The Mirror of Insight

The Mirror of Insight with the subtitle: The Buddha as a Strategist is a free e-book by Thanissaro Bhikkhu, a monk from the Metta Forrest Monastery. The book focuses on the Buddha?s four fold strategies for gaining liberating insight. The first part calls into question an old interpretation of the Buddha as strategist: the theory, first fully formulated in the Commentary many centuries after the Buddha, that the Buddha taught two levels of truth, ultimate and conventional. The last three parts offer an alternative interpretation that seems more in line with the portrait of the Buddha as mediator and teacher as presented in the oldest extant record of his teachings found in the Pali suttas and discourses.