Okay Paul I’ll do my best but honestly I find the book itself to be so concise that it’s arguably easier to just read it than to review it! That said, here are a few things that struck me that I hope will whet people’s appetite. These are just some personal highlights in the order in which the topics are discussed in the Theravāda chapter.
Attempts to authenticate the Abhidhamma as stemming from the historical Buddha are similar to and just as dubious as Mahāyāna’s effort to do so with their sutras and tantras.
Reliance on the Visuddhimagga rather than the suttas for both doctrine and meditation instruction is endemic in Theravāda. [I recall how Richard Gombrich, who wrote the forward to this book, wryly said that Walpola Rahula’s “What the Buddha Taught” ought to have been titled “What Buddhagosa Taught”]. Among the consequences of this pervasive reliance on commentarial literature:
“…the idea that mindfulness plunges into whatever objects are taken up by the mind. This invests mindfulness with an active and forward-thrusting connotation that is not found in the early Buddhist texts, where it appears to be a more receptive and non-interfering form of awareness.”
Similarly, instead of the sutta-based instructions on mindfulness of breathing grounded in the whole body while cultivating non-sensual joy, gladness and unified attention we have the focus on only the breath as such - to the exclusion of anything but strong “striving” focus on the tip of the nose during every waking hour in some popular Burmese traditions. With the loss of joy and relaxation counting the breath also arose as a way to help tether the attention.
Another case of a great deal of “doing” and discursive complexity replacing gentle “being” and resting in awareness is the substitution of the complex, discursive Visuddhimagga-inspired system of cultivating metta and the other divine abodes using phrases and a prescribed sequence of objects rather than the non-discursive radiating in all directions described in the suttas.
Substitution of the doctrine momentariness in which whatever arises disappears immediately for the early Buddhist view the something arisen may persist for some time as a changing process before it disappears. Among the dubious consequences of this radicalization of impermanence into momentariness was the invention of the bhavanga citta or “life continuum” which morphed into the substrate consciousness that transmigrates from life to life in Mahāyāna, arguably becoming indistinguishable from the Hindu ātman.
The practice parallel in Burmese insight meditation traditions is the construction of insight meditation practice so as to lead to a direct experience of central tenets of Abhidhamma thought. “The task of mindfulness was to lead in particular to an experience of momentariness and the direct dissolution of mind and matter. Contemporary insight meditation traditions facilitate such a direct experience of momentariness by encouraging a fragmentation of experience, breaking it down into its various components.”
Slow-motion walking serves the same end, as does Mahasi-style labeling which cultivates the realization (or rather, “perception”) of the immediate disappearance of whatever has just been noticed.
The contrast between these approaches to practice and a sutta-based one will obviously be very familiar to anyone who’s read Ven. Sujato’s masterful A Brief History of Mindfulness but the virtue of the discussion in Superiority Conceit, it seems to me, is its brevity combined with citations of the important but lengthy papers that support the views offered for those who wish to follow up in more detail. The entire book, after all, barely runs to a hundred pages.
The chapter concludes with a brief but masterful parsing of well-known controversies about jhāna in which Ven. Anālayo disputes both the Mahasi “vipassanā-jhānas” and contemporary Western views that relatively light levels of concentration are sufficient for liberating insight. At the very end he shares one of his most striking recent findings, namely that “right” concentration refers not to mastery of the four jhānas but to samadhi in balance with the other 7 path factors, along with a rejection of the claim that jhanic mastery is required for stream entry.