I am only a beginner. I have practiced meditation according to the Teaching (at least to the best of my ability and understanding) for less than one year. Here is my perspective on this debate.
There are a ton of translations out there besides @Sujato’s. I doubt that anything will make them go away at this point. Nor should they go away. If they contain the truth, and if this one doesn’t, then the truth will survive to be investigated by others. Practitioners will do best to investigate for themselves and decide accordingly.
But wait, you say! What if this one point is just too important? What if it’s going to throw people off the Path?
To that I have a simple answer. Probably the most interesting modern thing I’ve read about advanced meditative states is B. Thanissaro’s “Jhana Not by the Numbers,” which seems to speak more or less directly to this discussion. Here is the part I think is especially apt:
[A]s a teacher, [Ajaan Lee] tried to instill in his students these qualities of self-reliance, ingenuity, and a willingness to take risks and test things for themselves. He did that not only by talking about these qualities, but also by forcing you into situations where you’d have to develop them. Had he always been there to confirm for you that, “Yes, you’ve reached the third jhana,” or, “No, that’s only the second jhana,” he would have short-circuited the qualities he was trying to instill. He, rather than your own powers of observation, would have been the authority on what was going on in your mind; and you would have been absolved of any responsibility for correctly evaluating what you had experienced. At the same time, he would have been feeding your childish desire to please or impress him, and undermining your ability to deal with the task at hand, which was how to develop your own powers of sensitivity to put an end to suffering and stress. As he once told me, “If I have to explain everything, you’ll get used to having things handed to you on a platter. And then what will you do when problems come up in your meditation and you don’t have any experience in figuring things out on your own?”
Right view seems to come to the fore here; each person must develop independently the type of right view that allows them to discern meditative attainments themselves. Other approaches, like following set formulas – made out of words! – are perhaps not so good, for just the reasons stated.
Even way back where I am in this stuff, it still seems obvious to me that it’s better to have one meditator who knows what he sees in his mind – and we should prefer this to the most perfect and detailed word-picture of the meditation of the Buddha.
Words have never been terribly good at making maps of the mind. At times we may find, in describing a mind state, that it is well captured, if not completely captured, by a set of words and their opposites, a condition that the philosopher G.W.F. Hegel called “sublation” (Aufhebung).
And if that can happen elsewhere, then maybe it’s happening here? I really don’t know. I would welcome a peaceful resolution to this matter, however, even if it must be done only by covering it over with grass.