ABSTRACT
This chapter calls into question a common view about the purpose of Buddhist meditation and offers an alternative interpretation. It is often supposed that a primary purpose of Buddhist meditation is to provide experiential knowledge that there is no self. This is typically taken to mean that some form of insight meditation (vipassanā), such as mindfulness, is a source of knowledge of the absence of self. This interpretation, what may be called the metaphysical understanding model of meditation, has some plausibility, but this chapter offers reasons to question it. Moreover, the two core meditation practices in the Nikāyas (early Buddhist discourses) – mindfulness and concentration – are better understood as enabling practitioners to live without craving and clinging, as the key step in overcoming suffering, the primary goal of Buddhism. Hence, the main epistemic purpose of these practices is, in Western terms, knowing how to live without suffering, rather than knowing that there is no self. This chapter defends this interpretation, what may be called the knowledge-how model of meditation, and discusses its implications for understanding the significance of the no-self teaching.
