[burke]

And anyway… isn’t it the case that Theravadan meditation practice went practically extinct before being reconstructed from the suttas and commentaries sometime in the 18th/19th centuries? Vipassana at least was reinvented as such. Unless some enclave somewhere preserved an actually unbroken thread of jhana practice based on what was written in the suttas (maybe there was?), it weakens the authority of interpretation argument anyway!

[derrida]

I think there's always been monks meditating following the vinaya strictly in forests. They may not have a marketing department.

However that sort of question " isn’t it the case that Theravadan meditation practice went practically extinct" is a very theravada move as the "way (vada) of the elders (thera)" it always asks "is this modern buddhism really what the buddha taught" and that characteristic emphasis at the center distinguishes it from the mahayana

[burke]

Fair. Probably this phenomenon is more limited to Vipassana specifically than I was guessing.

I take the point about the Theravadan rhetorical move here but I still feel like at the very least the original texts deserve to not be written _out_ of the definition of a word if they can be reasonably interpreted to mean something different from what’s practiced in schools working from later turnings and teachings.

That leaves room for determining what is a reasonable interpretation though, and I am extremely far from any kind of authority on that.