01 Meditation Panel Preface.indd - United Nations Day of Vesak 2013

to do with the notion of ‘I’ ness in arahats, intriguingly imagining an encounter in which he can pose
various questions to a new arahat in order to ascertain the nature of the continuity that exists when
‘I’ making has ceased. By examining Wittgenstein’s notions of ‘I’ ness the author takes a fresh look
at some truisms of Buddhist exegesis. He concludes that ‘the rst-personal pronoun, ‘I’, ‘aha’ …
has not only a ‘use’, but a genuine ‘meaning’: the intrinsic and irreducible pure subjectivity –
the ‘‘I’-ness’ – of intentional consciousness’.
The following paper argues that the Buddhist delineation of states and stages of meditative
practice itself constitutes a kind of science, yet to be appreciated within the conventional
parameters of modern scientic discourse. ‘Is It True That Buddhism is Mind-Based Science?’
by Apisin Sivayathorn and Apichai Puntasen, avers that the Buddhist analysis of the mind and its
processes are described within Buddhism with a methodology that both denes the problem and
provides a means of deliverance, elements both essential to its particular orientation. It argues
that the subtleties of the Buddhist path as described within early texts provide a different kind of
science, for the practitioner, from modern academic disciplines. It contends that the close delineation
of states involved in mundane and supramundane jhna present a number of debating points for
modern scholars and practitioners, but nonetheless constitute a full salvic path, closely described
at each stage in a careful and scientic manner.
‘The Pleasant Way: The Dhyna-s, Insight and the Path according to the Abhidharmakoa’,
by Karin Meyers, asks ten basic questions often debated in commentarial literature as well as modern
academic and practice based discussion: Is dhyna essential for path? Does it have a single object?
Does the body provide the means whereby the state is experienced? These and other questions
are addressed with particular reference to the suggestions made in the Abhidharmakoa, but with
extensive allusion to modern discourse on the subject in varied Buddhist schools. A sense of
the momentary, simultaneous arising of vitarka and vicra (the rst two factors of dhyna/jhna,
initial and sustained thought), for instance, is felt difcult by some to reconcile with temporally
described processes in the sequential suttanta manner, such as the bee alighting on a ower: indeed
Vasubandhu, in contrast to his contemporaries, concludes that the two attributes cannot arise together
in one moment. The singleness of the object in dhyna/jhna, and whether or not it is also possible
to perceive a changing or multiple object in that state is also debated. Her detailed and scholarly
study of the Abhidharmakoa understanding of these questions, reveals, as she notes, some surprising
conclusions: many of the issues that most concern modern commentators are addressed, but their
resolution often dees expectation. Taking the example of the nature of the object in dhyna/jhna,
she notes that the Abhidharmakoa’s understanding is sometimes radically different from modern
practitioners: did Vasubandhu and his contemporaries simply have a different experience, or one
we do not yet appreciate, or an approach not primarily based on practice? Whatever the case, she
argues that study of the internal logic of the text, and its systematic path structure, may provide
some theoretical coherence: she suggests, for instance, that Vasubandhu’s reticence on the subject
of bodily manifestation and experience may reect a deliberate intent to present the path from
a non-phenomenological viewpoint. She strongly recommends further pursuit of these issues.
Thanaphon Cheungsirakulvit in ‘Buddhadsa’s Poetry: the Object of Contemplation on
Emptiness’, takes a perspective on language sometimes neglected in modern Buddhist scholarship
on meditative literature of Southern Buddhist schools: study of its manifestation in the various literary
forms in which meditative experience have been transmitted since the earliest period. Through
a careful examination of poetry concerned with meditation, in particular the works of Buddhadsa,
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