Jhana & Discernment

Take a couple of good, long, deep in-and-out breaths, and ask yourself, “Where do you feel the breathing in the body?” We know the air comes in and out through the nose into the lungs. But when the Buddha’s talking about the breath, he doesn’t talk about the air, he talks about the energy in the body itself.

You have to ask yourself, “Where do you feel that, the flow that allows the air to come in and allows it to go out?” It could be in the chest. It could be in the abdomen. It could be anywhere in the body. Ask yourself, “Where do you feel it most clearly now?” Try to stay with that, all the way through the in-breath, all the way through the out-. And if long breathing feels good, keep it up. If it doesn’t, you can change: Make it faster, slower, shorter, more shallow, heavier, lighter. Try to get in touch with what feels good right now.

You want to have a sensation of the breath that feels absorbing, something you can get into and settle in with. If the breath feels constricted or tight, it’s not going to be a pleasant place to be.

And you notice that you can change things: The breath, the Buddha said, is a bodily fabrication. In other words, there’s an element of intention in how you breathe, and you can make use of that intention to make this a good place to stay.

After all, that’s what right concentration is all about: finding a place where you can stay with a sense of ease, well-being, and refreshment. Then you can let that sense of refreshment spread through the body.

You can either think of it going all at once or you can make a survey through the different parts of the body, section by section. Start, say, around the navel. Watch that part of the body for a while as you breathe in, breathe out. Notice what rhythm of breathing feels good there. And if there’s any sense of tension or tightness there, allow it to relax, so that no new tension builds up as you breathe in, and you’re not holding on to any tension as you breathe out.

Then you go up to the stomach, the middle of the chest, the base of the throat, the middle of the head, down the shoulders, down the back, out the legs. Go around and around in the body like this for a while until you get a sense that whatever ease there is in the breathing can spread throughout the whole body, throughout the whole nervous system.

Then find a place in the midst of the body where it feels good to stay, where it’s easy to stay focused, and then stay right there, allowing your awareness to spread through the whole body. The breathing fills the body. The awareness fills the body. Everything feels good together.

This is how you get into what’s called jhāna, absorption. It’s an important factor of the path. In fact, in some passages the Buddha talks about it as the heart of the path, and all the other factors are its requisites, its supports. That’s because it’s here that you can observe the mind clearly, both in getting it into concentration and in maintaining the concentration.

There’s a passage where he says, “There’s no discernment without jhāna, no jhāna without discernment.” What he means is that if you want to get the mind into concentration, you have to be able to observe it: See what it’s doing, how it’s putting things together, because that’s the process the Buddha wants you to study and discern.

It’s called fabrication, or saṅkhāra in Pali. The Buddha wants you to see the extent to which the present moment is not just a given—it’s something you put together through the processes of fabrication.

You put it together, one, by the way you breathe. That’s called bodily fabrication. Two, verbal fabrication, the way you talk to yourself. You choose a topic, and then you comment on it; you ask questions about it, come up with answers. You can have an internal dialogue, or more than a dialogue. A whole group discussion can go on. As you’re getting the breath comfortable, and you’re getting the mind to settle down, there will be some talking inside.

We sometimes think that with meditation you have to get the mind absolutely quiet. But there’s some thinking you have to do before it gets quiet, so that you can get the mind subtly and snugly with the breath.

Then, three, there’s mental fabrication, which are your perceptions and feelings. Perceptions, here, would be the images you hold in mind—like thinking of the breath as a quality of energy flowing through the body, rather than air coming in and out the nose.

Those are two separate pictures you could have about what happens when you breathe, and you can ask yourself which one is more conducive to settling down. Another perception you can try is the question of whether the breath energy is actually coming in from the outside, or starts from the inside. And if it starts from the inside, where?

You can either choose one spot, two spots, or you can think of every cell in the body breathing in, breathing out. Ask yourself which perception is most conducive to getting the mind to settle down, which gives rise to feelings that are easy to stay with. Then stick with that perception.

So here, simply getting the mind to settle in with the breath requires using bodily fabrication, verbal fabrication, and mental fabrication. You can discern these things as you’re settling in, you get more sensitive to them, and then once the mind is there, then you can see the processes by which distractions might come up.

You’ll see that they involve the same sorts of fabrications. Say a thought world begins to appear in your mind. There’ll be a little knot in your breath energy someplace, and the mind will start talking about that world. Then there’ll be perceptions that come up, images in the mind, or words in the mind. Sometimes you say No to them, and sometimes you say Yes.

But for the time being, you want to say No to anything else besides the breath. And as you say No, you get better and better at detecting these things as they begin.

As every meditator knows, there are times when you’re sitting here with the breath, and all of a sudden you’re someplace else, totally forgetting the breath, and in another thought world. When you realize that’s happened, you just drop the thought world and you come back.

Ideally, though, you want to see the earlier steps before you go into the thought world. That’s one of the reasons why you try to maintain that full-body awareness, because to go into a thought world, you have to shrink. So keep your awareness expansive throughout the body. Keep the breath expansive throughout the body, and it’ll be easier and easier to maintain this frame of reference.

So in the process of getting the mind still, you’re also getting some understanding into it. You need the understanding to get the mind still, and once it’s still, you begin to see these processes even more clearly.

This is how those two factors in meditation, tranquility and insight, or discernment and jhāna, help each other along.

And there will be a strong sense of you doing this.

Sometimes you hear it said that if you have any sense that you’re doing the path, it’s wrong view. Well, if that were the case, then the Buddha had wrong view, because he often talked about developing a healthy sense of self around your meditation. It’s in seeing how you develop that sense of self again and again and again that you begin to understand the process. Then you can see how you do it as you go through the day in lots of different ways that can actually cause a lot of stress and suffering.

Wherever there’s a desire, that’s how things get started. As the Buddha said, things don’t come out of your self, they come out of desire. Everything, he says, that you’re going to experience, whether it’s on the path or off the path, is rooted in desire.

Those desires then become a nucleus around which your sense of you in a world of experience begins to develop. That’s how we were born to begin with. You were about to die, and an image came into your mind about where you might possibly go. There may have been lots of options you could have gone for, and one of them was attractive, pulled you in. Then there you are: you in a world of experience based on a desire—which, at the moment of death, can be pretty random, because when people are dying they can be pretty desperate. They’ll go for almost anything, which is why some people go to places that are not really worth going to—that no one in their right mind would want, but then people when they’re dying are rarely in their right mind.

Now, the process happens not only at the moment of death, it’s happening all the time. Again, an image appears in the mind, something that seems desirable. Then there’s a sense of you in relationship to it, and the world in which that desired object exists.

You can play three roles in that world. One, you’re the agent who can do things that will get that desired object. Two, you’re the consumer, the one who’s going to enjoy it when you gain it. And three, there’s the commentator who talks about what you’re doing, passes judgment on the agent and the consumer, observes what you’re doing, passes more judgment.

Concentration involves the same three senses of self. As the Buddha said, you want to have a sense of self that feels confident that you can do this—that’s the agent.

One of the thoughts that Ven. Ānanda—who was a student of the Buddha—said is really helpful in the path is that you think about all the people who’ve gained awakening and you say, “Well, they can do it. They’re human beings. I’m a human being. If they can do it, why can’t I?” You’re going to need that sense of confidence in yourself and your abilities to do things for this path to work.

As for the self as a consumer, there are times when you feel discouraged on the path, thinking you might want to give up. So, you ask yourself, “I got onto this path because I wanted to put an end to suffering, because I loved myself. If I abandon this path, does it mean I don’t love myself anymore?” That’s to encourage you to stick with it.

Then finally, the commentator: You look at what you’re doing. First, you survey your intentions behind what you’re doing. Here your intentions are good: You want to stick with the breath. As long as your intentions are good, go ahead. If they’re not good, abandon the idea, do something else instead. While you’re doing what you anticipated to be a good thing, if you see that any harm is coming up, you stop or, at the very least, you try to adjust things so that you can eliminate the harm.

Then, when you’re done, you want to reflect on the results of what you’ve done. If it ended up that you did cause harm, then you resolve not to repeat that mistake and you go talk it over with someone who’s more advanced on the path. But if you don’t see any harm, then you take joy in that fact and you continue training.

In other words, you’re not satisfied in the sense of, “This is as good as I can get,” but you’re satisfied with the fact that you’re on the right path, and you’re making progress. And you realize, of course, that there’s more to be done, and you’re happy to do it. That’s the kind of commentator you want.

This is how the Buddha taught his son when his son was still seven years old. Years back, I was leading a retreat where we discussed this particular passage. One of the people on the retreat was a psychotherapist who was leading a mindfulness therapy group. So she took the passage home, and the next day she took it to her group, Xeroxed it, passed it out, and asked the members of the group, “What do you think of the Buddha as a parent?” And they all said, “If we had parents like this, then we wouldn’t need these stupid mindfulness therapy groups.”

In other words, the Buddha teaches you how to try to avoid a mistake, but when you make a mistake, he teaches you how to learn from it. That’s the kind of commentator you want inside—a commentator that’s really helpful—especially as you’re doing meditation. You look at what you’re doing, and if you’re getting good results, you keep on doing it. If you’re not getting good results, you don’t get upset, you just ask yourself, “What could I change? What could I do differently?” You don’t tell yourself you’re a miserable meditator. Just say, “Whatever I was doing isn’t right. There must be a better way to do it.”

So the meditation requires a certain amount of confidence in you as an agent, and a desire that you as the consumer will get something good to consume. Also, your commentator has to be wise, encouraging, and exercising compassion, both in understanding that you can make mistakes easily, but also understanding that you have to learn from them.

You’re creating a good teacher inside, one who means well for you by holding you to a high standard. All of these senses of self help along the path.

Now, there will come a point where you don’t need them anymore, because after all, your sense of self is a strategy. Think of all the different things you’ve desired in the past and how many different “you’s” there are that pursued those desires. You’ve taken on many different identities as strategies.

So here again, as you’re pursuing the path, the path doesn’t happen on its own. It’s not just one of letting go. You do have to develop things. You develop mindfulness. You develop alertness. You put forth effort. All that requires a strong sense of self, a healthy sense of self as a strategy, to remind you that, yes, you can do this, and two, it’s going to be worth it.

But when you’ve attained the goal, then you don’t need those strategies anymore, either of self or of not-self.

Not-self, of course, has to do with the things that you used to identify with, but you realize you don’t need those old identities anymore. You learn how to drop them.

But when you’ve attained the ultimate goal, you don’t need any strategies. You’ve arrived, through insight, through discernment, through concentration, all working together.

So don’t be too quick to drop your sense of self. Learn how to train it. Realize that it’s an activity—something you do, something you put together—and you realize you can put it together well.

If you nail yourself down with having just one particular sense of self, you limit yourself, but if you realize you can choose these strategies, then use them as you need them, then you put them down. The image that the Forest ajaans give is of making a table, and you’ve got tools to make the table. You pick them up, use them, put them down, pick them up, use them, put them down. Use the hammer, then put the hammer down. Use the saw, then put the saw down, until you finish the table. Then, when you’ve finished the table, you put all the tools down for good, while you enjoy the table you’ve made.

So learn how to use these fabrications skillfully—the way you breathe, the way you talk to yourself, the images you hold in mind, the feelings you focus on. And in talking to yourself, use whatever sense of self is helpful; drop whichever ones are not.

As you engage in these fabrications, you finally develop a sense of dispassion for them. In other words, you see how good they can get, but then you also see the limitations of how far their goodness can go. It’s when you see their limitations that you put them down. But you have to test their limitations first.

If someone tells you to abandon fabrications, and you do it out of a sense of duty, you’re going to pick them up again when that sense of duty wains. But if you’ve seen there’s something better that comes when you put them down, then you’re not going to be inclined to pick them up again. You’ve seen their limitations through pushing against their limits.

They say that things are inconstant, stressful, not-self. Well, you try to create a state of concentration that is constant, easeful, and under your control—and see how far you can take that.

It’s when you’ve invested in the concentration, and then seen its limitations; that’s when the limitations really hit home—that this is the best thing you can put together with your mind, but it too has its limitations. And you believe the Buddha when he says there’s something better. That’s when you put it down. That’s when you abandon it—but only after you learn how to do it well.