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Studies in Indian Philosophy However, vision does not come on demand; it requires for its birth sustained intellectual effort which is, above all, the act of being appreciative and, for that reason also, discriminative; it also involves unflagging diligence, and a firm foundation on which the unificatory processes leading to an integrated personality, can rest. There is a gradation in this preliminary build-up, one step leading to the other; hence the attempt to make light of or even to skip the preliminaries, because modern man is in a hurry and must have instant results, is as intelligent or stupid as trying to prepare a succulent meal without having the necessary ingredients.
It is for this reason that the preparatory stage of the Buddhist 'path' has been given considerable attention in the indigenous works, while it bas been more or less neglected by those who approached Buddhist ideas from outside. The preparatory stage is graded into three sections which present a gradation and intensification of awareness. The first section begins with four kinds of inspection. Inspection, in the strict sense of the word, is the attempt to keep a perceptual situation as constant as possible and to inspect the objective constituent of that perceptual situation as closely as possible. However, keeping a perceptual situation constant is intimately intertwined with the attempt to learn more about the qualities of the percived object, the objective constituent and the epistemological object of the perceptual situation so that we may say that, on the one hand, we keep an idea or an image or an 'object of the mind constant and, on the other, we apply the appreciative and discriminative capacity of the mind to the idea or image or object held as constapt as possible. In other words, 'inspection presupposses appreciative discrimination just as 'appreciative discrimination' presupposes inspection.
The objective constituent of an inspective situation is said to be what, for all practical purposes, we may call the body. With it we associate the notion of 'physical object' and this widens the range of what is meant by 'body' in Buddhist texts, it comprises everything that is subsumed under the term rūpa.
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