Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha: An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book

by Daniel M. Ingram

One of the factors that add to the confusion is that the concentration state terminology (jhanas) is used in the Pali canon to describe both the progressively more advanced concentration states and the progress of insight, with little disambiguation. This was solved to some degree about one to three hundred years after the earliest texts in the Pali canon were written down when the stages of insight were articulated in the Abhidhamma and commentaries to the canonical texts, but the original problem was not explicitly mentioned. It was only in the second half of the twentieth century that the problem was sorted out to some degree by Burmese scholar-monks, particularly Sayadaw U Pandita. Bill Hamilton and some of those whom he influenced, such as Kenneth Folk and myself, have developed this more in the last twenty years or so, such that we now have a robust, rich, phenomenological lexicon detailing clearly and deeply what came before.