square stone slabs, with considerable attention to format; they seem to be unique in Thai epigraphy. Two of these carry extracts from the Abhidhamma; the third gives a syllabary followed by the recollection formulas of the Three Gems. The other two epigraphs are written not on stone slabs but are inscribed on small gold leaves; they contain the heart formulas of the books of the Tipiṭaka and the qualities of the Buddha, Dhamma, and Saṃgha. The exact find-spots and functions of the slabs and gold leaves are not known. I suggest that they are the products of widespread and enduring Buddhist cultures of inscription, installation, and consecration, as well as of customs of condensation and abbreviation that have have been intrinsic to Thai liturgical and manuscript practices up to the present.

The present contribution suggests the common authorship of three Pāli commentaries of the twelfth/thirteenth centuries CE, namely the Vinayavinicchayaṭīkā called Vinayasāratthasandīpanī (less probably Vinayatthasārasandīpanī), the Uttaravinicchayaṭīkā called Līnatthappakāsanī, and the Saccasaṅkhepaṭīkā called Sāratthasālinī. The information collected from these three commentaries themselves and from Pāli literary histories concerning these three texts leads to the second quarter of the thirteenth century CE as the period of their origination. The data from parallel texts explicitly stated to having been written by Vācissara Thera in the texts themselves render it possible to establish with a high degree of probability Vācissara Thera as their author.

The new Gāndhārī manuscript finds from Afghanistan and Pakistan, which date from approximately the first century BCE to the third or fourth century CE, are the earliest manuscript witnesses to the literature of the Indian Buddhist nikāyas or schools. They preserve texts whose parallels are found in the various Tripiṭakas, or what remains of them, preserved in other languages and belonging to various nikāyas, including sections of āgamas such as the Ekottarikāgama and Vana-saṃyutta of the Saṃyutta-nikāya/Saṃyuktāgama and anthologies of such sūtras, besides many texts that are not generally classed as “canonical”, such as commentaries. These very early collections of texts raise questions concerning canon-formation, such as whether the Gandhāran communities that produced these manuscripts had fixed āgama collections and closed canons or whether this material witnesses a stage in which collections and canons were still relatively fluid and open, and whether these manuscripts, which span several centuries, witness a shift towards fixity. This paper addresses these issues and re-examines our understanding of the formation of the canons of the early Indian nikāyas in light of the new Gāndhārī manuscript finds.

This article offers further support for Lance Cousins’ thesis that the Pāli canon, written down in the first century BCE in Sri Lanka, was based largely on a Theriya manuscript tradition from South India. Attention is also given to some of Cousins’ related arguments, in particular, that this textual transmission occurred within a Vibhajjavādin framework; that it occurred in a form of ‘proto-Pāli’ close to the Standard Epigraphical Prakrit of the first century BCE; and that that distinct Sinhalese nikāyas emerged perhaps as late as the third century CE.

This paper discusses the role of the Buddha’s wife, Yasodharā/Rāhulamātā, in Pāli Jātakas. Noting her continued popularity in South and Southeast Asian Buddhism, it considers her path to liberation seen as a composite whole, through many lifetimes, and considers some of the literary implications of this multiple depiction. The intention of this paper is to initiate more discussion about this figure as a sympathetic and central presence in Southern Buddhist text and practice.

This article explores the role of paccekabuddhas in stories of the Buddha’s past lives (jātaka tales) in early Buddhist narrative collections in Pāli and Sanskrit. In early Buddhism paccekabuddhas are liminal figures in two senses: they appear between Buddhist dispensations, and they are included as a category of awakening between sammāsambuddha and arahat. Because of their appearance in times of no Buddhism, paccekabuddhas feature regularly in jātaka literature, as exemplary renouncers, teachers, or recipients of gifts. This article asks what the liminal status of paccekabuddhas means for their interactions with the Buddha and his past lives as Bodhisatta.

This collection brings together scholarly contributions relating to the research of Lance Cousins (1942-2015), an influential and prolific scholar of early Buddhism. Cousins’ interests spanned several related fields from the study of Abhidhamma and early Buddhist schools to Pāli literature and meditation traditions. As well as being a scholar, Cousins was a noted meditation teacher and founder of the Samatha Trust. The influence of Cousin’s scholarship and teaching is felt strongly not only in the UK but in the worldwide Buddhist Studies community. The volume is introduced by Peter Harvey and the following chapters all speak to the core questions in the field such as the nature of the path, the role of meditation, the formation of early Buddhist schools, scriptures and teachings and the characteristics and contributions of Pāli texts. The volume is of interest to students and scholars in Buddhist Studies, Religious Studies and Asian Studies as well as Buddhist practitioners.