This is a book born of wide and deep meditative experience, a guide to the progressive stages of Buddhist meditation for those who have taken up the practice in full earnestness. The Seven Stages of Purification provide the framework for the disciple's gradual progress from the cultivation of virtue up to the attainment of the final goal. Integral to the higher stages of purification are the nine types of insight-knowledge by which the disciple penetrates to the real nature of phenomena. The present book treats the stages of purification and the insight-knowledges not only with great erudition, but with the clarifying light of actual meditative experience. The Venerable Matara Sri Nanarama Mahathera (1901-1992), late abbot and meditation master of the Mitirigala Nissarana Vanaya monestery, was one of the most respected meditation masters of present-day Sri Lanka.
