Jhanas Solved? Part II

In part I, I ventured my thesis that the jhānas have been traditionally misunderstood as discreet meditative processes rather than one meditative process with multiple stages. I also presented the idea that there is in actual fact just three jhānas or three aspects of one process rather than four distinct jhānas as traditionally regarded.

My main argument for this interpretation is located in the Maha-Saccaka Sutta which has been identified by scholars as containing some very ancient biographical passages of the Buddha.

In the sutta, the Buddha describes his difficulty in obtaining enlightenment to a Jain ascetic. The Buddha tells the Jain that after realizing the futility of his ascetic practices of starving his body, he recalls a time as a young child:

'I recall once, when my father the Sakyan was working, and I was sitting in the cool shade of a rose-apple tree, then — quite secluded from sensuality, secluded from unskillful mental qualities — I entered & remained in the first jhana: rapture & pleasure born from seclusion, accompanied by directed thought & evaluation.

In this passage the Buddha relates his experience of a young boy obtaining the first jhāna. The key to this passage is the description of the young-boy-Buddha experiencing such a pleasurable state by being “quite secluded from sensuality.” Instead of finding pleasure by engaging in the many distractions and activities that would have interested a boy of that age, the young Buddha-to-be finds pleasure by being secluded from them.

It is important to note that this passage does not convey at all the notion that the young Buddha-to-be entered into a type of concentrated mental absorption that shut out the world. On the contrary, the passage conveys a feeling of effortless relaxation and relinquishment that does not hint of the idea of losing all contact of the world.

While it may sound like the first jhāna is not a super special state that even a young boy could experience, traditionally the first jhāna has been seen as something only a practiced meditation virtuoso can obtain and appears to have some support from the suttas for it (Upakkilesa Sutta).

If the traditional interpretation is correct, then how can we explain the fact that the young Buddha experienced such a meditative state without obviously any meditative experience?

This conundrum indicates that there is something possibly wrong with the text or least the interpretation of it. Examining more closely the passage of the Buddha experiencing the first jhāna as a young boy, we find some things that do raise some doubts as to the entire passage’s authenticity.

The first thing to notice about the passage is the inclusion of the stock description, “I entered & remained in the first jhāna: rapture & pleasure born from seclusion, accompanied by directed thought & evaluation.” It seems somewhat surprising that the Buddha would clearly recall experiencing “directed thought and evaluation” during such a pleasurable state as indicated in the stock description of the first jhāna. Usually with highly charged pleasurable experiences one only remembers the pleasurable aspects of it and not other things like “directed thought and evaluation” which seems rather periphery and just too technical.

Another thing that is a little suspicious about the boy Buddha-to-be obtaining the first jhāna, is that it almost presupposes that he was sitting cross-legged in a firm meditative posture as is mentioned in many passages connected with the stock jhāna formulas. But this seems a little farfetched as he is just a young boy who most likely never formally meditated before in his life and had no motivation to do so. The young boy Buddha most likely sat under the rose apple tree not to meditate as a yogi but to rest and relax from the activities around him.

What also suggests to me that the stock first jhāna passage was not originally a part of the passage in question is a subtle shift in meaning when this stock passage is removed:

I recall once, when my father the Sakyan was working, and I was sitting in the cool shade of a rose-apple tree, then — quite secluded from sensuality, secluded from unskillful mental qualities — I [experienced] pleasure born from seclusion. 'Could that be the path to Awakening?'

Then following on that memory came the realization: 'That is the path to Awakening.' I thought: 'So why am I afraid of that pleasure that has nothing to do with sensuality, nothing to do with unskillful mental qualities?'

By dropping the stock formula and substituting “rapture & pleasure” with pleasure (which agrees better with later sentence of being “afraid of pleasure”) a different emphasis occurs. Instead of emphasizing the attainment of a meditative state, the emphasis shifts to a recollection of the types of qualities perceived to be necessary to reach enlightenment. This I contend is what prompted the Buddha to engage in a practice that would cultivate such qualities of gentle relaxation and mental withdrawal. And that practice was, of course, meditation or jhāna.

The Buddha thus went ahead and began to cultivate those states that offered an experience of joy which turned out to be the first jhāna.

It is likely that the pleasurable feeling in the first jhāna was something quite similar to the relaxing, blissful feeling of disengaging the senses the Buddha as a young boy experienced, but arrived at through the formalized skill of meditation.

If this is the case, then the element of “directed thought & evaluation” in the stock jhāna passage is possibly describing the skill of a meditator who is gauging the level of absorption and the level of activity of the mind.

And all this “evaluation” is used to know and direct the mind to the great bliss of what is now known as the second jhāna which will be the subject of part III.

Jhanas Solved? Part I

The Pali word jhāna is often encountered in the suttas within the context of the four jhānas or mental techniques the Buddha used as a vehicle for awakening.

The word jhāna has been frequently translated in English as “absorption” which connotes a technical mental technique that is extremely focused.

The word jhāna is based on the Sanskrit word dhyana that contains the root dhi meaning to “reflect, conceive and ponder over”. Surprisingly, this definition appears closer to the English word “meditation” than the traditional idea of "absorption".

Interestingly, there are instances in the the Pali Canon that support the idea of jhāna as a general form of meditation. There are multiple passages in the canon where the Buddha says, “jhayatha bhikkhave” (here), which translates much more intelligibly as “monks, meditate” instead of “monks, attain absorption.”

Even so, the overwhelming occurrence of the word jhāna in the suttas is used in a more technical sense of a specific form of meditation. The almost exclusivity of jhāna in the technical sense is somewhat of an illusion. Due to a small set of stock passages related to the four jhānas being repeated throughout the Pali Canon, the reader is left with the impression that jhāna has primarily a technical meaning that is often associated with absorption.

Not surprisingly, the Buddhist tradition has focused a lot of attention on the technical meaning of jhāna: its characteristics, how it is attained, the benefit and so on.

Historically, the attainment of jhānas has become increasingly difficult to obtain as time has passed since the Buddha’s death. Today, most of the Theravada orthodoxy proclaims that the attainment of the first jhāna, let alone other higher jhānas, can only be gained with difficulty by experienced meditators.

Whatever is the truth of the difficulty of obtaining jhānas, the Buddhist tradition, for the most part, has universally agreed that the jhānas are a series of discreet mental processes that progress in order from a lower jhāna to a higher one.

This assumption seems a very reasonable one given the fact that the jhānas are number from one to four and are always described in the same order. However, as I will try to show, this numbering may have been simply a helpful memorization device rather than a means of communicating four quite distinct processes.

I will argue in the following posts by examining key suttas of the Pali Canon and contemporary descriptions of personal experiences of jhāna that what is labeled as the four jhānas is actually a description of one meditative process that has four different stages.