Traditional Theravada Meditation and Its Modern-Era Suppression, by Kate Crosby, is a far-reaching attempt to rethink commonly accepted paradigms for Theravada Buddhist meditation traditions. Building on the controversial body of work on Cambodian Buddhism by François Bizot and other scholars in his tradition, Crosby draws as well on a number of key Buddhist texts from Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Laos to describe what she feels is a common esoteric tradition extending across the Theravada world. Her analysis is also supported by recent field interviews in Cambodia. Following Thai and Cambodian usage, she calls this meditation tradition borān kammaṭṭhāna (roughly “ancient/traditional meditation/site of practice”); it is seen as different from the vipassanā tradition, as it has been developed and popularized in modern Burma.

The texts and practices on which Crosby bases her arguments have in the past typically been categorized as oddities, unorthodox “magic,” Brahmanism, or even Tantrism. She presents them as organic to traditions of Theravada Abhidhamma, even though, since the techniques they draw on may have come into use in a later period, only a few of the later, more complex Abhidhamma texts in the Pali canon begin to reflect them. She argues that, despite introducing new elements, borān kamma ṭṭhāna is consistent with the authoritative Visuddhimagga, on which the vipassanā tradition is based: “It is clearly related to it, although not by way of linear derivation” (p. 14). In borān kammaṭṭhāna “the path to enlightenment is … understood to embody the full constituents of Buddhahood. In this path, for each component, or each one of its subsets, the practitioner develops a nimitta or ‘sign’, i.e. the intense vivid eidetic image that emerges with sustained concentration on it and then draws each nimitta into his or her body” (pp. 15–16).

Traditional Theravada Meditation and Its Modern-Era Suppression is intended as a broad overview of themes Crosby will develop in more detail in a series of future volumes. A key point of the book is the way it frames meditation as a “technique of transformation.” To understand borān kammaṭṭhāna, Crosby argues, one must see the way it draws on or parallels other premodern techniques of transformation: Indic transformational grammar, aryurvedic health practices, and alchemy. Thus, to attempt somewhat crudely to give examples, we can say that the visualization of nimitta could involve concentration on sequences of Pali phonemes and substitutions for them generated by rules of Indic grammar; the visualization of the nimitta entering and passing through the body links directly to aryurvedic techniques where medication enters through the nostrils and is seen as passing to different parts of the body, and in particular, in obstetrical treatment, the womb; the final transformation of the nimitta, once in the body, parallels transformations of alchemy. Thus borān kammaṭṭhāna as presented in the book constitutes a complex synthesis of a number of traditions, raising questions on a number of levels.

There is to date no evidence for borān kamma ṭṭhāna within Burmese Buddhism, although Crosby speculates that Burmese weiksa shamanism may incorporate some of its elements. She finds evidence of borān kammaṭṭhāna as early as the 1549 Phitsanulok inscription in Thailand. While most of the evidence for usage in Thailand and Laos in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is that of manuscripts referred to in later publications, eighteenth-century manuscripts transferred from Ayutthaya to Sri Lanka serve as the core of her analysis. Most manuscripts documenting the tradition in Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, and Sri Lanka date to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As a living esoteric tradition, it seems to be limited at the present time to a handful of practitioners in rural Cambodia—such as in Kampong Cham Province (where I have researched other aspects of nonreformed borān practice). Some borān kammaṭṭhāna practices are also found in the meditation traditions of Wat Paknam in Thailand, which have been popularized in nonesoteric form in the mass-oriented new Dhammakaya movement. Controversies surrounding Dhammakaya may themselves feed interest in borān kammaṭṭhāna, as well as, perhaps, some of the resistance to it as a concept.

Much of the book concerns the historical processes whereby borān kamma ṭṭhāna came to be marginalized and suppressed: the politics by which certain sects of Theravada came to be dominant; the disappearance, in the face of Western paradigms, of techniques of Indic grammar, aryurvedic medicine, and alchemy—practices whose internal logic underlie the techniques of borān kammaṭṭhāna; and, most of all, a modernizing tendency to prioritize textual traditions over those of practice.

This is an erudite book that, for me at least, convinces by its wealth of detail. However, some of these scholarly details assume a life of their own; a weakness of the book may be that occasionally, as in an excursion into the premodern treatment of smallpox, we end up wondering how direct the connection really is to borān kamma ṭṭhāna. This is unquestionably a book that deserves to be read and discussed. It will be essential reading for scholars of Theravada Buddhism and of interest to scholars of Buddhism more generally, as well as scholars with an interest in the links between religion and processes of modernization.