Books by Daniel M Stuart
Hamburg Buddhist Studies, 2024
This monograph interrogates a dominant teleological narrative about the history of modern global ... more This monograph interrogates a dominant teleological narrative about the history of modern global insight meditation and mindfulness: namely, that modern mass meditation movements were the inevitable result of the work of a handful of modern reformers who were in large part responding to colonial forces in Asia.
Focusing on the figure of S. N. Goenka (1924–2013) and his Burmese lineage, the book redescribes the development of twentieth-century lay-focused insight meditation and mindfulness emergent from Burma (Myanmar). By recovering the historical background, lineage relationships, and practice contexts of Goenka’s teacher, the Burmese lay meditation master Sayagyi U Ba Khin (1899– 1971), the book elucidates the historical dynamics that gave rise to one of the most influential global meditation institutions of the twentieth century. Daniel M. Stuart shows that an appreciation of the cosmological, political, and personal motivations of the meditation teachers in S. N. Goenka’s lineage brings to light occluded aspects of the history of modern global insight meditation.
Shambhala Publications (Lives of the Masters), 2020
In a life that saw him evolve from a staunchly religious Hindu to an ecumenical master of Buddhis... more In a life that saw him evolve from a staunchly religious Hindu to an ecumenical master of Buddhist insight meditation, Satyanārāyaṇ (S. N.) Goenka (1924–2013) emerged as a leader in the spread of lay mindfulness and insight meditation practice on a global scale.
Drawing heavily on Goenka’s own autobiographical writings and Dharma talks, S. N. Goenka: Emissary of Insight is the first comprehensive portrait of his life. Stuart incorporates a wide range of primary documents and newly translated material in Hindi and Burmese to offer readers an in-depth exploration of Goenka’s life and teachings. This fascinating addition to the Lives of the Masters series reflects on Goenka’s role in the revival of Buddhism in postcolonial India and his emergence as one of the most influential meditation masters of the twentieth century.
Maitreya is the future Buddha, the Buddha who will follow our present Buddha Śākyamuni. For more ... more Maitreya is the future Buddha, the Buddha who will follow our present Buddha Śākyamuni. For more than two thousand years Maitreya (Pali: Metteyya) has been an inspiration for Buddhist devotees who look forward to his coming and aspire to meet him and receive his blessings and teachings. Their devotions have animated art, ritual, meditation practice, and literature across Asia. The Theravaṃsa of Sri Lanka and South-East Asia transmits a ‘Chronicle of the Future’ (Anāgatavaṃsa) in a bewildering number of recensions. Written in Pali, the ‘Chronicle’ is a paean of the golden future that Maitreya will inaugurate for those who practice sincerely. The present volume contains a study, a critical edition, and an annotated translation of a commentary on the ‘Chronicle’, the Amatarasadhārā, or ‘Stream of Deathless Nectar’ composed in Pali by the Sri Lankan elder Upatissa. An appendix gives the Pali Anāgatavaṃsa side by side with two fourteenth-century Tibetan translations. The volume is a significant contribution to research on Maitreya the future Buddha and to the study of the Pali manuscript culture of Thailand.
A Less Traveled Path brings to light unique textual evidence of an important transitional moment ... more 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 Buddhist mind-centered metaphysics. The text offers perhaps the clearest available evidence for the process in 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.
https://verlag.oeaw.ac.at/a-less-traveled-path-saddharmasmtyupasthnanstra-chapter-2
Papers by Daniel M Stuart
Mind, Text, and Reality in Buddhist Studies: Engaging the Scholarship of Rupert Gethin, 2025
In coming to terms with the history of meditation and theories of salvation in
premodern South A... more In coming to terms with the history of meditation and theories of salvation in
premodern South Asia, the importance of the teachings of the Buddha cannot
be overemphasized. !is is the case not simply for reasons of foundational
in"uence, but likewise for reasons of historical evidence. Scholars have almost
no unambiguous concrete evidence of systems of meditation and yogic practice
in South Asia before the earliest Buddhist sources, and there exists little material
from a#er that time that is not in"ected – directly or indirectly – in relation to
Buddhist practice traditions.
But coming to terms with early and classical traditions of Buddhist practice is
a challenging endeavour. !e work of Rupert Gethin over the past three decades
has contributed substantially to scholarly understanding of such traditions,
and in this chapter, I showcase how Gethin’s methodology for dealing with
the earliest layers of Buddhist textual tradition can be deployed productively
to analyse a speci$c set of questions about early Buddhist practice. Gethin has
in"uenced my thinking immensely, and my encounters with him during my
graduate studies planted seeds that converted my approach to early Buddhist
texts in a variety of ways. Perhaps, most importantly, Gethin pushed me to
think about early Buddhist texts holistically, and this chapter is, in many ways, a
homage to Gethin’s holistic methodological perspicacity.
Knowing Life: The Ethics of Multispecies Epistemologies, 2025
Thinking about Buddhism from the angle of multispecies studies, and within the framework of multi... more Thinking about Buddhism from the angle of multispecies studies, and within the framework of multispecies epistemologies, is challenging for a number of reasons. This is the case, first and foremost, because the referents of premodern "Buddhism" are diverse and remain contested among scholars with different methodological and theoretical commitments. So, while we might look at various case studies from a range of Buddhist contexts to query notions of Buddhist multispecies epistemologies, a normative perspective on how Buddhism or Buddhists might provide resources to think at the edge of multispecies studies remains somewhat elusive. Second, the two most dominant methodological approaches to the study of Buddhism-the doctrinal/philosophical and the socio-historical approaches-tend to project a default humanism or a metaphysical naturalism (often in the guise of a methodological naturalism) onto the foundations of the Buddhist tradition. A default humanism in these contexts tends to minimize the importance of nonhuman agencies within traditional thought systems, while metaphysical naturalisms tend to remove such agencies entirely unless they can be accounted for naturalistically. It is my contention here that the onto-epistemic commitments of these approaches often constrain the ways in which the various species depicted within traditional Buddhist cosmologies get understood and figured, at times obscuring the traditional onto-epistemic relationalities of such cosmologies in their Asian contexts. In this chapter, I approach the issue of multispecies epistemology within Buddhism by focusing on a specific cosmovision presented in a particular textcomplex from around the third century CE in South Asia. 2 This text-complex is comprised of two voluminous and interrelated texts-the Saddharma-smṛtyupasthāna-sūtra ("The Teaching on Setting up Awareness of Real Phenomena") and the *Kāya-smṛty-upasthāna-sūtra ("The Teaching on Setting Up Awareness of the Body")-both of which are attributed by tradition to the historical Buddha.
Buddhakṣetrapariśodhana: A Festschrift for Paul Harrison, 2024
I present here a critical edition, diplomatic edition, and English translation of folios 217a1-21... more I present here a critical edition, diplomatic edition, and English translation of folios 217a1-218a5 of the only known extant Sanskrit manuscript of the Saddharma-smṛty-upasthāna-sūtra.
Numen, 2024
This article takes as its starting point a repertoire of protective texts and practices articulat... more This article takes as its starting point a repertoire of protective texts and practices articulated as ritual therapeutics in the early twentieth century by the well-known Burmese scholar-monk, the Ledi Sayadaw. Through an exploration of meditation-practice, meditation-teaching, and meditation-performance contexts in postcolonial Burma and India, I demonstrate the ways in which such texts and practices were adapted and refigured within the teaching models of two important twentieth-century Vipassanā meditation masters, Sayagyi U Ba Khin and S. N. Goenka. I argue that these protective texts and practices are constitutive aspects of the meditation modalities developed by these two teachers. I conclude with an exploration of the history of the Black American theologian and student of U Ba Khin, Leon E. Wright. In reflecting on Wright’s case, I consider the ways in which modern scholarly practices within Buddhist (modernism) studies continue to participate in the erasure of historically marginalized worlds and persons. (This article is the published version of a talk delivered at a workshop entitled "Performing Theravada" held at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in June of 2022.)
Cristina Pecchia and Vincent Eltschinger (eds.), Mārga: Paths to Liberation in South Asian Buddhist Traditions. Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 2020
Many years ago, Robert Buswell observed a key distinction between two key śāstric sources on the ... more Many years ago, Robert Buswell observed a key distinction between two key śāstric sources on the Buddhist path. He noted how the *Abhidharmamahāvibhāṣāśāstra (ca 150 CE) is largely retrospective in its outlook, surveying the path as if from the standpoint of its final goal. Conversely, the Visuddhimagga (ca 430 CE) is largely proleptic or developmental in its outlook, presenting the path from the perspective of a practitioner traveling it, as if looking out at the path with the final goal in the distance. He suggested that these different approaches lead to different ways of theorizing the entailments of the path or practically engaging it. In this article, I present an analysis of some aspects of a relatively little-known treatment of the Buddhist path of practice, found in a middle period sūtra attributed to the Buddha, the Saddharmasmṛtyupasthānasūtra (hereafter Saddhsu; ca 150–400 CE or possibly earlier). The text’s historical position and likely connection to on-the-ground meditation practice make it a key source for understanding some of the central dynamics that broadened the scope of theorization on Buddhist practice during the early centuries of the Common Era in South Asia. The path of practice set out in the Saddharmasmṛtyupasthānasūtra walks an interesting line between the two approaches to the path noted by Buswell. It presents a largely developmental model of practice, but its narrative structure also provides for a retrospective stance. And it is this amalgamation of—or perhaps accommodation of— perspectives that provides the Saddhsu with its particular outlook on the path.
I suggest here that this way of framing the Buddhist path should be understood as a key early development that contributed to new and expansive forms of conceptualizing the Buddhist path in history.
Religions, 2019
In an early discourse from the Saṃyuttanikāya, the Buddha states: "I do not see any other order o... more In an early discourse from the Saṃyuttanikāya, the Buddha states: "I do not see any other order of living beings so diversified as those in the animal realm. Even those beings in the animal realm have been diversified by the mind, yet the mind is even more diverse than those beings in the animal realm." This paper explores how this key early Buddhist idea gets elaborated in various layers of Buddhist discourse during a millennium of historical development. I focus in particular on a middle period Buddhist sūtra, the Saddharmasmṛtyupasthānasūtra, which serves as a bridge between early Buddhist theories of mind and karma, and later more developed theories. This third-century South Asian Buddhist Sanskrit text on meditation practice, karma theory, and cosmology psychologizes animal behavior and places it on a spectrum with the behavior of humans and divine beings. It allows for an exploration of the conceptual interstices of Buddhist philosophy of mind and contemporary theories of embodied cognition. Exploring animal embodiments--and their karmic limitations--becomes a means to exploring all beings, an exploration that can't be separated from the human mind among beings.
Journal of Indian Philosophy, 2018
The connection between early yogācāras, or practitioners of yoga, and later Yogācāra-vijñānavāda ... more The connection between early yogācāras, or practitioners of yoga, and later Yogācāra-vijñānavāda philosophy has long preoccupied scholars. But these connections remain obscure. This article suggests that a text that has received little attention in modern scholarship, the Saddharmasmṛtyupasthānasūtra, may shed light on aspects of early yogācāra contemplative cultures that gave rise to some of the formative dynamics of Yogācāra-vijñānavāda thought. I show how traditional Buddhist meditative practice and engagement with Abhidharma theoretics come together in the Saddharmasmṛtyuasthānasūtra to produce a novel theory of mind that mirrors many of the philosophical problematics that early and late Yogācāra-vijñānavādins confronted and attempted to work out in śāstric detail.
Religions of South Asia, 2017
This article fills in a gap in the historiography of modern insight and mindfulness meditation. B... more This article fills in a gap in the historiography of modern insight and mindfulness meditation. By providing an account of the role of S. N. Goenka in the formation and dissemination of modern insight meditation (vipassanā), and his reframing of Burmese Buddhist meditation in a postcolonial South Asian context, I show how the roots of modern therapeutic forms of mindfulness emerge from magico-religious contexts that have been glossed over in a process of scientization. By presenting two parallel case studies from South Asia, in which insight meditation was appropriated and repurposed by Jain and Hindu communities under the pressure of distinct social, personal, and religious forces, I suggest that modern therapeutic mindfulness is just one instantiation of other similar processes. By understanding the variety of ways in which insight meditation has been encountered by and made available to prospective practitioners in multiple social and historical contexts, historians can better understand the complex of factors that gave rise to the modern category of 'mindfulness'.
Susan Andrews, Jinhua Chen, and Cuilan Liu (eds.). Rules of Engagement: Medieval Traditions of Buddhist Monastic Regulation., 2017
The early Buddhist disciplinary literature contains some of the oldest data on legal theory and p... more The early Buddhist disciplinary literature contains some of the oldest data on legal theory and practice available to scholars of South Asia. This literature is also of central importance for understanding the social structures and relations of power within early Buddhist communities—as a set of self-regulating corporate groups—and their place within the broader fabric of premodern South Asian society. This chapter explores some aspects of procedural law in early Buddhist disciplinary literature as an entry point for understanding the operative modes of authority and the underpinnings of legislative thought in Buddhist monasticisms. Through a study of procedures for settling disputes or litigation (adhikaraṇaśamatha), I argue for a vision of power within early Buddhist communities that on the one hand prioritized community cohesion against individual needs, personal rights, or exchange of ideas, and on the other hand created opportunities for the resolution of conflicts and the public performance of community power and participatory ideals. I suggest that these issues get played out around a central tension in Buddhist monastic law and social life in general: the tension between legislative authority as originally unilateral and monocratic—a series of decrees issued by the sovereign Buddha—and a social context in which dissenting forces demand to be allowed expression.
Jundo Nagashima and Seongcheol Kim (eds.) 2017. Śrāvakabhūmi and Buddhist Manuscripts. Tokyo: Nombre Inc., 2017
The problematic of how mind and materiality interact fundamentally drives much of Buddhist metaph... more The problematic of how mind and materiality interact fundamentally drives much of Buddhist metaphysics. Various concepts emerged within different strands of Buddhist thought—particularly within the Abhidharma traditions—to deal with this problematic and to sort out a range of different practical, exegetical, and philosophical issues in the process. Among these concepts are categories such as the “storehouse consciousness” (ālayavijñāna: a mental substratum undergirding physical life) and “unmanifest materiality” (avijñaptirūpa: a form of karmically produced materiality that is not manifest to the physical senses), both of which are situated between the gross materiality of human bodies and the ethereal and less effable stuff of the mind. Debates about such concepts are directly relevant to traditions of Buddhist practice in its broadest sense—including ethical cultivation (śīla), the cultivation of deep states of concentration (samādhi), and the cultivation of discernment into the nature of reality (prajñā). In this chapter, I explore how engagements with—as well as shifting interpretations and historical understandings of—early Buddhist practice, and the connection of such practices with later śāstric debates about meditation, contributed to the development of such concepts. In this connection, this article is an attempt to understand the following liminal categories of materiality: 1. “unmanifest materiality,” 2. visual objects experienced in meditation, and 3. bodies of intermediate beings as they pass from one life to another in a process of rebirth.
Critical Review for Buddhist Studies, Dec 2015
The third-century CE Buddhist Sanskrit text, the Saddharmasmṛtyupasthānasūtra, allows scholars a ... more The third-century CE Buddhist Sanskrit text, the Saddharmasmṛtyupasthānasūtra, allows scholars a glimpse into a largely unstudied early cult of Buddhist meditation practitioners (yogācāra). The text’s theoretical engagement with the path of Buddhist practice reveals an expansive vision of spiritual power founded on ethical mastery and culminating in powerful forms of insight knowledge. I argue that the text represents an explicit and unique attempt to theorize a Buddha’s omniscience and the path leading to such omniscience. Employing specific Buddhist insight practices as foundational for cultivating such knowledge, the regime of practice outlined in the Saddharmasmṛtyupasthānasūtra allows a Buddhist practitioner to experientially negotiate a variety of epistemological registers, from the ethical to the deconstructive, and to thereby acquire knowledge of the reality that serves as a powerful force in the development of cosmic sovereignty, Buddha-like power. I show how this theorization about Buddhist practice, knowledge, and power is carried out by drawing on traditional canonical textual sources and pushing beyond them in a layered narrative that figures the yogācāra practitioner as a powerful conduit of a Buddhist contemplative metaknowledge approaching omniscience.
This appendix contains four sections from chapter 6 of the Sanskrit manuscript of the Saddharmasm... more This appendix contains four sections from chapter 6 of the Sanskrit manuscript of the Saddharmasmṛtyupasthānasūtra on various Buddhist psychological theories and meditative practices by way of numbered dharmas.
This appendix contains a section from chapter 6 of the Sanskrit manuscript of the Saddharmasmṛtyu... more This appendix contains a section from chapter 6 of the Sanskrit manuscript of the Saddharmasmṛtyupasthānasūtra on the practice of mindfulness of breathing in sixteen aspects.
This appendix contains a short section from chapter 5 of the Saddharmasmṛtyupasthānasūtra manuscr... more This appendix contains a short section from chapter 5 of the Saddharmasmṛtyupasthānasūtra manuscript on the meditative practice of envisioning the four types of food and how various animals sustain themselves thereby.
Review of A Less Traveled Path (2015) by Daniel M Stuart
Journal of the American Oriental Society, 2017
I want to emphasize the value of Stuart’s work. He approaches with utmost seriousness the formida... more I want to emphasize the value of Stuart’s work. He approaches with utmost seriousness the formidable tasks of editing, translating, and commenting upon an unusual and difficult text. His book is a reliable basis for further work on Saddharmasmrtyupasthānasūtra and a provocative contribution to the literature on meditation. Daniel Stuart is a very talented scholar, and his book is a major accomplishment in the field of Buddhist Studies.
Reviews of S. N. Goenka: Emissary of Insight by Daniel M Stuart
Buddhadharma, 2021
“In Emissary of Insight, Stuart offers a comprehensive account of Goenka’s life, his work as a te... more “In Emissary of Insight, Stuart offers a comprehensive account of Goenka’s life, his work as a teacher, and strategic moments in the development of the global organization he built. Along the way, he takes issue with what he identifies as a one-sided representation of Goenka the person and teacher that reinforces a particularly Euro-American image of the man while overlooking other aspects of his identity. The result is an engaging, informative, and, at times, argumentative book that offers insight into the life and thought of this important teacher while raising questions about the cultural dynamics of Buddhist modernity and the ways in which meditation traditions with roots in particular places and times are taken up by new audiences in a changing world.”
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Books by Daniel M Stuart
Focusing on the figure of S. N. Goenka (1924–2013) and his Burmese lineage, the book redescribes the development of twentieth-century lay-focused insight meditation and mindfulness emergent from Burma (Myanmar). By recovering the historical background, lineage relationships, and practice contexts of Goenka’s teacher, the Burmese lay meditation master Sayagyi U Ba Khin (1899– 1971), the book elucidates the historical dynamics that gave rise to one of the most influential global meditation institutions of the twentieth century. Daniel M. Stuart shows that an appreciation of the cosmological, political, and personal motivations of the meditation teachers in S. N. Goenka’s lineage brings to light occluded aspects of the history of modern global insight meditation.
Drawing heavily on Goenka’s own autobiographical writings and Dharma talks, S. N. Goenka: Emissary of Insight is the first comprehensive portrait of his life. Stuart incorporates a wide range of primary documents and newly translated material in Hindi and Burmese to offer readers an in-depth exploration of Goenka’s life and teachings. This fascinating addition to the Lives of the Masters series reflects on Goenka’s role in the revival of Buddhism in postcolonial India and his emergence as one of the most influential meditation masters of the twentieth century.
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 Buddhist mind-centered metaphysics. The text offers perhaps the clearest available evidence for the process in 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.
https://verlag.oeaw.ac.at/a-less-traveled-path-saddharmasmtyupasthnanstra-chapter-2
Papers by Daniel M Stuart
premodern South Asia, the importance of the teachings of the Buddha cannot
be overemphasized. !is is the case not simply for reasons of foundational
in"uence, but likewise for reasons of historical evidence. Scholars have almost
no unambiguous concrete evidence of systems of meditation and yogic practice
in South Asia before the earliest Buddhist sources, and there exists little material
from a#er that time that is not in"ected – directly or indirectly – in relation to
Buddhist practice traditions.
But coming to terms with early and classical traditions of Buddhist practice is
a challenging endeavour. !e work of Rupert Gethin over the past three decades
has contributed substantially to scholarly understanding of such traditions,
and in this chapter, I showcase how Gethin’s methodology for dealing with
the earliest layers of Buddhist textual tradition can be deployed productively
to analyse a speci$c set of questions about early Buddhist practice. Gethin has
in"uenced my thinking immensely, and my encounters with him during my
graduate studies planted seeds that converted my approach to early Buddhist
texts in a variety of ways. Perhaps, most importantly, Gethin pushed me to
think about early Buddhist texts holistically, and this chapter is, in many ways, a
homage to Gethin’s holistic methodological perspicacity.
I suggest here that this way of framing the Buddhist path should be understood as a key early development that contributed to new and expansive forms of conceptualizing the Buddhist path in history.
Review of A Less Traveled Path (2015) by Daniel M Stuart
Reviews of S. N. Goenka: Emissary of Insight by Daniel M Stuart