---
title: "Samatha and Vipassanā: Two Tracks, One Vehicle — The Yoking of Concentration and Wisdom"
author: "釋慧鏡 (Shi Huijing)"
series: "Six Practice Gates, Volume 5 — SAMĀDHI: From the Pāli Jhāna to Silent Illumination and the Huatou · Part I · Pāli Roots"
series_short: "SAMĀDHI"
volume: 5
paper_id: "SAMADHI-P03"
paper_number: 3
part: Part I · Pāli Roots
part_number: 1
date: 2026-05-31
version: "1.0"
license: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
---

# Samatha and Vipassanā
***Two Tracks, One Vehicle — The Yoking of Concentration and Wisdom***

*中文主題：止觀雙軌——定與慧的雙運：兩條軌道，一輛車*

**Abstract**

This chapter gives the first head-on treatment of a question that runs through the entire volume: the relation between concentration (*samādhi*) and wisdom. The previous chapter built a wall — that the deepest concentration is not, of itself, liberation — by following the Buddha's renunciation of the formless attainments; but it left one question open: are concentration and wisdom two diverging roads, or two wheels of one cart? This chapter answers from the oldest stratum of the Pāli and the Āgamas. By way of the four paths to accomplishment listed in the *Yuganaddha-sutta* (AN 4.170), the four corresponding "ways of speaking" of the *Saṃyukta Āgama* (SA 560), and the reciprocal structure in which calm and insight beget one another (SA 464), it argues a single conclusion: serenity (*samatha*) and insight (*vipassanā*) are not substitutes for each other, not two mutually exclusive camps, but two tracks of one vehicle — cultivable apart, cultivable yoked, and converging in the end on one destination, the liberation that is wisdom. The chapter holds two boundaries at once. First, "two tracks" does not mean "concentration is optional"; what the counter-case of liberation-by-wisdom exhibits is the *minimum* of the calm track, not its absence. Second, the chapter only analyses the structural relation of the two tracks; it does not unfold the practice of insight itself. The deepest asymmetry — that concentration must turn back toward wisdom — is left for the volume's closing chapter to redeem.

**Keywords:** *samatha*, *vipassanā*, the yoking of calm and insight (止觀雙運 / *samathavipassanaṁ yuganaddhaṁ*), *cetovimutti* (freedom of heart), *paññāvimutti* (freedom by wisdom / 慧解脫), *samādhi*, *jhāna*, *yuganaddha* (the yoke), *maggo sañjāyati* (the path is born), *samāpatti* (attainment / absorption), *sammā-samādhi* (right concentration), *sati* (mindfulness), *adhipati-pratyaya* (增上緣, supporting condition), *ubhatobhāgavimutta* (liberated-both-ways / 俱解脫), *kāyasakkhī* (body-witness / 身證), the relation of concentration and wisdom, the *Aṅguttara Nikāya*, the *Saṃyukta Āgama*

---

**Author:** Shi Huijing (釋慧鏡)
**Date:** May 2026
**License:** CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
**Version:** 1.0
**Series:** SAMĀDHI — *From the Pāli Jhāna to Silent Illumination and the Huatou*

---

## I. The Fork in the Retreat Schedule — *Do I Need Deep Jhāna to Awaken?*

Picture opening the schedule of a meditation centre. Within a single month, two kinds of retreat sit side by side: one is labelled "concentration," or "calm"; the other, "insight." Each has its own teachers, its own daily rhythm, its own vocabulary, and between them there seems to run an invisible dividing line. Sooner or later, the person signing up is stopped by a question: do I have to develop very deep concentration first before awakening is even on the table? Or is concentration just an optional run-up, with insight doing the real work?

The question is not new. It has worn many faces, but the skeleton beneath them is always the same: are concentration and wisdom two things pointed in opposite directions, in competition with each other? And the reason it traps people so easily is that it smuggles in a double false premise. Either one supposes that concentration can *replace* wisdom (cultivate deeply enough and wisdom appears of itself), or one supposes that concentration and wisdom are *at odds* (gathering the mind in tightly only obstructs the seeing of things as they are). These two pictures look opposed, but they share a single assumption — that calm and insight are two things between which one must choose.

The previous chapter dramatised this tension to its breaking point. The Buddha learned from two teachers the two highest formless attainments his India could reach — the dimension of nothingness and the dimension of neither-perception-nor-non-perception — and set both of them down, because that was not the liberation he sought. That chapter built a wall into the foundation of the volume: the deepest concentration is not, of itself, liberation. But it also left, at its close, a question handed forward to this one: are concentration and wisdom two diverging roads, or two wheels of one cart? — and it jotted down, in passing, an intuitive answer: *where concentration reaches its end, wisdom begins*.[^1]

What this chapter does is precisely to put that question on the table and to correct that intuition. "Where concentration reaches its end, wisdom begins" is a *linear* reading: first fill concentration to the brim, then change tracks to wisdom. But the oldest layer of the Pāli and the Āgamas gives a picture that is not a single line but two parallel tracks. The thesis of this chapter can be set down in one sentence at the outset: calm and insight are not substitutes, not opposites, but two tracks of one vehicle — cultivable apart, cultivable yoked, and converging in the end on one. The previous chapter inherited the *narrative* of the search; this one inherits the *problem* it left behind, and shifts the manner of answering from telling a story to analysing a structure.

---

## II. Two Words in the Pāli — *Samatha and Vipassanā as a Pair*

To see the two tracks clearly, one must first see the two words clearly.

*Samatha* — literally "stillness, calming" — names the gathering and settling of the mind: the work of drawing back the attention that habitually reaches outward and scatters in every direction, and resting it in one place. To put it in a way that may come closer: calm is *subtraction*, not addition. It subtracts distraction, subtracts agitation, subtracts the noise that keeps the mind from coming to rest. It does not ask the mind to seize hold of something; it lets the mind release the things it usually clutches, so that it naturally settles.

*Vipassanā* — literally "seeing in a discerning way, seeing through" — names the seeing of things as they really are: the seeing of the impermanence, the suffering, and the not-self of all conditioned things. If calm is making the surface of the water still, insight is seeing clearly through the stilled surface to the bottom. Here a self-imposed line must be drawn at once: this chapter speaks only of where insight *stands* within this pair of tracks; it does not unfold *how* insight is cultivated. The sixteen insight-knowledges, the contemplation of rise-and-fall, and the rest of insight's own methods belong to a later series; this chapter touches none of them, marking insight's position without unfolding its practice.

The Pāli canon does more than place these two words side by side; it openly pairs them, each with its own office. A passage in the Twos of the *Aṅguttara* sets calm and insight in a single matching frame (AN 2.31 — in the Pali Text Society's numbering, AN 2.30; both numbers are in circulation, and one should note this when looking it up). Its structure runs roughly thus: cultivating calm accomplishes the development of "mind" (*citta*), by which greed (*rāga*) is abandoned, and what is gained is freedom of heart (*cetovimutti*); cultivating insight accomplishes the development of "wisdom" (*paññā*), by which ignorance (*avijjā*) is abandoned, and what is gained is freedom by wisdom (*paññāvimutti*).[^2]

This passage is worth pausing over. It does not rank calm and insight high and low; it sets them as two paths, each countering a different affliction — one countering the bondage of the affective sort, greed; the other countering the obscuration of the cognitive sort, ignorance. The two paths point not to two endpoints but to two faces of one liberation. In other words, what the passage gives us at the start is not "before and after" but "division of labour." This is exactly the relation that the volume's first chapter had already flagged when it distinguished its three words — and explicitly deferred to here: calm and insight are a pair the canon itself joined by hand.

As for how this pair combines, and which routes it admits — that is the next chapter's business.

---

## III. Four Modes of Yoking — *The Structure of the Yuganaddha Sutta*

If AN 2.31 gives "the direction of each of the two tracks," then the *Yuganaddha-sutta* of the Fours of the *Aṅguttara* (AN 4.170) gives "how those two tracks may be combined in the walking." This is the most pivotal passage of the chapter, because it all but settles, once and for all, against the later opposition of a "pure-calm party" versus a "pure-insight party."

One thing must be said first: this passage is not spoken by the Buddha directly but proclaimed by the Venerable Ānanda to a gathering of monastics. Ānanda says here that anyone who declares they have reached the fruit of arahantship has done so by no more than four paths. The first: *developing insight preceded by calm* (*samathapubbaṅgamaṁ vipassanaṁ bhāveti*) — first letting the mind settle, then on that basis seeing things as they are. The second, the reverse: *developing calm preceded by insight*. The third: *developing calm and insight yoked together* (*samathavipassanaṁ yuganaddhaṁ bhāveti*) — calm and insight developed abreast, drawing as one. The fourth, the special case: when the mind is seized by restlessness about the teaching (*dhammuddhacca*) and cannot settle, one first counters that unease, and when the mind at last grows steady, one enters upon the path.[^3]

(In keeping with the form of the Pāli text itself, the latter three paths are elided there with a contraction mark, only the first being set out in full; here, following that form, the names of all four are supplied while the remainder share its single formula. The elided tails should not be presented as if spelled out in the discourse.)

These four paths share one ending: the path is born (*maggo sañjāyati*), the fetters are severed, and the practitioner advances to one and the same fruit of arahantship. Notice what this "all converging on one" structure means. It means that in this oldest layer of Buddhism, calm and insight were never two hostile schools, two methods between which one had to take a side. They are two orderings of one stretch of road — one may settle first and then see through, may see through first and then settle, may run both abreast, may even begin by countering scatter — but whichever it is, in the end both must be present, and both lead to the same liberation.

The word "yoked" itself hides an image. Its Pāli original, *yuganaddha*, literally means "yoke" — the harnessing of two oxen to one crossbar, drawing one cart together. This is the simile the canon itself supplies, and the very image this chapter's title borrows: two tracks, not two carts, but two wheels of one cart; not each going its own way, but bearing one yoke, advancing to one place.[^4]

So the question that traps the person signing up for a retreat — "do I pick the calm camp or the insight camp?" — is, in the face of this passage, a false question. The canon never asks you to choose one of the two. What it gives you is four ways of fitting the two together, and one unchanging conclusion: lacking either side, the cart reaches no destination.

---

## IV. Samatha-Vipassanā in the Āgamas and the Treatises — *How the Chinese Inherited This Pair of Tracks*

By now someone may suspect: this whole account of yoked calm-and-insight — might it not be a system added after the fact by later commentators, or by some particular school? The answer is no. We need only turn to the Chinese Āgamas to find the same structure already there.

Take first the *Saṃyukta Āgama*, discourse 560 (Taishō vol. 2, No. T0099, fascicle 21). This discourse is precisely the Chinese parallel to the *Yuganaddha-sutta*. Ānanda here sets out four "ways of speaking" (說道) for the severing of the afflictions, and the fourth of them reads, in plain words, *calm and insight conjoined, running together* (止觀和合俱行) — this is the yoking. The first three share a single set-phrase, describing how the mind comes to *abide, abide well, abide focused, be tamed, be one in calm-and-insight, and be evenly received* (止觀一心、等受) before the fetters are cut. The Chinese uses sense-renderings such as "one in calm-and-insight" and "calm and insight conjoined, running together," answering at a distance to the Pāli "yoked." Two traditions, across a long river of translation, have preserved one and the same structure.[^5]

Then take a cleaner passage: the *Saṃyukta Āgama*, discourse 464 (same Taishō, fascicle 17).[^6] Ānanda asks an elder which two things one should cultivate, and the elder answers: "calm and insight." Then comes the line that matters most —

> "Cultivating calm, one in the end accomplishes insight; having cultivated insight, one likewise accomplishes calm. That is to say, the noble disciple cultivates calm and insight together, and gains the elements of liberation."

This line states the relation of the two tracks as *mutual begetting*: cultivating calm can accomplish insight, and cultivating insight can in turn accomplish calm; each strengthens the other — it is not a one-way staircase. And where does it finally land? On "the elements of liberation" (諸解脫界) — which is to say that calm and insight, within this structure, are always *for the sake of* that joined fruit, and never the terminus themselves. Concentration is not a place to rest in; concentration is one of the tracks by which one passes through to liberation.

So what, exactly, does concentration do within wisdom? The *Saṃyukta Āgama*, discourse 65 (same Taishō, fascicle 3),[^7] gives the oldest root-line:

> "One should constantly cultivate skilful meditation, inwardly stilling the mind. And why? Because a monk who constantly cultivates skilful meditation, inwardly stilling the mind, observes things as they really are."

"Inwardly stilling the mind" is concentration; "observing things as they really are" is wisdom; and in the syntax, the former is the very premise of the latter — the mind must first settle before there can be any talk of seeing, as-it-really-is. This is the source, within the Āgamas, of the line "wisdom is kindled in dependence on concentration." But one must hold to a distinction here with great care: the text says "concentration is what wisdom relies upon," that it is wisdom's necessary supporting condition, the condition under which wisdom can occur; it does not say "enter concentration and wisdom automatically springs up." Put more precisely — concentration is the *supporting condition* (*adhipati-pratyaya*) of wisdom, not its *direct cause*. The treatises say this still more plainly. The *Abhidharmakośa* (same Taishō, vol. 29, No. T1558, fascicle 25) has a line: "with the superior concentration as their support, faith and the rest become a supporting condition for the supramundane states."[^8] The term "supporting condition" (增上緣) chimes exactly with the running vocabulary of this volume: concentration is a condition that helps things along, not the cause that directly produces wisdom. Holding to this distinction matters, for otherwise one slides back into the error the previous two chapters already guarded against — the supposition that, cultivate to the absolute depth of concentration, and liberation will follow of its own accord.

One further note on the Chinese, carrying forward the "fault-line in the Chinese translation" raised earlier when the three words were distinguished. The two transliterated terms familiar to us today — *shēmótā* (奢摩他, *śamatha*) and *pípóshènà* (毘婆舍那, *vipaśyanā*) — do not appear even once across the four Āgamas. The Āgama stratum uses throughout the sense-renderings "calm" (止) and "insight" (觀). The transliterations are a later arrival — they belong to the lexical layer of the treatises and of the later Tiantai line.[^9] This detail reminds us that the *structure* of yoked calm-and-insight was already complete in the Āgamas, but that the *words* carrying it went through more than one act of translation and choice on Chinese soil. (As for how this structure was later systematised, in the Yogācāra line, into the nine stages of mental abiding — that is a matter for further on in the volume; only the direction is marked here, not unfolded.)

---

## V. The Counter-Evidence of Wisdom-Liberation — *The Asymmetry Within the Two Tracks*

So far, the two tracks look symmetrical: calm accomplishes freedom of heart, insight accomplishes freedom by wisdom, drawing abreast. But there is a body of canonical material that forces out a finer question: are these two tracks really of equal weight?

The *Madhyama Āgama*, discourse 195, the *Discourse to Assaji* (《阿濕貝經》; Taishō vol. 1, No. T0026, fascicle 51; parallel to the Pāli *Majjhima Nikāya* 70, the *Kīṭāgiri-sutta*), preserves a three-fold typology of liberated persons.[^10] Sorting along the two axes of "concentration" and "wisdom," it arranges people into a spare grid:

- The one **liberated-both-ways** (俱解脫): "touching the eight liberations with the body, dwelling in their accomplishment, and by wisdom seeing the taints exhausted" — possessing both the deep concentration (the bodily mastery of the eight liberations) and the wisdom that has exhausted the afflictions.
- The one **liberated-by-wisdom** (慧解脫): "*not* touching the eight liberations with the body, yet by wisdom seeing the taints exhausted" — lacking that layer of deep concentration, yet having, all the same, exhausted the afflictions by wisdom.
- The **body-witness** (身證): "touching the eight liberations with the body … but *not* by wisdom seeing the taints exhausted" — possessing the deep concentration, yet not having exhausted the afflictions by wisdom.

A term that is easily misread must be cleared up first. "Touching the eight liberations with the body" does not mean, broadly, "having concentration or not"; it points specifically to that "deep concentration" by which one can enter and emerge at will from the four formless states and even the cessation-attainment. So when the one liberated-by-wisdom "does not touch them with the body," it means that what he lacks is *that deepest layer of absorption*, not that he lacks concentration altogether.

Spread the three types out, and the one most worth noticing is "liberated-by-wisdom": he has not the deepest concentration, yet he is liberated all the same. Set against the *Saṃyukta Āgama* discourse 347, the *Discourse to Susīma* (《須深經》; same Taishō, fascicle 14)[^11] — used in the previous chapter as well — the point grows clearer still. Susīma puts question after question to the monks who declared themselves arahants: have you attained the first *jhāna*? the second, third, fourth? the bodily realisation of the formless? The monks answer, one and all, "no," and state of themselves, "we are liberated by wisdom." The Buddha's explanation: "first comes the knowledge of the stability of the Dhamma, and after it the knowledge of *nibbāna* … freed from the view of self, they no longer give rise to the taints, and the mind is well liberated."

Here is another high-risk term to watch. The text says of the one liberated-by-wisdom that he "does not gain the attainment" (不得正受) — and this "attainment" (*samāpatti*) means the absorptive abiding of the four *jhānas* and the formless states, the deep concentration; it does **not** mean the "right concentration" (*sammā-samādhi*) of the eightfold path. To misread "does not gain the attainment" as "has no right concentration" would be a grave error, for it would collide head-on with the previous chapter's establishment that "right concentration is the four *jhānas*." The one liberated-by-wisdom is not without concentration — he has at least that measure of concentration needed to incline toward liberation; he has merely not walked the full course of the four *jhānas* and the formless attainments.

With this clarified, the true sense of the counter-evidence comes to the surface. What it proves is this: liberation stands or falls on wisdom's severing of the afflictions, not on the depth of concentration. A person may be liberated without the deepest concentration, but cannot be liberated without wisdom. This is the asymmetry between the two tracks — they run abreast, but the direction of the cart is wisdom.

And yet here the chapter's most important firewall must be raised: "two tracks" does not mean "concentration is optional." What the counter-evidence of wisdom-liberation denies is the claim that "one must realise the absolute depth of concentration, the full formless range, before one can be liberated"; what it does *not* deny is that "one could be liberated with no concentration at all." The one liberated-by-wisdom still has concentration, merely not the full course of it. So what this material truly exhibits is the *minimum* of the calm track, not its absence. To read it as "concentration turns out to be superfluous" is to read it exactly backwards — what it shows is that concentration cannot be fully extracted, only that it need not be cultivated to the extreme. This, too, is the reason behind the previous chapter's wall, and behind this volume's claim that "concentration must return to wisdom."

One last thing to mark, to avoid repeating the previous chapter: the same material on wisdom-liberation was cited there from the angle of "liberation is not bound to the depth of concentration," whereas here it is revisited from the angle of "how the two tracks combine within one liberation." As for the commentarial dispute within the Theravāda over whether liberation-by-wisdom requires "momentary concentration" (*khaṇika-samādhi*) or "access concentration" (*upacāra-samādhi*), this chapter marks it as a boundary case and sets it aside, leaving it for the later part of the volume that handles the systematisation of concentration, and rendering no verdict here.[^12]

---

## VI. Modern Dialogue and Conclusion

Set this structure beside the modern academy, and one meets several scholars worth speaking with. Before entering the dialogue, a methodological caution should be settled. The scholar Robert Sharf has warned: do not read the canon's set descriptions of *jhāna* as transparent "field reports of inner experience," and still less use the question "what is meditative experience really like?" to adjudicate the relation of calm and insight. This chapter accepts that caution in full — and it is exactly for this reason that the chapter walks, throughout, the path of text and structure: we read how the canon's own *textual architecture* situates calm and insight, rather than claiming whose meditative experience counts. In that sense, the chapter's argument stands, by design, outside the reach of Sharf's warning.[^13]

The first interlocutor is Richard Shankman (*The Experience of Samādhi*). He notes that there are in fact two readings of *jhāna* in the canon: the *sutta* *jhāna*, lighter, able to run abreast of insight; and the *Visuddhimagga* *jhāna*, a deep absorption with the senses sealed off, its threshold raised so high as to leave people feeling it is "unattainable in this life," and thence to despair. This can be accepted by half: the four-*jhāna* set-phrase of the *suttas* does not, in itself, entail the later reading of "the senses entirely shut down," and the anxiety of "I can't reach it" is, in practitioners, real. But one should press a step back — the difference between the *suttas* and the *Visuddhimagga* is one of degree and of systematisation, not evidence of "calm versus insight in opposition." For the same *sutta* corpus gives both the "lighter *jhāna*" and the yoked calm-and-insight of the *Yuganaddha-sutta*; so even granting Shankman's own *sutta*-favouring premise, "two tracks" still resolves into "one vehicle."
The second is Keren Arbel (*Early Buddhist Meditation: The Four Jhānas as the Actualization of the Path*, Routledge 2017). She is this chapter's strongest ally, holding that the four *jhānas* are themselves already the actualisation of the path, steeped from the start in the components of insight, and that the "calm-insight dichotomy" is a later imposition. This position can largely be agreed with: the *jhāna* of the early canon is indeed not an affect-flattened trance but a cognitively rich, ethically saturated state of mind, and the stiff two-step march of "calm first, then insight" is not the only reading. One wishes only to add, gently (more supplement than rebuttal): if one dissolves calm *entirely* into insight, treating them as the same thing, one erases the very discourse in which the canon itself names the two apart and then yokes them — the *Yuganaddha-sutta* is precisely "naming separately, then drawing abreast." The canon's gesture is *yoking*, not *identifying*. So this chapter's "two tracks, one vehicle" is, if anything, a friendly fine-tuning of Arbel. (A line from Polak's *Reexamining Jhāna* can corroborate from the side: under a strict text-critical reading, the calm-insight dichotomy may well have been a later addition.)
The third is L. S. Cousins ("Samatha-yāna and Vipassanā-yāna"). He reminds us that this pair of expressions, the "calm-vehicle" and the "insight-vehicle," is two approaches the *tradition itself* acknowledges, and that they ultimately converge on one and the same fruit. That is to say, this "two-vehicle" vocabulary is native to the canon and the commentaries, not a modern invention; it describes two complementary approaches. This braces the structure of the chapter's title exactly — two tracks, but advancing to one awakening. (The "vehicle" here is the simile of a *conveyance*, borrowing the image of the cart-wheel and the yoke, and not some later doctrine of vehicle-classification; the two must be kept apart.)[^14]

In passing: within the contemporary Southern Theravāda there do exist two routes of cultivation weighted differently, a "dry-insight" route and a "calm-first" route. This chapter describes them as different *approaches and orderings*, and **by no means** names or judges any living meditation teacher or monastic community — that is neither the chapter's work nor a line it may cross.

Before drawing to a close, the two red lines the chapter has kept throughout, restated. First, mindfulness (*sati*) is not the same as concentration. Mindfulness is a factor common to both tracks, not a synonym for either; the modern mindfulness movement often reduces insight to "continuous present-moment awareness" and calm to "relaxed focus," and the chapter has held the text as a wall against following that reduction. Second — the other face of the same wall — one should not treat "calm" and "insight," two words with definite doctrinal content, as labels to be slapped on at will.

So, back to that retreat schedule that traps people. Calm and insight were never two camps between which you must choose one. They can be cultivated apart, can be cultivated yoked, but in the end they converge on one destination — the liberation that is wisdom. Only, the two tracks are not entirely of equal weight: they run abreast, and the direction of the cart is, always, wisdom. The deepest layer of all — that at its extreme concentration must instead be released, that even the deepest concentration is not to be grasped — the volume keeps for its closing chapter to truly redeem.

But to see how this cart actually moves, one must first unscrew one of its wheels, turn it over, and look at its inner structure. The calm track is not a uniform expanse of stillness; it has a scale of graded depth: the four *jhānas* and the four formless attainments are the rung-by-rung stratification of this calm track. What the next chapter does is exactly to raise this scale — the spine of the volume — one rung at a time.

---

## Notes

[^1]: The previous chapter, *The Rose-Apple Tree and the Two Teachers*, hands forward to this one with the metaphor "two diverging roads, or two wheels of one cart," and announces the core question; this chapter takes up that simile directly and corrects its linear reading, "where concentration reaches its end, wisdom begins." See SAMĀDHI P02 in this series.

[^2]: The Twos of the *Aṅguttara* (AN 2.31) carry the Pali Text Society numbering AN 2.30; both numbers are in circulation, and a citation should mark both, lest the reader search in vain. For the pairing of calm leading to freedom of heart and insight leading to freedom by wisdom, see the SuttaCentral edition in Bhikkhu Sujato's English translation (CC0).

[^3]: The *Yuganaddha-sutta* (AN 4.170) is spoken by the Venerable Ānanda, not by the Buddha directly, and must be framed as such. In the discourse the latter three paths are elided with a contraction mark (*…pe…*), only the first being set out in full; here the names are supplied while the rest share that single formula. PTS A ii 156–157 (by concordance). Pāli from SuttaCentral, Bhikkhu Sujato's translation (CC0).

[^4]: The Pāli original of "yoked," *yuganaddha*, literally means "yoke" — the image of two oxen bearing one yoke to draw one cart; the chapter's title, "two tracks, one vehicle," borrows this simile.

[^5]: *Saṃyukta Āgama*, discourse 560, Taishō vol. 2, No. T0099, fascicle 21; translated by Guṇabhadra. "Calm and insight conjoined, running together" (止觀和合俱行) is the fourth way of speaking, corresponding to the third path of AN 4.170, "calm and insight yoked."

[^6]: *Saṃyukta Āgama*, discourse 464, Taishō vol. 2, No. T0099, fascicle 17. Its fruit is "the elements of liberation" (諸解脫界), not concentration itself. This discourse (the reciprocity of calm and insight) differs from discourse 560 (the four ways of speaking, with "calm and insight conjoined, running together") and the two must not be cross-cited.

[^7]: *Saṃyukta Āgama*, discourse 65, Taishō vol. 2, No. T0099, fascicle 3. "Inwardly stilling the mind" (concentration) is the syntactic premise of "observing things as they really are" (wisdom). The sense is "concentration is wisdom's support / supporting condition," not "entering concentration automatically produces wisdom."

[^8]: *Abhidharmakośa*, Taishō vol. 29, No. T1558, fascicle 25; translated by Xuanzang. The term "supporting condition" (增上緣, *adhipati-pratyaya*) chimes with this volume's vocabulary: concentration is a condition that helps things along, not the direct cause that produces wisdom.

[^9]: The two transliterated terms *śamatha* (奢摩他) and *vipaśyanā* (毘婆舍那) appear nowhere across the four Āgamas (T0099 / T0026 / T0125); the Āgama stratum uses only the sense-renderings "calm" (止) and "insight" (觀), the transliterations being a later treatise-and-Tiantai lexical layer. This carries forward the "fault-line in the Chinese translation" thread of P01 in this series.

[^10]: *Madhyama Āgama*, discourse 195, the *Discourse to Assaji*, Taishō vol. 1, No. T0026, fascicle 51; translated by Gautama Saṅghadeva. Parallel to the Pāli *Majjhima Nikāya* 70, the *Kīṭāgiri-sutta* (MN 70). The three types are arranged in a 2×2 grid along the axes of concentration and wisdom. "Touching the eight liberations with the body" points specifically to the at-will mastery of the four formless attainments and even the cessation-attainment, not to concentration in general.

[^11]: *Saṃyukta Āgama*, discourse 347, the *Discourse to Susīma*, Taishō vol. 2, No. T0099, fascicle 14. The "attainment" of "does not gain the attainment" is *samāpatti* (the absorptions), not the "right concentration" (*sammā-samādhi*) of the eightfold path; it must not be misread as "no right concentration." The one liberated-by-wisdom still has the concentration needed to incline toward liberation.

[^12]: The counter-evidence of wisdom-liberation was cited in the previous chapter (P02) from the angle "liberation is not bound to the depth of concentration"; this chapter revisits it from the angle "how the two tracks combine within one liberation." As for the commentarial dispute over whether wisdom-liberation requires momentary or access concentration, this chapter marks it a boundary case and sets it aside, leaving it for the later part of the volume that handles the systematisation of concentration.

[^13]: For the methodological caution see Robert Sharf, "Buddhist Modernism and the Rhetoric of Meditative Experience" (venue to be verified). His admonition: do not take the canon's set descriptions of *jhāna* as transparent reports of inner experience.
[^14]: Page numbers for the three interlocutors are omitted; only author and work are given: Richard Shankman, *The Experience of Samādhi*; Keren Arbel, *Early Buddhist Meditation: The Four Jhānas as the Actualization of the Path* (Routledge, 2017; subtitle to be verified); Grzegorz Polak, *Reexamining Jhāna*; L. S. Cousins, "Samatha-yāna and Vipassanā-yāna." All positions are paraphrased, none quoted verbatim.
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## References

### Buddhist Canon (Taishō originals)

- *Saṃyukta Āgama* (《雜阿含經》), translated by Guṇabhadra, Taishō vol. 2, No. T0099. (Fascicle 3, discourse 65; fascicle 14, discourse 347; fascicle 17, discourse 464; fascicle 21, discourse 560.)
- *Madhyama Āgama* (《中阿含經》), translated by Gautama Saṅghadeva, Taishō vol. 1, No. T0026. (Fascicle 51, discourse 195, the *Discourse to Assaji*.)
- *Ekottarika Āgama* (《增壹阿含經》), translated by Gautama Saṅghadeva, Taishō vol. 2, No. T0125. (Fascicle 7.)
- *Abhidharmakośa* (《阿毘達磨俱舍論》), composed by Vasubandhu, translated by Xuanzang, Taishō vol. 29, No. T1558. (Fascicle 25.)

### Pāli Canon (SuttaCentral, Bhikkhu Sujato's translation, CC0)

- *Yuganaddha-sutta*, AN 4.170 (PTS A ii 156–157, by concordance).
- AN 2.31 (PTS numbering AN 2.30).
- *Cetanākaraṇīya-sutta*, AN 10.2.
- *Upanisā-sutta*, SN 12.23. (Transcendental dependent origination, not the twelve saṃsāric links.)

### Modern Scholarship

- Arbel, Keren. *Early Buddhist Meditation: The Four Jhānas as the Actualization of the Path*. Routledge, 2017. (Subtitle to be verified.)
- Cousins, L. S. "Samatha-yāna and Vipassanā-yāna."
- Polak, Grzegorz. *Reexamining Jhāna*.
- Shankman, Richard. *The Experience of Samādhi*.
- Sharf, Robert. "Buddhist Modernism and the Rhetoric of Meditative Experience." (Venue to be verified.)

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## Cross-References

- **Inherits from:** P01, *What Samādhi Actually Means* (the relation of calm and insight, deferred there to a later chapter and redeemed here); P02, *The Rose-Apple Tree and the Two Teachers* (the wall that the highest formless concentration ≠ liberation, and its closing question, "two roads or two wheels").
- **Points toward:** P04, *The Four Jhānas and the Four Formless Attainments* (the volume's spine; unscrewing the calm track and raising its scale of graded depth).
- **Further on:** the systematisation of calm-and-insight in the Yogācāra line (the nine stages of mental abiding, Part IV); the systematisation of concentration and the momentary-/access-concentration dispute over wisdom-liberation (Part III); the practice of insight itself (a later series).
- **Long-range lock:** the volume's closing chapter redeems the asymmetry that "concentration must return to wisdom, and even the deepest concentration is ungraspable."

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*Paper:* SAMADHI-P03 · *Samatha and Vipassanā: Two Tracks, One Vehicle* · **SAMĀDHI · Part I · Pāli Roots**
*Author:* 釋慧鏡 (Shi Huijing) · *Project:* 指月 / Pointing-at-the-Moon · *Series:* The Six Practice Gates (六行門)
*License:* CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
*CBETA collation:* Citations from the *Saṃyukta Āgama* (T0099, fascicles 3 / 14 / 17 / 21), the *Madhyama Āgama* (T0026, fascicle 51), the *Ekottarika Āgama* (T0125, fascicle 7), and the *Abhidharmakośa* (T1558, fascicle 25) verified against the CBETA Electronic Tripiṭaka. Pāli references follow PTS numbering (AN 4.170; AN 2.31 / AN 2.30; AN 10.2; SN 12.23); the AN 4.170 and AN 2.31 passages are blockquote-safe under Bhikkhu Sujato's CC0 SuttaCentral edition.
*Repository:* https://github.com/pointing-at-the-moon/six-practice-gates