Buddhist origins and discussion of the Buddha’s teachings are amongst the most controversial and contested areas in the field. This bold and authoritative book tackles head-on some of the key questions regarding early Buddhism and its primary canon of precepts. Noting that the earliest texts in Pali, Sanskrit, and Chinese belong to different Buddhist schools, Roderick S. Bucknell addresses the development of these writings during the period of oral transmission between the Buddha’s death and their initial redaction in the first century bce. A meticulous comparative analysis reveals the likely original path of meditative practice applied and taught by Gotama. Fresh perspectives now emerge on both the Buddha himself and his enlightenment. Drawing on his own years of meditative experience as a Buddhist monk, the author offers here remarkable new interpretations of advanced practices of meditation, as well as of Buddhism itself. It is a landmark work in Buddhist studies.

The introductory chapter presents the problem posed for all Buddhists by the existence of differing versions of what the Buddha taught, preserved by different early schools of Buddhism, in different languages. Using specific examples, it shows how by focussing on these very textual discrepancies, the methodology of comparative analysis to be applied in this book can actually reveal what is most likely to have been the Buddha’s original teaching. A discussion follows of the assumptions underlying this methodology and how it might be applied to core components of Buddhist doctrine. The chapter concludes by showing how the structure of the book is defined by the fourth of the Buddha’s four noble truths, which specifies the path of practice to be followed to end suffering and attain enlightenment.

This chapter surveys the corpus of early Buddhist texts that have survived the passage of time and can be consulted by scholars. These comprise the complete canon of the Theravāda school written in Pali, a significant amount of the canon in Sanskrit belonging to the Sarvāstivāda school, plus more in Chinese translation, and substantial portions of the canons of other schools, also preserved in Chinese. Determining whether particular texts were early or later, along with analysis of their mode of transmission, enables them to be evaluated as sources for comparative analysis. This rather technical chapter concludes with a discussion of difficulties encountered in drawing parallels between texts from different schools in different languages.

This chapter addresses some of the discrepancies and anomalies that occur in textual accounts of mindfulness. Analysis begins by comparing three different versions of the core text, the “Discourse on the Foundations of Mindfulness”, one in Pali and two in Chinese, deriving from three different schools of early Buddhism. Discrepancies exist not only among these three versions but also between this core text and other accounts of mindfulness practice. These inconsistencies have attracted the attention of meditators and scholars alike. Three previous studies are discussed, from which it is concluded that confusion has arisen from failure clearly to distinguish between awareness (of breathing, body posture, etc.) and mindfulness as a mental discipline and that the ancestral practice from which the three versions derive is most likely to have comprised just the components that the three versions have in common.