The Buddhist Psychological Concepts of Samatha and Vipassana

Abstract

The key concepts of Buddhism’s traditional psychology are samatha and vipassana, which incorporates, in some form and to some degree, all Theravada Buddhism, Mahayana Buddhism and Tantric Buddhism’s philosophical and psychological major ideas. Therefore, this paper will use hermeneutics as its research method, take the study of the concept of samatha and vipassana in classical Pali texts and Chinese traditional Mahayana Buddhist texts as its objects of research, and the study will be conducted from three aspects: 1) the suttic and commentarial sources of samatha and vipassana; 2) the meaning of samatha and vippasana, and 3) the relationship between samatha and vippasana.