Jhāna

Yesterday there were some questions about jhāna, so that’s the topic for this morning’s talk.

The first question was how to get into the first jhāna, and the short answer is to follow the breathing instructions I’ve been giving you in the guided meditations. You settle in with one topic, like the breath, with a sense of pleasure and refreshment, and you try to attain a state of full-body awareness. That’s the first jhāna.

The word jhāna is related to a verb, jhāyati, which means to burn with a steady flame. The Pāli language has lots of different verbs for burning. For example, jalati means to burn as a normal fire does, with flickering flames, whereas jhāyati means to burn with a very steady flame. It doesn’t flicker—as with the flame of an oil lamp. You can read by the flame of an oil lamp because it’s so steady, unlike the flame of an ordinary fire, which flickers and is hard to read by. Or you can compare it to the flame of a gas stove. When you turn it way down, the flame is steady.

So when you have the mind in jhāna, you can read it clearly. Or it’s as if you’re cooking your mind over a slow flame—like scrambled eggs. You stir and stir and stir, and at first nothing seems to be happening, but then eventually, the eggs start to set.

In the texts, they describe right concentration as four levels of jhāna. The first level of jhāna corresponds to the establishing of right mindfulness. Basically, you’re staying with an object, such as the breath, in and of itself, and you’re putting aside all thoughts related to the world. You bring three qualities to this focus: You’re mindful, ardent, and alert. After a while, the mind really does begin to gather around the breath, with a sense of pleasure or ease.

Then there’s what’s called pīti in Pāli, which can be translated in many ways, such as refreshment or rapture, and it can be felt in many different ways as well. One is a sense of fullness. Another is a chill running through the body. For some people, when it’s intense, their hair stands on end. For others, it’s milder. Usually there’s a strong sense of energy running through the body, but you stay focused on the breath, your awareness fills the whole body, and you allow those feelings of rapture and ease to spread through the whole body as well.

The texts say this state also has what’s called direct thought and evaluation. In other words, you’re talking to yourself about the breath: “Is the breath comfortable? If it’s not comfortable, what can I do to make it comfortable? If it is comfortable, how can I maintain that sense of comfort? And once I maintain it, what can I do with it? How can I get it to go throughout the entire body?” And you just keep on doing that.

The image they give in the Canon is of a bathman who prepares soap for people in a public bath. Back in those days, they didn’t have bars of soap. They had something like a soap flour, and you would mix water into it, in the same way you’d mix water with flour in order to make bread. Then you would knead the water through the powder to make the whole ball of soap-paste moistened.

In the same way, you work the feelings of ease through the patterns of tension in the body to loosen them up. The water in the image stands for the pleasant sensations. The movement of the kneading stands for rapture. And the bathman corresponds to directed thought and evaluation. There’s a slight sense that you’re standing outside of the breath and working on it from the outside.

After a while, that sensation of rapture and ease fills the body, and there’s nothing more that you consciously have to do to adjust the breath to maintain it. So you can stop the directed thought and evaluation and just stay with the perception of “breath.” Now, there’s still a sense of ease and rapture, and in fact it often it gets stronger. This state of rapture and pleasure without directed thought and evaluation is the second jhāna. Your awareness and pleasure continue to fill the body.

Here the Buddha gives the image of a lake with a spring coming up from the bottom of the lake, so that the cool water from the spring fills the entire lake. Again, the water stands for pleasure, the movement of the water stands for rapture, but there’s no bathman anymore. In other words, there’s no need for directed thought and evaluation because you don’t consciously have to spread the pleasure and rapture in the body. They spread on their own. Then you just stay there.

After a while, the sense of rapture becomes unpleasant. An image that I like to use—it doesn’t appear in the Canon—is that, to avoid the rapture, you tune your mind into another frequency, to something that’s calmer and more easeful inside, like switching from hard rock to soothing music on a radio. Then again, that sense of stillness fills the body. For a while, the movement of rapture is still there, but it begins to dissipate because you’re not focusing on it. After a while, it goes away. You enter the third jhāna.

There’s still a sense of pleasure filling the body, but the mind is becoming more and more equanimous. The image the Buddha gives here is of a lake of water that has lotuses growing in the water. Some of the lotuses don’t grow above the surface of the water, so they’re saturated with water from the tips of the flowers down to the tips of their roots. In the same way, your body is saturated with a sense of ease, but the sense of rapture has stopped. In this image, the water again stands for pleasure, while the fact that the water is still stands for the fact that the rapture is gone. There’s still a subtle sense of in-and-out breathing in the body.

As you stay there after a while, you begin to notice that the sense of breath energy fills the body so much that you don’t feel the need to breathe the in-and-out breath. You don’t try to stop it, it’s just that there’s no sense that you need to breathe in or breathe out.

This is when you enter the fourth jhāna. There’s a sense of equanimity, both in body and mind, and your awareness fills the body. And that’s it: There’s no sense that you have to breathe. If there’s any sense that breath energy is lacking in one part of the body, it’ll immediately come from another part of the body to make up the lack.

The Canon’s image here is of a man sitting with a white cloth covering his whole body from his head to his feet. There’s no water in the image, which symbolizes that the pleasure is gone. But your awareness feels bright and clear. Some people actually sense a light in their body. Others don’t, but there’s a sense of clarity in your sense of the body.

Those are the four jhānas.

The fourth jhāna can become the basis for some formless states of concentration as you begin to realize that your sense of the shape of the body depends on the movement of the energy in the body, so when the energy flow gets still, the sense of the surface of the body begins to disappear. It feels as if your body is more like a cloud or mist of tiny droplets of water, with no clearly-defined boundary around the cloud. After a while you decide, “Why focus on the water? Why don’t I focus on the spaces between the droplets?” Now, you don’t leave the body, you don’t go outside, you still stay within the body, and you know that if you wanted to have the perception of the shape of the body, you could recreate that perception—but you realize you don’t have to. In fact, it’s more pleasant not to. You have the sense that the space inside the body connects with the space outside the body and there’s no end to that sense of space. Just maintain that perception of “space, space, space,” all around. That’s the dimension of the endlessness of space. Stay there for a while.

Eventually the question arises, “What’s aware of the space?” Then you focus on a sense of awareness that again has no clear boundary, and you maintain that perception of “knowing, knowing, knowing.” That’s the dimension of the endlessness of consciousness.

The next step is to notice you have a sense of oneness in that awareness, and you ask, “What happens if you just drop the sense of oneness?” What replaces that oneness is the perception of nothingness. Then you maintain that perception. That’s the dimension of nothingness.

Finally, that perception gets very, very gentle. You realize that you can’t say there’s a perception there, but you can’t say there’s no perception there. You recognize where you are but you don’t have a name for it. And you just stay there. That’s called the dimension of neither perception or non-perception.

So those are the different states of jhāna. It’s possible in each of those states, except for the very last one, to analyze the state while you’re in it. It’s like having put your hand fully into a glove and then pulling it out slightly. Imagine that you have eyes on the ends of your fingers, and you can see what’s inside the glove.

The Buddha gives the analogy of a man standing looking at a person sitting down, or a man sitting down looking at a person who’s lying down. In other words, you can observe your mind in the state of jhāna from slightly outside it and you can see what activities are there. So you’re bringing back a little bit of directed thought and evaluation. In the Pāli, though, they use different verbs for the thinking that’s done at this stage. That’ll be the topic for tomorrow morning.

There are some controversies about what constitutes jhāna. For example, some people say that you should have no sense of your body, no sense of the world outside at all. But if you weren’t aware of your body, then the Buddha wouldn’t have used his repeated images of full-body awareness. As for the world outside, you know it’s still there, but you just don’t pay attention to it.

I noticed when watching Ajaan Fuang teaching people, that between the first jhāna and the fourth jhāna, different people would experience the steps in different ways: how they felt the breath, how they felt the energies in the body. And in the Canon itself, some passages say that there are two steps between step one and step four, and some say there are three. But the only two steps that are pretty objective—where you can say, “Yes, this is the this jhāna, this is that jhāna”—are these: With the first jhāna, you really are totally absorbed in analyzing the breath and working with the breath. You know that you’ve gone beyond the first jhāna when you feel totally absorbed in the breath without even thinking discursively about it. You’re fused with breath. There’s a sense of unification between the awareness and the breath itself. That’s the second jhāna.

The other objective sign is in the fourth jhāna, when the breath stops. The important thing is that you don’t try to make it stop, because it won’t stay. It has to happen naturally. The other problem that comes is when you realize you haven’t been breathing for a while and you say, “Wait a minute, I’m going to die.” You’re not going to die. You have to remind yourself that the breath originates from within the body, and if the body needs to breathe, it’s going to breathe. There is some controversy as to how much oxygen actually is absorbed by the skin at this stage, but it seems that when the mind settles down in the state of the fourth jhāna, the pores of the skin open up. You can tell yourself, “If the body needs any oxygen, it can get it through the skin” because the part of the body that uses the most oxygen is the brain. When the brain is very still, it’s using less oxygen. So don’t be afraid. You’re not going to die in fourth jhāna. And even if you do, you’re going to go to a good place. You have some monks right here who will chant for you.

So those are the four jhānas. Tomorrow we’ll talk about how you use jhāna in order to gain insight. But again, the short lesson for today is: The way I’ve been teaching you to work with the breath is how you can get into jhāna. And as for moving from one jhāna to another, it basically comes down to asking yourself, “In this state of stillness I have here, is there still some disturbance? What am I doing to perturb that stillness? And what can I do to stop?” Basically that’s how you go from one level of jhāna to the next. Whether there are four steps or fifteen steps between your first jhāna and your fourth jhāna, it doesn’t matter. It’s your jhāna. And eventually that’s what it’s all about: exploring how you sense your own body and mind, and how you can bring them together.