A Less Traveled Path: Saddharmasmṛtyupasthānasūtra Chapter 2, with A Study on Its Structure and Significance for the Development of Buddhist Meditation
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A Less Traveled Path brings to light unique textual evidence of an important transitional moment in Indian Buddhism. In this book, Daniel Stuart introduces the recently discovered Sanskrit manuscript of a third- or fourth-century Buddhist Sanskrit text, the Saddharmasmṛtyupasthānasūtra, which sheds light on the so-called “Middle Period” of Indian Buddhism.
The book argues that meditative practice, rhetoric, and philosophy were intimately tied to one another when the Saddharmasmṛtyupasthānasūtra was redacted, and that it serves as an important historical touchstone for understanding the development of a Buddhist mind-centered metaphysics. The text offers perhaps the clearest available evidence for the process through which philosophical developments grew organically out of specific meditation practices rooted in the early canonical Buddhist tradition. It also evidences an emergent historical ideology of cosmic power, one that ties ethical conduct, contemplative knowledge, and literary practice to a spiritual goal of selfless cosmographical sovereignty. This development is historically significant because it marks a major shift in Indian Buddhist religious practice, which conditioned the emergence of fully developed Mahāyāna path schemes and power-oriented tantric ritual traditions in the centuries that followed the text’s compilation.
The study includes a critical edition and translation of the text’s second chapter based on the recently discovered manuscript, the first installment of a series of critical editions of the chapters of the Saddharmasmṛtyupasthānasūtra.