Dear Ven. Pandita,

Thank you for your reply, thoughtful & thought provoking. I very much look
forward to any later information you might be able to give on textual
matters.

You may have missed my post where I said I was bowing out of further
discussion on Mt Meru as I felt that the particular thread was beginning to
generate more controversy than I had anticipated. I'm very grateful though
for your late points & it would be rude not to acknowledge them.

In looking up information about Mt Meru I was very struck by the reference:
"The dukkha destroyed by an arahant compared with what is yet left to him
until his death, is like seven grains of sand on the top of Sineru (=Meru)".

Someone commented to me recently that an enlightened person had passed
beyond all suffering which caused me to reply, no not until after their
death, i.e., paranibbana. Then I was left scratching my head about why I was
convinced of this apart from a vague memory of a story about the Buddha
being struck on the heel by a rock & it being the burning off of some
previous kamma. So I was very interested to come upon this reference.

I need to contemplate your post and absorb it's implications but I would
just make a small comment here:

> In other words, the West is suspicious of Abhidhamma because its origin
> cannot be validated by virtue of common sense or science.

As I understood it from my rather erratic & inadequate reading, "the West's
suspicion of Abhidhamma" was mainly based on textual evidence that it was
composed at a later date than the rest of the canon and, to quote G P
Malalasekera" As a matter of fact, it is not held even by the commentators
to be the word of the Buddha in the same sense as the suttas."

I'm neither agreeing nor disagreeing with those attitudes but merely
reporting my impression that those were the key points in it's neglect.
(Apart from it's sheer difficulty of comprehension, of course--As I
understand it, you have to be very advanced in Pali to understand it.).

None of the above issues diminish it's utility in any way, of course.

Thanks once again for your considered reply, nich