e
BU
DDHANET'SBOOK LIBRA
RY
E-mail: bdea@buddhanet.net
Web site: www.buddhanet.net
Buddha Dharma Education Association Inc.
Ven. Matara Sri Nanarama
The Seven Stages
of Purification
& The Insight Knowledges
I
i
l
Buddhist Publication Society
P.O. Box 61
54, Sangharaja Mawatha
Kandy, Sri Lanka
First published 1983
Second edition 1993
Copyright © 1983, 1993 by The Sangha,
Mitirigala Nissaraõa Vanaya
All rights reserved
ISBN 955–24–0059–7
Published for free distribution
The Seven Stages of Purification
This is a book born of wide and deep meditative
experience, a guide to the progressive stages of
Buddhist meditation for those who have taken
up the practice in full earnestness.
The seven stages of purification provide the
framework for the practising disciple’s gradual
progress from the cultivation of virtue up to the
attainment of the final goal. Integral to the
higher stages of purification are the nine types of
insight-knowledge, by which the disciple breaks
through the delusions covering his mental vision
and penetrates through to the real nature of
phenomena. In the present book the stages of
purification and the insight-knowledges are
treated not only with the author’s great erudi-
tion, but with the clarifying light of actual medi-
tative experience.
The author, the late Venerable Matara Sri
¥àõàràma Mahàthera, was one of the most
respected meditation masters of present-day Sri
Lanka, the abbot and meditation master of the
Mitirigala Nissarana Vanaya monastery. Though
he himself emphasized the practice and teaching
of insight meditation (vipassanà), his experi-
ence, and also this book, extend to serenity med-
itation (samatha) as well.
The Seven Stages
of Purification
and
The Insight Knowledges
A Guide to the Progressive Stages
of Buddhist Meditation
The Venerable Mahàthera
Matara Sri ¥àõàràma
Translated from the Sinhala
Buddhist Publication Society
Kandy Sri Lanka
Contents
Overview ........................................................
iii
Translator’s Preface ....................................
8