A few days before the eminent scholar Lance Cousins passed away, in 2015, he revealed to one of his students, Sarah Shaw, that he had been working on a book on Buddhist meditation. After his death, with the permission of his family, Shaw found the manuscript on his desktop and prepared it for publication. The book, Meditations of the Pali Tradition: Illuminating Buddhist Doctrine, History, and Practice, is the first comprehensive exploration of meditation systems in Theravada Buddhism, and it offers an in-depth analysis of the ritual, somatic, and devotional aspects of Theravada practice that are often overlooked. In a recent episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, spoke with Shaw about a system of Buddhist meditation known as the jhanas, as well as the underappreciated role of joy in meditative practice.

James Shaheen (JS): Many of the essays in this book focus on the jhanas. To start, can you walk us through what those are?

Sarah Shaw (SS): The jhanas are a way of the mind finding unity and peace within itself.  The Buddha is said to have stumbled on this state as a child while sitting under a rose apple tree simply through watching his breath. He found this state by chance, and his system of breathing mindfulness is a way of training the mind to enter the jhanas. 

We usually apply our minds to things we need to do. But what we don’t do very easily is release the mind from the preoccupations around us and just let it settle on the breath. When we can apply the mind to breath, great joy and happiness can arise. This will eventually take the mind to the state known as jhana, this great unification where the mind is freed from searching for other objects.

JS: Cousins focuses on the jhana factor of piti, or joy. Can you share more about the role of joy in meditative practice?

SS: The Sri Lankan Buddhist teacher Walpola Rahula once said that Buddhism always gets a reputation for going on about suffering, but people forget that the central factor for awakening—the fourth out of seven—is joy. Joy is the most important thing you can have in Buddhist practice, and Rahula said it was the hallmark of the Buddhist path at every stage. Cousins talks about it quite a bit in his book because he felt that it was a crucial aspect of how Buddhist meditation actually works. Without joy, we just can’t do things well. This is described at great length in the boran kammatthana, or the ancient system of meditation. Joy is one of the starting points for meditation, and it’s something that changes people. Cousins actually thought that the closest translation of piti was love, though it’s a difficult word to use in the West.

In the jhanas, the joy can get quite violent, but it eventually settles and deepens into sukha, or happiness, and then equanimity. In one of the suttas, piti is compared to what someone feels when they’re parched in a desert and see a wonderful freshwater lake, and sukha is what they feel when they’ve drunk from the water. I think that gives a nice analogy of the movement from the second jhana to the third: In the second jhana, there is said to be so much joy that it is the overriding experience. But, then, in the third jhana, that joy is stilled. The mind is refreshed, and there’s an increase in mindfulness.

JS: In Western practice, the jhanas are often dismissed or less frequently discussed, but Cousins defends them as part of a rich tradition crucial to the Buddha’s own life story. Can you speak to the role that the jhanas played in the Buddha’s biography?

SS: In what the Buddha told us about his life, he clearly wanted jhanas to occupy an important role. He describes the instant under the rose apple tree when he attains the first jhana. He then describes various meditations he pursued before he became enlightened, as well as after attaining enlightenment. The Buddha and a lot of the arhats [beings who have achieved enlightenment] continue to enter jhana after they’re enlightened—it’s where they refresh their mind. At the moment of his entrance into nibbana, the Buddha goes up through all the jhanas and formless states and then back down again, leaving his human body on the fourth jhana. In this way, he made his departure from his human body a form of meditation for those around him. He wanted to demonstrate that the jhanas were really important. It’s almost like that’s where he wanted his body to be.

Often, people will say that you need wisdom to get to enlightenment and jhana won’t get you there. It’s rarely looked at the other way around. But the Dhammapada says that you can’t get wisdom without jhana. The two are very closely linked. People who practice jhana defend it as a way of being able to go deeper into the mind and thereby get more insight because the mind is more peaceful.

JS: Cousins also examines the development of insight meditation. Today, we tend to see insight as opposed to the jhanas, but the relationship between vipassana and samatha is more complex. Can you share more about how this relationship is described in the Pali canon and commentaries?

SS: Samatha is calm meditation, and it’s always been seen as in tandem to what is known as vipassana, or insight meditation. They’re often compared to the two wings of a bird—both are needed. Most Buddhist practices tend to have an emphasis on one or the other, but they still have elements of both. In samatha breathing mindfulness, the emphasis is on the pursuit of calm, but there are also elements of insight because you’re aware of the rise and fall of the breath and its impermanence and unsatisfactoriness. The two are often described as yoked together. The Buddha says that some people practice samatha first, then insight; some people do insight first, then samatha. They’re not really in opposition. It’s a bit like how you feel and what you see. If I’m looking at a beautiful view, the act of seeing the view is vipassana, whereas how I feel is samatha. That’s the state of my being. The two aren’t in contradiction. They’re just two slightly different functions that can be going on at the same time.

♦

Listen to the full discussion between Sarah Shaw and James Shaheen here on Tricycle Talks:

The post The Joy of Jhana appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

A few days before the eminent scholar Lance Cousins passed away in 2015, he revealed to one of his students, Sarah Shaw, that he had been working on a book on Buddhist meditation. After his death, with the permission of his family, Shaw found the manuscript on his desktop and prepared it for publication. The book, Meditations of the Pali Tradition: Illuminating Buddhist Doctrine, History, and Practice, which comes out September 27, is the first comprehensive exploration of meditation systems in Theravada Buddhism, and it offers an in-depth analysis of the ritual, somatic, and devotional aspects of Theravada practice that are often overlooked.

In a recent episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sat down with Shaw to discuss a system of Buddhist meditation known as the jhanas, as well as the underappreciated role of joy in meditative practice.

***

What are the jhanas? 

The jhanas are a way of the mind finding unity and peace within itself. We usually apply our minds to things we need to do or things we’re working on, like the housework. But what we don’t do very easily is release our mind from the preoccupations around us and just let it settle on the breath. When the mind can settle, a great joy and happiness can arise. Eventually, this will take the mind to this state known as jhana, where the mind is unified and freed from searching for other objects.

The link between the jhanas and wisdom

People will often say that the jhanas won’t get you to awakening—you need wisdom. But it’s rarely looked at the other way around. The Dhammapada says you can’t have wisdom without jhana. The two are very closely linked. People who practice the jhanas defend it as being a way of being able to go deeper into the mind peacefully and thereby get more insight because there is a greater sense of peace there.

The overlooked factor of awakening 

Joy is central to the jhanas—and to awakening. The Sri Lankan Buddhist scholar Walpola Rahula Thero said years ago that Buddhism always gets such a reputation for going on about suffering, but people forget that the central factor for awakening, the fourth out of the seven, is joy. It’s the most important thing you can have in Buddhist practice, and Rahula said it was the hallmark of the Buddhist path at every stage. 

The movement from joy to happiness 

In the jhanas, the joy goes through five stages and can get quite violent. But it then settles and deepens. There’s an image in one of the suttas where joy is compared to somebody parched in a desert who sees a wonderful freshwater lake and feels this great joy, and happiness is what they feel when they’ve drunk from that lake. This is a nice analogy for the movement from the second jhana to the third: in the second jhana, there is said to be so much joy that it is the overriding experience. But then in the third jhana, the joy is stilled. The mind is very refreshed, and there’s an increase in mindfulness then.

Where the Buddha wanted to be

In what the Buddha told us about his life, he clearly wanted the jhanas to occupy an important role. He is said to have recollected stumbling on the first jhana as a child while sitting under a rose apple tree watching the breath. His system of breathing mindfulness is a way of training to find that too. Even after enlightenment, a lot of the arahats and the Buddha enter jhana. They want to. It’s where they refresh their mind. At the moment of his entrance into nibbana, the Buddha goes up through all the jhanas and formless states and then back down again, and he leaves his human body on the fourth jhana. It’s almost like that’s where he wanted to be, and he made his departure from the human body a kind of meditation for those around him.

The post Awakening through the Jhanas appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Earlier this year, as I was looking through an advance copy of Jhana Consciousness: Buddhist Meditation in the Age of Neuroscience by Paul Dennison, a name jumped out, first on the dedication page and then repeatedly throughout the book: Nai Boonman.

Jhana is an interesting term referring to meditative absorption that arises from concentration practice. There are nine jhanas in total, the first four being rupa (“form”) jhanas, associated with rapture, pleasure, equanimity, and mindfulness. The five higher jhanas (arupa, or “formless”) are said to endow practitioners with supernatural powers, including the ability to walk through walls.

Perhaps the two best-known modern jhana teachers in the West are the German-born Buddhist nun Ayya Khema (1923–1997), who first learned jhanas from classical texts, and Leigh Brasington, who was authorized by Ayya Khema to teach jhanas and who has now been leading retreats for decades. When asked, Brasington had never heard of Boonman. Yet Boonman, as Dennison writes, is an essential link in jhana practice.

Starting in the mid-20th century, the Thai sangha began favoring vipassana (insight) over samatha (concentration) practice, which is used to access the jhanas. Even legendary masters like Ajahn Chah (1918–1992) were careful not to call “jhanas” by their name. But Boonman Poonyathiro, a former monk and meditation teacher in the UK in the sixties, bypassed all this drama. Dennison, a psychotherapist and researcher who has published research on the brain activity of practitioners who have experienced jhana, credits him with sustaining an essential practice whose history dates back to the time of the Buddha.

Boonman turns 90 in August 2022 and because of health and memory issues was not available for an interview. Thus this profile relies heavily on Boonman’s self-published autobiography, From One to Nine (2003), academic writing, and interviews with his wife and students.

Boonman Poonyathiro was born to a Cambodian father and a Thai mother on August 5, 1932, in Ta Prik, a district in northeastern Thailand, the youngest of three children. Boonman’s mother died fifteen days after she gave birth to him.

As Boonman recalls in From One to Nine:

There was a story that after my birth my mother craved gibbon soup. There were plenty of gibbons around that area, and to please her, my father went to the forest to shoot one. Unfortunately, the gibbon he shot was a mother with baby; the mother fell to the ground dead, and the little one ran away. My mother died shortly after this incident and my father for some reason blamed me for her death. He moved away, taking my brother and sister with him, leaving me in the care of a relative of my mother, a spinster named Miss Kuo. I became an orphan overnight.

Miss Kuo died when Boonman was 4, and he was sent to live with an uncle. Then, when he was 7, he went to live at a temple school (Thailand has a centuries-long tradition of providing basic education in Buddhist temples, where boys can ordain as novice monks in exchange for free education, room, and board. Though education has been compulsory and government-run for 100 years, Buddhist temples continue to provide an alternative form of education, especially in rural and poor areas.) Boonman spent the next four years becoming “more unruly and rough.” He got a tattoo—empowered by spells from a Cambodian monk—to act as a talisman that would give him the power to win fights. He was publicly caned after talking back to a monk, and then had salt poured into the wounds. During this time, he also became increasingly interested in spells and witchcraft. “If I took a dislike to anyone, I would take a dead man’s bone and bury it under their house, empowering it by chanting a spell,” Boonman recalls. And all of this he did to solidify his aspiration to become the “village gangster.”

After finishing temple school, Boonman was banished to a remote hut to tend to the family’s water buffaloes. Boonman’s disobedient behavior led to punishment by his uncle, which in turn led to the teenager’s feeling “unwanted.”  “I was an orphan and had always felt different from other children, and I wanted to end my life,” Boonman wrote.

The boy stared at a nearby well but chose not to jump in; ultimately he fulfilled his duty to sell the family’s yearly crop of watermelons near the Cambodian border, and then became a temple boy, assistant to elder monks, at Wat Pailom, where his cousin had ordained as a bhikkhu (monk).

“If I took a dislike to anyone, I would take a dead man’s bone and bury it under their house, empowering it by chanting a spell.”

Boonman took to meditation and his studies, and as the rough boy in him gradually disappeared, meditation and learning Pali became the most exciting activities in his world. He learned samatha from the older monks at Wat Pailom, silently saying bu on the in-breath and ddho on the out-breath, the same way he would teach his Western students decades later.

When he was 16, Boonman became a novice monk. His uncle’s family refused to give him permission to ordain, but because of Boonman’s dedication to studying he was sponsored by the abbot.

I was their pride and joy. This ordination was very different to the previous one; the only similarity being that none of my relatives from Ta Prik village came. I became Phra Maha Boonman Poonyathiro, the same name I have used up to this present day.

In order for Boonman to go through the ceremony, his fight-winning tattoo had to go. He complied, removing the tattoo and the last traces of the gangster he had aspired to be.

On the Road

Not long after ordaining, Boonman was accepted to Varanasi Sanskrit University in India and spent the next five years studying for his bachelor’s degree, focusing on the Abhidhamma. His travels were funded by friends and laypeople back at Wat Pailom, and he earned some money by giving Thai visitors tours of Buddhist sites, writing for Thai publications, and offering astrology readings.

On one of his days off, Boonman was visiting Sarnath, the birthplace of the Buddha, when he met a Canadian-born monk named Venerable Ananda Bodhi, who lived at Hampstead Buddhist Vihara in London. (In the late 1960s, Ananda Bodhi would be recognized as a reincarnate lama by the Sixteenth Karmapa, and he later taught around the world as Karma Tenzin Dorje Namgyal Rinpoche.) The two monks were both interested in meditation, and Ananda Bodhi told Boonman to look him up if he ever came to London.

Boonman did have travel on the brain. His studies were finished, and other monks he knew had gone to places like China and Russia. He didn’t know where exactly he wanted to go, but he decided to join an assistant professor in Bangkok, Ajahn Vichian, who planned to travel overland from India to the UK on an English Triumph motorcycle in the summer of 1962 before continuing on to the United States to study. But there was one thing Boonman needed to get sorted out before he left—his passport. Boonman had always traveled on a monk’s passport, which was only valid for passage within India. When he asked at the Thai embassy in New Delhi on a Friday, Boonman was told he would have to return to Thailand to receive permission if he planned to travel as a monk.

“The rest of that day I gave the matter careful consideration; I was now 30 years old and for 15 years I had been ordained as a samanera and then as a monk—half my lifetime. It was a hard decision to make, but I made it. I decided to disrobe and try to live as a layman.” The following day, Boonman bought lay clothes and found a temple where he could perform the necessary ceremony to disrobe.

During the disrobing ceremony one of the candles flickered and almost went out completely, but after a while became bright again. I knew then that my life would meet with a lot of obstacles before it could run smoothly.

Boonman returned on Monday morning to the embassy, where the shocked staff issued him a passport and apologized for having caused him to disrobe.

Soon, the ajahn and the former monk set off on the motorbike with only enough money for food and gas. They slept in police stations or churches to save money and sometimes even slept in the desert. There were the worst of times: being accused of acting as spies in Iraq and totaling the bike when a Turkish army truck forced them off a bridge and into a river. And there were the best of times, like the time when Greek police officers paid for the two travelers’ ferry tickets to Italy after Boonman wrote in their tourist log that he was “proud to be in this land of Plato and Socrates and other famous philosophers.” The two travelers took a train from Rome to London, where the ajahn took a flight to American and Boonman went to the Thai embassy. “The consul was not very happy with my story and decided that I was perfectly good for nothing—a total vagabond who should be sent back to Thailand,” Boonman wrote. His passport was promptly confiscated, but his luck changed when he met an embassy officer whose family supported Wat Pailom, and Boonman was hired as a window cleaner.

Once he was settled—or at least not detained—in England, Boonman reconnected with Ananda Bodhi. It was thanks to him that Boonman started teaching meditation with the English Sangha Trust and moved into the Hampstead Buddhist Vihara, where Ananda Bodhi lived.

At first, Boonman was alarmed at the invitation to teach: he thought of himself as a practitioner—not a teacher, and definitely not a teacher for foreigners. But he accepted, and he organized his sessions differently from those he had at the monastery, with no chanting or taking precepts. Boonman called his method “pure anapanasati,” feeling the sensations of the in- and out-breath. After a few years teaching at the Vihara, he began teaching meditation at Cambridge, where he served as vice-chair of the Cambridge Buddhist Society (the famous Buddhist convert Christmas Humphreys, a British lawyer and judge, was the chair).

Enter Paul Dennison, then a radio astronomy student at Cambridge. Dennison was familiar with yoga and was drawn to breathing practices that might help his bronchial problems but, as he says himself, he knew nothing about Buddhism. After approaching the Buddhist table at the Society’s fair, Dennison started going to Boonman’s class.

“There was something about the quality of stillness he had that was very tangible,” Dennison answered when asked what he remembered about meeting Boonman for the first time. “And he was just sitting there and waiting for people to arrive, just very, very collected, very calm, but a very strong character.”

Several years later, a Cambridge student of theoretical physics named Peter Betts also found his way to Boonman’s class and attended a life-changing nine-day retreat with him in 1971. Three years later, he moved to Thailand to become a monk. Now, 48 years later, Betts is known as Ajahn Brahmavamso Mahathera—Ajahn Brahm for short.

“He impressed me because his method was simple and it worked for me,” Ajahn Brahm told Tricycle. Today, Ajahn Brahm teaches all around the world and is the abbot of Bodhinyana Monastery and the spiritual director of the Buddhist Society of Western Australia.

Although women could become fully ordained nuns (bhikkhunis) during the Buddha’s lifetime, this tradition died out in Theravada Buddhism nearly a thousand years ago. Among Ajahn Brahm’s many accomplishments was a 2009 ceremony in which he, Ajahn Sujato, and other members of the Theravada bhikkhu sangha ordained four women monastics as bhikkhunis, allowing women equal status and giving them the ability to ordain fellow women monastics. (The mainstream sangha does not share the two monks’ views and does not recognize full ordination for women; both monks were excommunicated from the Wat Pa Pong sangha.)

A Jhana By Any Other Name

Jhanas started becoming problematic in the fifties, when the Thai sangha began favoring the practice of vipassana (insight) meditation over samatha (concentration), which includes jhana practice. Dennison says the jhanas were seen as “superstitious and unscientific,” dangerous, and unnecessary to the development of the Buddhist path. But Boonman continued to teach the jhanas, although, as Dennison and Ajahn Brahm say, he was careful not to refer to them as such.

Dennison explains that Boonman taught meditation the way he was taught to practice. “He wanted to see how it would work with Westerners if he taught the old technique. So he didn’t explain much. He wanted to see what we made of it, basically.”

When asked what might have been the consequences of Boonman disobeying the sangha’s decree, “He probably would have lost his job [at the Thai embassy],” Dennison said. “These old traditions have been taught unbroken for centuries. And Boonman never showed a great deal of bitterness about it.”

The way Dennison tells it, “pure jhana” was not taught in the lay tradition until a few decades later, when Ayya Khema renewed interest in the jhanas as part of what Dennison calls the “new samatha tradition.”

And yet jhana instruction continued, but covertly and by another name.

“Ajahn Chah did teach jhanas, but not publicly,” Ajahn Brahm said in an email. “He would call it appana samadhi, which is the Abhidhamma term. Ajahn Jayasaro, who translated Ajahn Chah’s biography, told me that many old recordings exist of Ajahn Chah teaching appana samadhi.”

Thanissaro Bhikkhu, an American Buddhist monk and scholar in the Thai Forest tradition and the abbot and cofounder of Metta Forest Monastery in southern California, explains that a significant change happened after Phra Phimontham, the abbot of a large monastery in Bangkok, sent students to learn vipassana in Burma in the tradition of Mahasi Sayadaw (1904–1982). (Mahasi Sayadaw’s mindfulness method, the form that spread across the West over the last half-century, did not require jhana practice.) When the monks returned, they were sent to teach in monasteries across Thailand. “These were the people who were denouncing the practice of jhana,” Thanissaro Bhikkhu said.

Over the following years, teachers in the Thai Forest tradition would either reject or embrace jhana, but the anti-jhana sentiment cooled off—in part because Ajahn Lee (1907–1961), one of the most influential meditation masters of the 20th century, “managed to teach one of the strongest opponents of the Forest tradition in that hierarchy how to meditate, and apparently got him into jhana,” as Thanissaro Bhikkhu noted.

While all this was going on, Boonman was teaching the jhanas in the UK, relatively unencumbered and free from sangha politics. When it comes to jhana practice, he “planted the seed,” Dennison writes on the dedication page of Jhana Consciousness.

Dino Daddy and The Future of Jhana

In 1974 Nai Boonman returned to Bangkok with his family, settling into the life of a businessman. His wife’s family ran a jewelry and gem-cutting business, and Boonman became involved with it too. During a recent phone call, Aramsri Poonyathiro, Boonman’s wife, told Tricycle that no one in Bangkok really knows about Boonman’s life as a monk and meditation teacher. Rather, he’s known for his work in the family business and for his tektite collection (tektite is a type of natural glass formed from meteor debris). Boonman owns the world’s largest tektites and also has a collection of petrified dinosaur dung, which in a magazine article earned him the nickname “Dino Daddy.”

A year before Boonman returned to Bangkok, he and Dennison helped found the Samatha Trust (another founding member was the British Buddhist Studies scholar Lance Cousins, 1942–2015).

Boonman returned to England in 1996 when the Samatha Trust celebrated the opening of the first center in Wales (the organization has since opened UK centers in Manchester and Milton Keynes), and until the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic he would make a yearly trip to lead Samatha Trust retreats. In later years he joined these retreats on video calls.

Sarah Shaw, a Buddhist scholar and author, says Boonman has a “slight gift for invisibility.” She describes him as “someone who would have been quite happy to remain behind the scenes for decades. It is difficult to explain—he is not averse to publicity and certainly encourages samatha meditators to write and publicize the form of samatha and breathing mindfulness he teaches. But he is very dedicated to seeing the tradition he teaches thrive.” Shaw added that Boonman is still addressed as Ajahn [a term of respect for senior monks in the Thai Forest tradition] in temples by senior monks who are familiar with him and his work, but he is not a public figure.

This is true in the West as well. Just about every academic and Buddhist teacher not connected to Samatha Trust approached for this article hadn’t heard of him.

Boonman’s daughters run the gem business now, and Aramsri Poonyathiro says that Boonman doesn’t really meditate anymore. Boonman is “rather deaf, and his memory is not great,” Dennison explained in our first email exchange. “He is still very present, however, for those who know him well.”

In 2014, a year after S. N. Goenka’s death, the New York Times ran an article entitled “Overlooked No More: S. N. Goenka, Who Brought Mindfulness to the West.” Boonman is still alive, and still overlooked, perhaps because Samatha Trust never promoted itself, or because he was never the head or spiritual leader of that very democratic organization. The present profile is an attempt to give credit where credit is due.

Correction (8/11): A previous version of this article mistakenly identified Ajahn Chah’s year of death as 1922. Ajahn Chah died in 1992.

Correction (8/30): A previous version of this article mistakenly stated that Ajahn Sumedho was involved in the 2009 bhikkhuni ordination ceremony. It was Ajahn Sujato who participated in the bhikkhuni ordination along with Ajahn Brahm, not Ajahn Sumedho.

The post The Jhana Underground appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In the West, summer months evoke images of straw hats and beaches, hammocks under shady oak trees, and neighborhood cookouts. We hope you have the good fortune and ability to experience the R&R this summer that all of us deserve. 

The Buddha didn’t spend the summer months in a hammock (at least, we haven’t seen any iconographic evidence of this). Summer in south Asia means monsoons, and the Buddha and his sangha spent the rainy months in retreat. This period, which usually falls from July to October on the lunar calendar, is called Vassa, or “Rains Retreat.” It was during this time that the Buddha gave many of his sermons, and the monks lived in one place in an effort to not damage farmers’ crops during their wandering.

So whether you’re spending your summer traveling the world or upping your practice at home—or if it’s not even summer where you live right now—here are some books to enjoy this season. — Wendy Biddlecombe Agsar

Jataka Tales

Let’s stay in the rainy summers of the Buddha’s lifetime. The Jataka Tales, ancient stories about the Buddha’s past lives that illustrate moral lessons, are available in numerous translations and formats. Wat San Fran, a Thai Buddhist temple in San Francisco, has a very cool and extensive video series of more than 100 animated Jataka Tales and stories from the Dhammapada, the collected sayings of the Buddha. — Wendy Biddlecombe Agsar

If you prefer text-based reading, here are a few stories to get you started:

• Jataka Tales: The Birth Story of the Great Monkey (Mahavanarajatakam)
  
• Jataka Tales: The Elephant
  
• Jataka Tales of the Buddha: Part I (Access to Insight)
  

There are also many books translating the Jataka Tales, but a good one to start with is Jataka: Birth Stories of the Bodhisatta, by Sarah Shaw.

We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies 

By Tsering Yangzom Lama

In this debut novel, Tibetan writer Tsering Yangzom Lama follows a Tibetan family through exile, capturing the nuances of the refugee experience through the lives of four people over 50 years. The book begins with Lhamo and her younger sister, Tenkyi, fleeing Tibet for a refugee camp in Nepal after the Chinese invasion in 1950. The sisters’ parents die on the journey, but they find comfort in a young man named Samphel, who they meet at the camp, and the mysterious reappearance of a statue last seen in their home village. The story then skips ahead to Tenkyi living in Toronto with Lhamo’s daughter, Dolma, an aspiring scholar. Dolma comes across the statue that her mother encountered in the refugee camp all those years ago, and, pulled between her academic ambition and her family heritage, Dolma must decide what comes next. Published in May, this is the new piece of fiction that belongs on your summer reading list. — Alison Spiegel

The Swimmers

By Julie Otsuka

For the perfect poolside read, Julie Otsuka’s latest novel, The Swimmers, published in February 2022, chronicles the obsessive habits and routines of a group of swimmers who find refuge in their daily laps at an underground pool. Outside the pool, members occupy a range of roles and professions, but at the pool all these identities drop away. Momentarily free from the precarity of their lives above ground, the swimmers thrive on the fleeting ecstasy of weightlessness as boundaries between them and the water dissolve. But when a crack appears at the bottom of the pool, the swimmers are forced out of their underground sanctuary. With characteristic humor and grace, Otsuka catalogs the members’ responses to an abrupt, inexplicable loss of control, and the novel morphs into a quietly devastating portrait of one swimmer’s mind unraveling. Tender, gripping, and at times hypnotic, this short volume offers a profound meditation on the ways we structure our lives—through laps, through communities, through our very sense of self—and what happens when those structures disappear. — Sarah Fleming 

Read more in this review of the novel from the Summer 2022 issue.

The Lightness: A Novel

By Emily Temple

For a still-new but slightly older selection, this 2020 novel is set at a summer camp high in the mountains and nicknamed the “Buddhist Boot Camp for Bad Girls.” The Lightness is written by Emily Temple, who grew up in Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s Shambhala community, and this fictional work addresses familiar themes of power, sexuality, and youth. Two years after reading it, I maintain it is smart and 100 percent bingeable.  — Wendy Biddlecombe Agsar

Read more in this Q&A with Temple and historian Maya Rook about growing up in Shambhala. 

The Dharma Bum’s Guide to Western Literature: Finding Nirvana in the Classics

By Dean Sluyter

Author, meditation teacher, and former English instructor Dean Sluyter is the impassioned teacher you wish you’d had back in high school. In his new book, The Dharma Bum’s Guide to Western Literature, published in March 2022, Sluyter invites readers to lighten up, have some fun, and look anew at the classics of Western literature to discover that, they too, offer valuable spiritual lessons. With wit and humor, Sluyter guides readers through the canon of required reading and reveals how their contents contain hints of the light of enlightenment—even if the authors didn’t use those terms explicitly. Like Jay Gatsby pining for Daisy in The Great Gatsby or Vladimir and Estragon for Godot in Waiting for Godot, Sluyter shows how we are all seekers of the infinite, of nirvana. — Amanda Lim Patton

Read more in this interview with Sluyter about the book, plus an excerpt from the chapter on The Catcher in the Rye. 

Focused and Fearless

By Shaila Catherine

If you’re looking for a practice-oriented book, try this 2008 guide to the jhanas by meditation teacher and author Shaila Catherine. It might be easy to get lost in the technical descriptions of the jhanas, the deep meditative states the Buddha was said to move through before his enlightenment, or in the argument of whether they are necessary for insight and realization. Yet anyone who has spent time in concentrated, meditative practice will recognize the factors that strong meditation brings about—joy, mindfulness, and equanimity—and the power of cultivating an ever-deeper meditation practice. Catherine’s book is an excellent guide, serving to demystify the jhanas and bring them within reach of ordinary practitioners committed to liberation. — Vanessa Zuisei Goddard

An Onion in My Pocket: My Life with Vegetables (Plus a Zen Recipe!)

By Deborah Madison

Memoir fans should try An Onion in My Pocket, by cookbook author and chef Deborah Madison, a longtime authority on vegetarian cooking. Before Madison changed the conversation around vegetarian cooking, she was a Zen priest for almost 20 years. Her memoir is personal, inspiring, and may leave you eager to get into the kitchen. — Alison Spiegel

If you worked up an appetite from all that reading, or need to fuel up on an easy summer recipe, try Madison’s four-minute “One-Zucchino Lunch for One.” Madison, the founding chef of San Francisco Zen Center’s Greens Restaurant and a New York Times bestselling author, has us reconsidering zucchini in general with this elegant take on a ribbed variety, dressed with pine nuts, fresh herbs, and the invitation to invite other veggies and cheese to the dish. — Wendy Biddlecombe Agsar

The post Tricycle’s Summer Reading List: 7 Books to Read This Season appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

“Meditation” is a vague term.

Even in English it has two opposing meanings: thinking and not-thinking. But unsurprisingly, since the word meditation is derived from Latin, the term can be even more confusing when it comes to Buddhist meditation and its recent offshoot, secular mindfulness.

In the Pali canon, there’s no single word for meditation. Mindfulness (sati) is part of vipassana bhavana, or the cultivation of insight. It’s also part of the eightfold path—though the Pali word “sati” may or may not correspond to Jon Kabat-Zinn’s helpful definition of nonjudgmental, moment-to-moment noticing.

But sati is only one of the meditative elements of the eightfold path—the other major one is samadhi, or concentration. And here’s where things get interesting. In most of the Pali canon’s discussion of samadhi, it’s described not simply as one-pointed concentration in general, but as the ability to enter the four jhanas—distinct, concentrated mind states—in particular.

Eventually, dhyana, the Sanskrit for jhana, became chan in Chinese, and later zen in Japanese. These words became roughly synonymous with meditation itself and later identified with various specific meditation practices such as zazen.

But a funny thing happened to the jhanas within Theravadan traditions, particularly in the “dry insight” Burmese lineages that evolved into Western insight meditation and from there into secular mindfulness: jhana practically disappeared.

Why? Perhaps the problem is that the meaning of jhana was never entirely clear. The suttas do describe what these states are like. The second jhana, for example, is often described as “gaining of inner stillness and oneness of mind . . . without applied and sustained thinking, and in which there are joy and pleasure born of concentration.” Sounds nice, right? Dozens of such descriptions appear in the Pali canon.

But how do I get there, exactly? How do I know it’s a jhana and not just a passing pleasant mind state? What does it mean to “enter and remain” in that state?

Commentaries, especially the fifth-century Visuddhimagga, said that for jhana to be real, it has to be a wholly immersive and absorptive mind state. If you can hear anything, think anything, or even note the passage of time, you weren’t experiencing jhana.

With that high of a standard, cultivating jhana became a practice only for elites. Regular chumps like you and me didn’t have a chance.

Thus, while developing concentration remained central to these forms of Buddhist practice, jhana itself did not. This was an unfortunate development for two reasons.

First, given that the Buddha spells out exactly what he means by Right Concentration [one of the required spokes of the eightfold path]— cultivating jhana—surely it must be a mistake to jettison the practice entirely. Why would the Buddha say that jhana is essential and that the path is accessible to anyone, and then prescribe a practice that is inaccessible to all but a few?

Moreover, as my teacher Leigh Brasington summarized in his recent book, Right Concentration, there are numerous instances of nonabsorptive jhana in the suttas themselves. In one such account, practitioners talk to one another while experiencing jhana, which hardly comports with the notion that jhana is all-absorptive. (The Visuddhimagga says they must have been psychic.)

Now, it’s clear that jhana can be absorptive, and it is deeply profound when it is. I’ve had those experiences on long retreats, and many teachers still teach that way today. But jhana is also powerful without full absorption. As the Thai Forest teacher Ajahn Chah put it, the four jhanas are like four pools of water; they can be deeper or shallower, but they’re the same four pools.

Which is the second reason why it’s a shame to jettison jhana: because jhana is good for you. In my experience practicing and teaching the jhanas, there are numerous benefits to both beginner and advanced meditators. The states themselves are so profound as to be transformative in themselves, especially for shaking the mind free from attachment to other pleasant mind states, whether spiritual or pharmacological or otherwise. The pleasure they bring is regarded as “pure.”

And then there’s their main benefit: they spur you toward awakening. In one famous Tibetan analogy, building concentration is like sharpening the sword that cuts off the head of delusion. On its own, concentration doesn’t get you anywhere. But concentration, and jhana in particular, can make any meditation practice easier, sharper, and more effective.

There are two other, more modern reasons why a contemporary meditator should consider adding jhana to their repertoire.

The first is variety. We all get in dharma ruts now and then. Practices get stale, and even sitting with the staleness gets stale. Cultivating jhana really is different from mindfulness and other popular forms of meditation; it inclines the mind differently, builds different skills, yields different fruit. And while it’s difficult to attain jhana off retreat, it’s not hard to translate jhana skills into everyday life, infusing regular sits with concentration or noticing the wholesome feelings of bliss, equanimity, and so on when they arise. Jhana spices up meditation.

Cultivating jhana also, I think, addresses some of the big reasons laypeople meditate today: stress reduction, relaxation, and the pursuit of bliss. Despite its use for stress reduction, mindfulness done properly can often be stress inducing, as you see harmful habits of mind, deconstruct the self, or notice how everything arises and passes so quickly. I actually think that it’s the concentration aspect of mindfulness meditation—the calming, centering, focusing part—that actually holds appeal for most beginning meditators.

Of course, meditation’s not meant to be a narcotic. But most beginners are experiencing real dukkha [suffering] and they are searching for ways to lessen it. Mindfulness, meta-cognition, insight, and building witness consciousness are great ways to do so. But so are building concentration, focus, and calm—and that’s where jhana meditation excels.

And not just for beginners! Personally, I have a “day job” as a political pundit and columnist. I can vouch from firsthand experience that building samadhi is a key part of my own meditation toolkit. Creating islands of calm amid the insanity of our culture enables me to rest, recharge, and go back to the work of justice.

Leigh Brasington authorized me to teach jhana in the lineage of his teacher, the Ven. Ayya Khema. This method cultivates jhana as described in the Pali canon, rather than in the commentaries. In my experience, jhana meditation can lead to transformative experiences, aid in the work of insight, add variety to meditation practice, and provide valuable tools for modern life. It’s a vital part of the eightfold path.

Which I guess is why it’s there.

This article was originally published September 22, 2016.

The post Jhana: The Spice Your Meditation Has Been Missing appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

The Pali word jhāna has been on a remarkable journey. The Sanskrit form dhyāna became chan in China and then soen in Korea and later zen in Japan. The word itself means “meditation,” so it is perhaps not surprising to see it become central to many different expressions of Buddhism.

Meditation practice goes back a long way in India, possibly to the Indus Valley civilization with its carved seals showing people seated in yogic meditation postures. It was certainly around long before Buddhism, and the Buddha himself is said to have learned concentration practices from other teachers.

He incorporated these practices into the right concentration aspect of his eightfold path. But although he saw concentration as an important tool insofar as it focused the mind, steadied it, and cleared it of its many impediments, to him it was not sufficient to bring about the awakening experience we know as nirvana. The Buddha’s unique insight was that wisdom alone is truly transformative and that meditation up to the point of awakening is largely a matter of “peaceful abiding here and now.”

Familiar to some practitioners today are the four jhānas, a sequence of four stages of deepening concentration leading to a profound state of equanimity. Here jhāna is often translated as “absorption” because, as the process unfolds, one’s attention is drawn more naturally and easily into the calm inner reaches of the mind.

The first jhāna requires the practitioner temporarily to abandon the five hindrances—restlessness, sluggishness, sense-desire, ill will, and doubt—at which point a deep feeling of pleasure and well-being naturally emerges in the body and mind. Perhaps the jhānas are not widely practiced these days because it can be so difficult to access the entry point—to become free of the hindrances.

Conceptual thinking subsides with the second jhāna, and in the third the sensations of pleasure begin to be tempered with equanimity. The fourth stage of absorption is characterized by a mind that has achieved “purity of mindfulness due to equanimity” and thereby has become steady, clear, flexible, and luminous.

At this point, the practitioner is more able to discern the impermanent, fragile, and impersonal nature of all experience—to “abide without clinging to anything whatsoever in the world”—and thus stands at the gateway of wisdom.

The post What’s in a Word? Jhāna appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

This article is part of Trike Daily’s Sutta Study series, led by Insight meditation teacher Peter Doobinin. The suttas, found in the Pali Canon, comprise the discourses the historical Buddha gave during his 45 years of teaching. Rather than philosophical tracts, the suttas are a map for dharma practice. In this series, we’ll focus on the practical application of the teachings in our day-to-day lives.

In the Samadhanga Sutta (The Factors of Concentration), the Buddha offers a vivid explication of the relationship between concentration and discernment. As the sutta begins, the Buddha tells his disciples that he’s going to talk about “five-factored noble right concentration.” As he goes on to explain, the first four factors are concerned with jhana, the Buddha’s concentration. The fifth factor is discernment. The Buddha’s message is that if we develop jhana, we’ll be able to develop discernment.

The Buddha then describes each of the four jhanas, around which there has always been a great deal of misunderstanding. There’s a tendency to think about “jhana practice” as a standalone exercise in which we seek to attain four discrete states of concentration: first jhana, second jhana, and so on. But generally that’s not a useful way to think about it. Indeed, the Thai forest monk Thanissaro Bhikkhu explains in his essay “Jhana Not by the Numbers” that his teacher in Thailand, Ajaan Fuang, didn’t teach in this fashion. Instead, Ajaan Fuang “rarely mentioned the word jhana in his conversations, and never indicated to any of his students that they had reached a particular level of jhana in their practice.” We’re better served to think of jhana in terms of qualities of concentration that we cultivate through breath meditation practice.

In the first jhana, we cultivate the qualities of rapture and pleasure. Rapture is a quality of physical ease, an energy that flows through the body. When this quality of ease is developed, the mind registers pleasure. But even though pleasure is a mental quality, we feel it largely in the body. Rapture and pleasure, when fully developed, “pervade” the body. The Buddha likens this pervading to a ball of bath powder—which was used for soap in the Buddha’s day—being massaged, kneaded, and sprinkled with water, so that the bath powder is “saturated, moisture-laden, permeated within and without.”

The dharma student cultivates rapture and pleasure by using “directed thought & evaluation.” She guides herself through the process by applying what the teachings call “internal verbal fabrication”—essentially, internal dialogue. She purposefully brings her attention to her breath by using directed thought, and then she evaluates that breath. In practicing evaluation, the dharma student scrutinizes every inhale and exhale, discerning where there is ease or dis-ease. Gradually, she focuses her attention on the easeful part, cultivates that quality, and lets herself breathe in the most pleasurable way. Then she allows the easeful breath to pervade the whole body, all the while expanding her awareness of the body along with it.

The term jhana is related to jhayati, a word used to describe a small steady flame, like the flame from a lamp that can clearly illuminate an entire room. Developing jhana, we begin by focusing on and cultivating an easeful, pleasurable breath—a small steady flame. As we keep our mind on the breath, the light of the flame gradually spreads to the entire body, which fills with that pleasant quality.

Related: Entering the Jhanas: Focus Comes First

As the qualities of rapture and pleasure develop, the mind becomes more inclined to stay with the breath and body. Happy to reside there, the mind doesn’t stray after its usual preoccupations, thoughts, sense experiences, and so on. Eventually, the practitioner doesn’t have to do anything to keep her mind on the body—it just stays. Now the dharma student has developed the quality of jhana that the sutta refers to as “unification of awareness,” in which  awareness is concentrated entirely on the body.

The effort required to fabricate directed thought and evaluation creates a degree of dissonance in the mind, but now the practitioner can let these tools go. And “with the stilling of directed thoughts & evaluations,” concentration deepens even further.

Describing this level of concentration, the Buddha uses the metaphor of cool spring-water filling a lake so that there is “no part of the lake unpervaded by the cool waters.” Imagine the breath fueling the body with “breath energy,” the easeful, pleasurable energy suffusing the body.

The third development of the five-factored noble right concentration, the Buddha tells us, occurs when the practitioner abandons the quality of rapture, the energy pervading the body. Now, in the body, there’s simply pleasure. Again, it’s a more refined state of concentration. Rapture has its sharp edges, it causes some dissonance; when we let it go, the quality of pleasure increases. The dharma student has, as the Buddha puts it, “a pleasant abiding.”

Here, the Buddha uses the metaphor of a lotus flowers immersed in a pond, “permeated and pervaded, suffused and filled with cool water from their roots to their tips.”

As the dharma student progresses to the next “development” of jhana, she lets go of pleasure as well. At this stage, her experience comprises a “purity of equanimity & mindfulness.” Equanimity is the fourth quality the dharma student learns to cultivate. Now there is an inner stillness and clarity, what the Buddha describes as “pure, bright awareness.” When equanimity is developed there may be a quality of exquisite contentment. When we experience it, the Buddha says, it’s as if we’re wrapped from head to foot with a white cloth.

As dharma students practicing breath meditation, we learn to develop these qualities: rapture, pleasure, unification of awareness, and equanimity. If we put in the effort and follow the Buddha’s instructions, there’s no question that we can do this. It’s important to understand that developing the factors of jhana is not limited to monk and nuns and people living in retreat settings—even as householders, living in the modern world, we are capable of it.

When these qualities are developed, we’re then able to practice discernment, the fifth factor.

Describing this fifth development, the Buddha says: “And further, the monk has his theme of reflection well in hand, well attended to, well-pondered, well-tuned [well-penetrated] by means of discernment.”

At this stage, we’re able to work with the four noble truths, the Buddha’s main practice for achieving discernment. We’re asked, first and foremost, to comprehend our suffering, and having developed the qualities of jhana, we’re now in a position to do this. We’re able to look clearly at our suffering, as it is, in the present moment, and see the way we cause ourselves suffering by clinging to various mental states—aversion, desire, and their myriad subsets.

When the qualities of jhana are developed, the dharma student is able to observe her experience with calm and objectivity. In the sutta, the Buddha gives an important description of what this observation is like. He says it’s like one person observing another person, or a standing person observing someone who is sitting, or a seated person observing someone who is lying down. It’s important to remember that, in order to develop insight, we need to be able to observe in this manner.

When we develop the qualities of jhana, the Buddha says, we’re able to develop insight quite easily. In the first of several striking analogies, he says it occurs with the ease with which a strong man tips over  a glass of water.

The Buddha then speaks about six “higher knowledges” that we realize when we cultivate jhana. For our purposes, we’ll discuss the last three. The fourth and fifth knowledges concern the law of karma. First the Buddha describes how he came to see into the truth of his “past lives.” As he explains, as human beings we go through a process of ongoing change, the process of birth and death. This could mean that we take birth into this life, we die, and we pass on to another life; or it could mean we go through a process of birth and death in this very life, from day to day, week to week, year to year, and so on.

Next, the Buddha explains that the kind of life into which we’re reborn depends upon our actions. If our actions—our deeds, our speech, our thinking—are unskillful, informed by desire and aversion, we’ll take an unfortunate rebirth—which  can occur in the next life, later on in the day, later on in the month, or in the year or decade. What it comes down to is that our actions determine what our lives will be like. Our actions determine our happiness.

When developed in the qualities of jhana, we’re able understand the law of karma. Not on an intellectual level, but on a deeper level, in the heart.

The sixth higher knowledge is the knowledge that leads to the end of suffering, or, as the Buddha puts it, the “ending of the effluents.” Established in jhana, we’re able to develop liberating insight. We’re able to understand the four noble truths. We’re able to bring an end to our suffering and know a greater happiness in our lives.

♦

Peter Doobinin’s previous sutta studies take a look at the Thana Sutta, Yoga Sutta, Nava Sutta, Lokavipatti Sutta, and Cunda Sutta.

The post Sutta Study: Factors of Concentration appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Perhaps no aspect of the Buddha’s teaching has been more misunderstood and neglected than right concentration. Yet right concentration is an integral part of the Buddha’s path to awakening. It is, for instance, one of the qualities cultivated on the eightfold path.

In general, Buddhist teachings can be divided into three parts: sila, samadhi, and prajna: ethical conduct, concentration, and wisdom. Or to put it into the vernacular: clean up your act, concentrate your mind, and use your concentrated mind to investigate reality.

The Buddha thus makes it clear that a concentrated mind is necessary for the proper examination of reality. The jhanas are the method he taught over and over again for developing such a mind.

The word jhana literally means “meditation.” In the sutras, there are four jhanas and four immaterial states. In modern times these eight states are simply called the eight jhanas. Thus the jhanas are eight altered states of consciousness, brought on via concentration and each yielding more concentration than the previous. Upon emerging from the jhanas—preferably the fourth or higher—you begin doing an insight practice with your jhanically concentrated, indistractable mind. This is the heart of the method the Buddha discovered. It reminds us that these states are not an end in and of themselves—they are simply a very useful way of preparing your mind, so you can more effectively examine reality and discover the deeper truths that lead to liberation.

Related: The Mindfulness of the Buddha 

The method for entering the jhanas begins with generating access concentration. The phrase access concentration means concentration strong enough to provide access to the jhanas. It is distinguished from momentary concentration—which is less concentrated—and from fixed or one-pointed concentration, which is the stronger concentration associated with the jhanas.

You begin by sitting in a comfortable, upright position. It needs to be comfortable, because if there is too much pain, the unwholesome mental state of aversion will naturally develop. You may be able to sit in a way that looks really good, but if your knees are killing you, you will be in pain and you will not experience any jhanas. So you need to find some way to sit that is comfortable. But you also need to be upright and alert, because that tends to get your energy flowing in a way that keeps you awake. On the other hand, if you are too comfortable, you might be overcome by sloth and torpor, which is also an unwholesome mental state that of course is totally useless for entering the jhanas.

So the first prerequisite for entering the jhanas is to put your body in a position that you can hold for the length of the meditation period. If you have back problems or some other obstacle that prevents you from sitting upright, then you need to find some other alert position you can maintain comfortably.

Now, this is not to say you cannot move. It may be that you have taken a position and you discover something: “My knee is killing me; I have to move because there is too much aversion.” If you have to move, you have to move. Just be mindful of the moving. The intention to move will be there before the movement. Notice that intention; then move very mindfully, and then resettle yourself into the new position; finally notice the mind working to get back to that place of calm it had before you moved.

This process encourages you to find a position you can keep, because you’ll notice the amount of disturbance that even a slight movement generates. And in order to become concentrated enough to have the jhanas manifest, you need a very calm mind.

Generating access concentration can be done in a number of ways. A common means for doing so is through following the breath, a practice known as anapanasati. The first word of this Pali compound, anapana, means “in-breath and out-breath,” while the word sati means “mindfulness.” The practice is therefore “mindfulness of breathing.” When practicing anapanasati, you put your attention on the physical sensations associated with breathing. It is extremely important to not control the breath in any way—just pay attention to the breath as it naturally occurs. If you control the breath, it does make it easier to focus. But it makes it too easy, so you won’t generate sufficient concentration to enter the jhanas.

It is probably better if you can observe the physical sensations at the nostrils or on the area between the nose and the upper lip, rather than at the abdomen or elsewhere. It is better because it is more difficult to do; therefore, you have to concentrate more. Since you are trying to generate access concentration, you take something that is doable, though not terribly easy to do, and then you do it.

When noticing the natural, uncontrolled breath at the nose, you have to pay attention very carefully. In doing so you will notice the tactile sensations, and then your mind will wander off. Then you’ll bring it back, and it will wander off; then you’ll bring it back, and it will wander off. Eventually, though maybe not the next time you sit in meditation, maybe not even tomorrow or next week or next month, you’ll find that the mind locks onto the breath. Any thoughts you have are relegated to the background. The thoughts might be something like, “Wow, I’m really with the breath now,” as opposed to, “When I get to Hawaii, the first thing I’m going to do is…”

Related: Jhana: The Spice Your Meditation Has Been Missing

Whatever method you use to generate access concentration, the sign that you’ve gotten to access concentration is that you are fully present with the object of meditation. So if you are doing metta (lovingkindness meditation), you’re just fully there with the feeling of metta; you’re not getting distracted. If you’re doing the body-sweeping practice, you’re fully there with the sensations in the body as you sweep your attention over the body. You’re not thinking extraneous thoughts; you’re not planning; you’re not worrying; you’re not angry; you’re not wanting something. You are just fully there with whatever your object is.

As you start to become concentrated, you might notice various lights and colors even though your eyes are closed. These are signs that you are starting to get concentrated. There is generally nothing useful that can be done—just ignore them. When you actually do get quite concentrated, the random blobs and laser shows will disappear. They might be replaced by a diffused white light, which is a sign of good concentration. It always appears for some people, it never appears for others, and many people find it sometimes appears and sometimes does not appear. But again, there’s nothing you need to do with that sign either—it’s just a sign. Remain focused on your meditation object.

Not everyone who undertakes jhana practice becomes proficient in this skill, but the only way to find out if it is something that works for you is to try learning it. It is indeed learnable by serious lay practitioners as well as by modern monks and nuns.

May your journey on the spiritual path be of great fruit and great benefit to all beings.

If you’d like to learn more about concentration practice, read Tricycle‘s interview with Brasington as well as other articles that appeared in our Winter 2004 special section on the jhanas.

♦

From Right Concentration by Leigh Brasington, © 2015 by Leigh Brasington. Reprinted by arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc., Boston, MA.

[This story was first published in 2015.]

The post Entering the Jhanas: Focus Comes First appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Can a game get you enlightened?

Not yet, but a sampling of virtual reality games I tried out at the June 2017 Buddhism and Technology Conference in Shanghai suggests that we might be on our way.

To be sure, none of the game designers I talked with promised total liberation from suffering. Rather, they are focused on more transitory shifts: creating transformative experiences, training the mind to meditate, and building calm. More samadhi [concentration] than panna [wisdom], in the terms of the Pali Canon.

Not that the designers are modest, however.

“My intention is to facilitate a temporary experience of the cessation of mental processes and identification with those mental processes,” explained Robin Arnott, creator of the game SoundSelf.

Lofty aims, but in my test drive, SoundSelf delivered, at least somewhat. Wearing a VR headset, the player enters an immersive world of geometric shapes that are controlled by one’s own voice. Chanting, singing, even speaking causes the shapes to develop, grow, morph, and move. The net effect can be pleasingly psychedelic, but because VR is so immersive, it can also be more than that: it’s not a bad approximation of a state of intense samadhi, such as in Theravadan jhana meditation or complex Tibetan visualization practices.

Arnott’s own inspiration is perhaps a familiar one. “The whole project,” he told me, “is inspired by my first ‘oneness’ experience, which was on LSD at Burning Man.” Unlike most people on an acid trip, Arnott, a longtime game and sound designer, realized he could facilitate a similar experience for others using VR.

SoundSelf isn’t a game in the sense of a competitive activity with a goal, scorecard, or tasks to complete. It’s more like a psychedelic mental playpen that is so immersive that it can create an experience of wonder—a flow-state in which the brain’s default mode network (what meditators might call “ordinary mind”) shuts down.

And, it is entirely abstract. “Everything that you saw in there,” Arnott told me after I emerged, dazed, from a 15-minute trip, “is an answer to the question of what abstract visual systems are rich and complex enough that we can make them dance and shift with your voice and still remain beautiful.”

That took a lot of iteration. Earlier versions had sounds and shapes that were perceived as dissonant, and a decent percentage of players reported that they had “bad trips,” emerging shaking or with difficulty communicating. “SoundsSelf opens you up,” Arnott said. “If there’s stuff you’re not ready to be with yet, and there’s some dissonance in the audiovisual experience, it could be a bad trip.”

Fortunately, the current beta version has ironed out those kinks. (After four years of development, SoundSelf is still not in full release). If anything, the geometric patterns felt familiar, and reminiscent of psychedelic experiences I’d had in the past.

Related: Tricycle’s Meditation App Roundup 

Perhaps most important, you have to make the game work for you, which involves both mental attention and bodily participation. You can’t just sit back and trance out, and that level of engagement seems to help the unitive experience. In fact, all of the games I tried at the conference had this feature in common: the user’s body becomes part of the process.

Chakra, developed by Jason Asbahr, the founder of the VR development community warm.ly, is focused on “stimulating the limbic system through body movement.”

“What the player sees when they put on the VR headmount is a world that moves to music, and they’re shown action prompts: little gems that they can reach out and touch,” Asbahr said. “And when they touch them, it releases energy to the universe, creating the universe.”

The net result isn’t so different from “Dance Dance Revolution,” the old arcade favorite where players must step on various floor-pads to keep up with an ever-quickening array of instructions. “There’s a common lineage, you might say,” Asbahr laughed. “Though ‘Guitar Hero’ would be the comparison I would make.”

As with SoundSelf, the key to the Chakra experience is its total immersion. It’s a contemporary version of what the German opera composer Richard Wagner called the Gesamtkunstwerk: the “total work of art” involving multiple media and art forms.

Where Arnott is aiming to create a peak experience, Asbahr had a somewhat more esoteric intention. “We’re trying to balance left and right inputs, and there’s an adaptive function that keeps you in the flow zone,” he said.

Related: Hacking My Way to Consistent Meditation  

Similarly, in Owen Harris’s DEEP, players use the breath to maneuver up, down, and through a simulated underwater world. Like SoundSelf and Chakra, DEEP doesn’t send you on any adventures. But it works quite effectively to quiet the mind, even at a busy multi-day conference in a foreign city.

Harris explained that DEEP came about partly as a result of working with his own anxiety. Accordingly, the game focuses on neither peak experiences nor trance states, but relaxation. Harris’s website says it will “sweep you into its relaxing embrace as it teaches you yogic breathing techniques that can alleviate stress, anxiety, and mild depression.”

Now, is all this cheating? Isn’t part of the point of meditation to do the work on your own, without all these clever tools to make it easier?

Meh. Meditators have been using clever tools for millennia. The Visuddhimagga, a core Theravadan Buddhist text that translates to “The Path of Purification,” suggests staring at kasinas [colored discs] to cultivate jhana concentration states. Tibetan mandalas aren’t merely pretty; when concentrated upon, they unfold into three (or more) dimensions, becoming intricate palaces to navigate around and through. If these VR games are cheating, then so are vast swaths of the Buddhist tradition.

And we ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Today’s VR technology is pretty awesome, but it will seem laughably primitive in a decade or two. It’s inevitable that tomorrow’s games will be immersive, somatic, and, yes, addictive. At least these dharmic games are utilizing that emerging technology for the purpose of cultivating wholesome mind states.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once said that he could imagine a religion comprised entirely of jokes. Maybe we’re witnessing the dawn of a religion of games.

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I don’t think anybody has an absolute definition of jhana. Descriptions of the jhanas can range from glancing, fleeting states to much more sustained states that can be accessed and exited with intention. There are signposts for each jhana that I look for in myself and in my students. One is sustainability—the ability to enter the jhanas and sustain that level of concentration for a given period of time. Each jhana is really a springboard to the next. The rapture experienced in the first jhana stabilizes through continued concentration and is tempered into refined concentration in the next, and so on. A Tibetan teacher of mine once said it would be a good idea to leave our clothes outside the door because we would be too absorbed to notice if the building—and our clothes—caught fire. I never tested the fire theory, but there are certainly states of concentration where perception fades away.

I decided to teach jhana after finding that a number of people do have accidental encounters with these states, and because I have a great deal of respect for the effects jhana practice has on consciousness. When I see that people are temperamentally inclined toward entering the jhanas, I encourage it. There are many powerful benefits of doing jhana practice beyond turning them toward insight practice. For one, in my experience, they make the mind much less prone to agitation and proliferated thought. I also see the benefits in terms of uprooting the five hindrances (desire, ill will, torpor, restlessness, and doubt).

I see how the jhanas help students encounter a deep level of inner happiness and joy that profoundly affects their relationship to life. The whole energy behind clinging and grasping and craving becomes more transparent for people who do jhana practice, and they have a greater understanding of the fact that nothing achieved through grasping compares to the contentment achieved through developing concentration. The mind loses its addiction to being lost in proliferated thought because it’s more inclined toward inner stillness. Jhana practice is really a practice of learning to let go. And in that sense, one of its lingering effects is much more ease in students’ ability to let go.

But jhana is not for everyone. It requires a tremendous amount of work, and it does take time. The preparation phases for getting to access concentration—the threshold of concentration required to enter the first jhana—take sustained effort and steadiness. I never think of teaching the jhanas in the context of a one-week or two-week retreat. You need at least a month. Moreover, not everyone has the capacity to get into the jhanas, although I do believe everyone has the capacity to reach access concentration.

Few Western dharma teachers teach jhana practice, because it has not necessarily been part of their own training. In Thailand and Burma, where some of them studied, the jhanas were still being taught, but the dominant form was insight practice. Jhana practice is a bit of a lost art, but I do think there’s a renewed interest in it. More and more of the mature students I see are motivated to refine their practice with longer periods of samatha—tranquility meditation. As they begin to enter the jhanas, they can see what an effective means of refining the consciousness it is. It opens the gates of consciousness.

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