Teaching Awareness in the Buddhist Tradition - Essays in Honour of Professor Corrado Pensa - Chiara Neri
1. The Meditative Cultivation of Joy
Teaching Awareness in the Buddhist Tradition - Essays in Honour of Professor Corrado Pensa - Chiara Neri
Bhikkhu Analayo [+]
Barre Centre for Buddhist Studies
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Description
In what follows I explore the significance of joy (pīti/prīti) in the context of descriptions of early Buddhist meditation, based on a comparative study of the discourses found in the Pāli Nikāyas and their counterparts in the Chinese Āgamas. After a survey of selected passages in order to gain a general impression of the role of meditative joy, I explore in particular an apparent tendency to reduce the scheme of sixteen steps of mindfulness of breathing to its first tetrad, as a result of which the importance of the meditative cultivation of joy is no longer evident and the practice itself loses part of its potential to lead to a state of mind free of distraction.