The Qualities Pertinent to Awakening: Bringing Mindfulness Home

The thirty-seven qualities pertinent to awakening set the soteriological context for the deployment of mindfulness as described in early Buddhist texts. A comparative study of relevant early discourse passages, extant in different reciter traditions, points to the importance of this set of qualities and their practical relevance, which can be explored in particular with insight meditation related to the six senses. The different facets of early Buddhist meditation theory that emerge in this way converge on the overarching importance of the formal cultivation of mindfulness for progress to liberation.