ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with a set of instances of historical change and doctrinal development within the Pali Canon. The most important of these changes is the development of the idea that Enlightenment can be attained without meditation, by a process of intellectual analysis (technically known as pañña, insight) alone. This idea is perhaps made fully explicit in only two texts of the Sutta Pitaka; but even one would be enough to authorise practice. There has certainly survived in Theravada Buddhism a tradition of behaviour which takes these texts as its authority. There is also a Buddhist Sanskrit text (but preserved only in Chinese translation), Harivarman’s Satya-siddhi-fastra1
which uses the same canonical material to reach the same conclusion; but this work belongs to an extinct school of the Fravakayana (the Bahufrutiya).2 So far as I know, the Theravada is the only surviving form of Buddhism to accept this idea.
