Book Review: Esoteric Theravada: The Story of the Forgotten Meditation Tradition of Southeast Asia

Exploring Theravāda's connections to other paths - what can we learn from other traditions, religions and philosophies?
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Lucas Oliveira
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Book Review: Esoteric Theravada: The Story of the Forgotten Meditation Tradition of Southeast Asia

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Book Review: Esoteric Theravada: The Story of the Forgotten Meditation Tradition of Southeast Asia

In Theravada lies a fascinating contemporary contradiction. On one hand, Theravada Buddhists, with some justification, maintain that the overall tradition of Theravada is the oldest extant transmission of Buddhism. On the other, modern Theravada (as a practice distinct from the Pali Canon) is actually a relatively modern movement by the very virtue of understanding itself as something older and more authentic than other expressions of Buddhism (specifically, the various Mahayana and Vajrayana schools). As Prof. Kate Crosby challenges in her new book Esoteric Theravada: The Story of the Forgotten Meditation Tradition of Southeast Asia, when was the last time readers really encountered an in-depth study on pre-modern Theravada practices in Southeast Asia? In this seminal book, Crosby introduces to a broader audience borān kammaṭṭhāna, the “old meditation” that was established and promoted by royalty and by the supreme patriarchs of the Buddhist sangha in the regions that would become Cambodia, Laos, Sri Lanka, and Thailand. (173–74) It is anything but a simple school of meditation, and far beyond what conventional coverage has cast for decades as simply being a dichotomy of samatha and vipassana. The historical borān kammaṭṭhāna is a phenomenon that preceded this dichotomy and, in many ways, united both practices.

https://www.buddhistdoor.net/features/b ... heast-asia


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Re: Book Review: Esoteric Theravada: The Story of the Forgotten Meditation Tradition of Southeast Asia

Post by form »

This book looks exciting.
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Aloka
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Re: Book Review: Esoteric Theravada: The Story of the Forgotten Meditation Tradition of Southeast Asia

Post by Aloka »

I have ordered this book because it looks really interesting!


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DiamondNgXZ
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Re: Book Review: Esoteric Theravada: The Story of the Forgotten Meditation Tradition of Southeast Asia

Post by DiamondNgXZ »

Take note that the book doesn't go into much details on how to practise that, more of scholarly details, which maybe boring if you're not used to reading academic kind of work. Read it, doesn't shed much light on practise.
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Sabbe_Dhamma_Anatta
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Re: Book Review: Esoteric Theravada: The Story of the Forgotten Meditation Tradition of Southeast Asia

Post by Sabbe_Dhamma_Anatta »

Thanks for posting this in Connections to Other Paths.

I've no objection against the author's intention to rediscover & revive that specific form of practice. However, if the author may want to depict this practice as some original version of Theravada, it would be utterly nonsensical. That is not a book about Theravada, of course.


These don't belong to Theravada.
  • “The meditation system is complex, employing a range of methods to induce transformation in the individual. Some of these methods are usually associated with other fields, especially generative grammar, ayurvedic obstetrics, and alchemy. These features of the practice take me into the technicalities of areas no longer seen as related either to Buddhism or spiritual transformation.”

Regarding some similar practices in Myanmar, the book says:
  • “Despite these challenges, the evidence for borān kammaṭṭhāna, once we know what we are looking for, is far more widespread, accessible, and unproblematic to deal with than other esoteric forms of Theravada meditation, such as, for example, the weikza meditation in Burma (Myanmar).”
    That weikza thing is not Theravada. Yes, they do, as found in the first quote, alchemy, numerology, 'alphabetology', medicine-related things etc.It's just a pollutant to Theravada in Myanmar.


And, what is this nonsense, apparently portraying Buddha? :
  • The Buddha proclaimed, “Meaning is understood through phonemes. The sense of all speech is understood only through the phonemes. When there is a mistake in the phonemes, there is confusion as to the meaning. Therefore, skillfulness regarding phonemes is very helpful in relation to the Sutta-teachings.”

    On hearing the Buddha, Venerable Mahākaccāyana said, “Lord, please permit me to compose a book on phonemes that would henceforth protect the teaching contained in the Tipiṭaka, with its 84,000 portions. It would enable living beings to refer to the constituents of materiality, rūpa-dhamma, the constituents of mentality, nāma-dhamma, all the volitional formations, sabba-saṅkhāra-dhamma, and functional consciousness as conditioning states, kiriya-citta-paccaya-dhamma, in conformity with the phonemes (sadda) that make up the entire collection of texts.”

    The Buddha replied, “Excellent! Proceed, Mahākaccāyana.”

    At these words, the venerable Mahākaccāyana composed the book of phonemes in its entirety. He began, “Now the phonemes beginning with the letter a are forty-one in number, namely, a ā i ī u ū e o | ka kha ga gha ṅa | ca cha ja jha ña | ṭa ṭha ḍa ḍha ṇa | ta tha da dha na | pa pha ba bha ma | ya ra la va | sa ha ḷa aṃ. “These forty-one become the constituents of materiality and the constituents of consciousness. “The vowels become materiality. The three vowels of light measure are the short vowels a i u. They are the articulation of the two ankles, the two knees, and the two elbows. The others are called long vowels ā ī ū e o. They divide into five branches. The phoneme ā becomes the left leg. The phoneme ī becomes the right leg. The phoneme ū becomes the left arm. The phoneme e becomes the right arm. The phoneme o becomes the torso. This is why the vowels are called ‘constituents of materiality.’ The thirty-two consonants become the thirty-two physical constituents of the body beginning with the hair.”
𝓑𝓾𝓭𝓭𝓱𝓪 𝓗𝓪𝓭 𝓤𝓷𝓮𝓺𝓾𝓲𝓿𝓸𝓬𝓪𝓵𝓵𝔂 𝓓𝓮𝓬𝓵𝓪𝓻𝓮𝓭 𝓣𝓱𝓪𝓽
  • Iᴅᴇᴀ ᴏꜰ Sᴏᴜʟ ɪs Oᴜᴛᴄᴏᴍᴇ ᴏꜰ ᴀɴ Uᴛᴛᴇʀʟʏ Fᴏᴏʟɪsʜ Vɪᴇᴡ
    V. Nanananda

𝓐𝓷𝓪𝓽𝓽ā 𝓜𝓮𝓪𝓷𝓼 𝓣𝓱𝓪𝓽 𝓣𝓱𝓮𝓻𝓮 𝓘𝓼
  • Nᴏ sᴜᴄʜ ᴛʜɪɴɢ ᴀs ᴀ Sᴇʟғ, Sᴏᴜʟ, Eɢᴏ, Sᴘɪʀɪᴛ, ᴏʀ Āᴛᴍᴀɴ
    V. Buddhādasa
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Nicholas Weeks
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Re: Book Review: Esoteric Theravada: The Story of the Forgotten Meditation Tradition of Southeast Asia

Post by Nicholas Weeks »

Here is how Crosby's Introduction begins:
Today we are surrounded by a rich profusion of meditation teachings
from the Theravada world as well as the array of secularized
Mindfulness practices that they have inspired. The early Buddhist
texts that teach meditation are also familiar to many, widely
available in translation, and have been for over a century. This
situation might lead us to assume that these present-day practices
represent unbroken, uncontested lineages of meditation teaching
going back to the Buddha himself. Those more familiar with the
history of how Theravada Buddhists had to fight for the survival of
their religion, against the devastation and upheaval of the European
colonial period, know that many of these modern offerings were
stirred into life by that fight. It has been said that there was little or
no meditation at all (or perhaps only isolated and fragmentary forest
traditions) in Theravada countries before its well-documented
reconstruction as part of that revival. There did exist, however, an
extensive, older tradition of meditation. It was represented across
the Theravada world at court and among the Sangha (monastic)
hierarchy as much as in rural contexts. Reflecting its anteriority to
the meditations of the revival period, I shall here refer to that system
of meditation as borān kammaṭṭhāna, “the old meditation.” This
book is about its history, its distinctive practices, the evidence we
have for it, how it sat within its broader cultural context, and why it
disappeared.

This older tradition was marginalized and suppressed in the
course of the reforms and revivals of Buddhism from the nineteenth
century onward because of characteristics no longer seen as fitting in
the new world order: sequential, body-based practices that
internalize meditative experiences to create an enlightened being
within, which utilize potent language and are transmitted in an
esoteric teacher-pupil relationship. As such they reminded some
modern observers of tantra, others of magical lore, and were
dismissed as corruptions or as influences from beyond Theravada.

Hidden beneath those characteristics, however, is a rigorous
framework of Abhidhamma, the orthodox Theravada teaching of how
causality and transformation happen. This framework is not
immediately visible to the casual observer or even the beginner
practitioner. Moreover, many of the somatic characteristics that at
first seem strange in fact point to the participation of meditators in
scientific techniques unrecognized and unappreciated by Western
observers and Buddhist modernizers. This book attempts to present
a holistic view of the nature of this meditation system. I am
particularly interested in its understanding of how change happens
and how it relates to other technologies of transformation.
Good and evil have no fixed form. It's as easy to turn from doing bad to doing good as it is to flip over the hand from the back to the palm. It's simply up to us to do it. Master Hsuan Hua.
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Re: Book Review: Esoteric Theravada: The Story of the Forgotten Meditation Tradition of Southeast Asia

Post by mikenz66 »

Sabbe_Dhamma_Anatta wrote: Sun Sep 12, 2021 4:02 am I've no objection against the author's intention to rediscover & revive that specific form of practice. However, if the author may want to depict this practice as some original version of Theravada, it would be utterly nonsensical. That is not a book about Theravada, of course.
Of course, there is some fluidity around what is "Theravada" and what is "Stuff Theravada people do". Besides, Theravada is a particular school that became fully formed many hundreds of years after the Buddha, whether being "not Theravada" a good thing or a bad thing depends on one's point of view.

In my view, if someone feels that they can learn from the history and experiential knowledge of living traditions then it can be very useful to read the Visuddhimagga, later Theravada texts, texts from other schools, and studies of more recent developments such as this one. And also to look critically at how the modern views of what is "Theravada" and "EBT" have been created.

In any case, here is some earlier discussions:
viewtopic.php?f=13&t=38839
viewtopic.php?t=10503

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Nicholas Weeks
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Re: Book Review: Esoteric Theravada: The Story of the Forgotten Meditation Tradition of Southeast Asia

Post by Nicholas Weeks »

The 2011 thread "Tantric Theravada?" covers the ground well:

viewtopic.php?f=16&t=10503

Methods of cultivation are many, yet it is will, wisdom & character of the cultivator & his teacher that gives good results -- the method less so.
Good and evil have no fixed form. It's as easy to turn from doing bad to doing good as it is to flip over the hand from the back to the palm. It's simply up to us to do it. Master Hsuan Hua.
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Re: Book Review: Esoteric Theravada: The Story of the Forgotten Meditation Tradition of Southeast Asia

Post by form »

Some of the ways non western people see meditation, western people will not understand.
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