Buddhist Meditation and the Great Chain of Being: Some Misgivings

In his Buddhist Meditation, Edward Conze puts it plainly: \u27Meditational practices constitute the very core of the Buddhist approach to life.\u271 To presume that the wisdom gained from mental culture is equally available to intellectual analysis, even of the highly refined and subtle, sort, is to presume that a job requiring a laser can be done equally will with a blowtorch. The Buddha\u27s deepest insights are available to the intellect, and powerfully so, but it is only when those insights are discovered and absorbed, by a psyche made especially keen and receptive by long coursing in meditative discipline, that they begin to find their fullest realization and effectiveness. Precisely because of the inestimable importance of meditation practice in Buddhism, we shall adopt it as a perspective from which to assess the notion of the \u27Triple World,\u27 a Buddhist version of the hierarchical ontology or \u27Great Chain of Being\u27 we often find represented in traditional worldviews. ~ from the articl