Early Buddhist Meditation
Page 3
This clear-cut identification of the jhānas with specific concentration exercises on a chosen object, which does not require the development of wisdom, is completely absent from the Nikāyas’ accounts, as pointed out rightly by Bucknell.40 Moreover, the arūpa samāpattis41 were considered by the commentarial tradition, and consequently by Buddhaghosa, as a type of jhāna attainment; that is, as similar in nature. In spite of this similarity, the arūpa samāpattis are never referred to in the Nikāyas as jhānas. Although they sometimes appear as states attained after the fourth jhāna, they also appear as part of a meditation model that is separated from the four jhānas. 42 In light of all this, Bucknell’s main argument seems valid when he observes that Buddhaghosa’s account is not ‘merely a more detailed and precise formulation of the account found through the Nikāyas, rather, it is fundamentally different version which is in serious conflict with the Nikāya account’.43
Another problem with Buddhaghosa’s presentation of Buddhist meditation theory is his systematization of the path (magga) under the headings sīla, samādhi and paññā. 44 According to Rupert Gethin, we should not rely too heavily on Buddhaghosa’s systematization of the path under these headings. Gethin has observed that this division can be misleading, since it
[C]an make it appear that much of the account of the development of samatha given under the heading ‘purification of consciousness’ (citta-visuddhi) has rather little bearing on the remaining five ‘purifications’, which are therefore to be understood more or less exclusively in terms of wisdom and insight.45
Note also, that this classification means that the development of samatha or samādhi is separated from the development of insight and is not dependent on it. In other words, this classification led to the assumption that the jhānas can be developed before one possesses paññā. 46
Further, according to Buddhaghosa, the development of samādhi has different levels, and not all of them are required for attaining nibbāna. Some practitioners develop deep states of concentration, such as the rūpa jhānas and the arūpa samāpattis; others develop only ‘access concentration’ – a level of concentration before the attainment of the first jhāna. Buddhaghosa states that this preliminary samādhi is enough for the practice of vipassanā and the attainment of nibbāna (e.g., Vism XI.212). The concept of ‘momentary concentration’ (khaṇika-samādhi) appears rarely in the Visuddhimagga. Nevertheless, it became central in certain lineages of contemporary vipassanā meditation;47 indeed, these lineages consider this type of samādhi as necessary and sufficient for insight practice and the attainment of liberation.48 Cousins has also observed that in the Theravāda view, direct knowledge (abhiññā) can occur on the basis of access concentration alone, and hence, one can embark on insight practice from that stage without entering the jhānas at all.49 According to Cousins, the path was divided between the vehicle (yāna) of samatha or samādhi and the vehicle of insight (vipassanā-yāna). In the former, the practitioner develops the jhānas, and optionally the four formless attainments and the various special powers (iddhi); only then does the practitioner embark on the development of insight (paññā). Alternatively, one can choose to pursue the vehicle of insight alone, by developing a minimal degree of concentration (either ‘access concentration’ or ‘momentary concentration’), which is less than the samādhi of the jhānas. 50 According to the commentaries, an arahant who attains liberation without the jhānas is called ‘liberated by wisdom’ (paññāvimutti). The commentaries explain that paññā-vimutti arahants includes ‘those who attain Arahantship either as a dry insight meditator (sukkha-vipassaka)51 or after emerging from one or another of the four jhānas’.52
Thus, according to these commentaries, the jhānas can be attained without the development of paññā, while paññā (a specific liberating knowledge) can be developed without the attainment of the jhānas, or only with the first jhāna as a basis.53 In other words, the jhānas were perceived as a meditation technique for attaining certain higher states of mind that might be used as a basis for insight practice, but only if one wishes or is able to attain these higher states. If the jhānas are viewed as attainments in which the mind is absorbed into one object of perception, while vipassanā and paññā as insight arisen from observing the changing phenomenal field, it is difficult to integrate these two factors into one coherent path-structure.54
It should be noted that nowhere in the Nikāyas is there any mention of the possibility that paññā-vimutti arahants, or any other arahants for that matter, achieve liberation without the four jhānas. 55 This discrepancy with the Nikāyas’ account is supplemented not only by the commentaries’ dubious linkage of the jhānas with the kasiṇa practice, as a key exemplar method for attaining them, but also by their view that the jhānas are mere concentration exercises that do not involve insight.56 This understanding has resulted in the misleading interpretation of the jhānas as twofold: lokiya-jhānas (ordinary jhāna) and lokuttarajjhānas (supramundane jhāna). According to the Abhidhamma and the commentaries, lokiya-jhānas are what we discussed earlier: the four jhānas and the four ‘formless attainments’ that can be achieved by the practice of concentration on particular objects. This type of jhānas (rūpa and arūpa), according to the Abhidhamma and the commentaries, is not a necessary component in the path to liberation. However, the Abhidhamma created another ‘type’ of jhāna: lokuttara jhāna, which is different from the ‘ordinary’ jhāna. For the Abhidhamma, the lokuttara-jjhānas are a label for the moment one attains one of the four stages of awakening. According to the Abhidhamma, the path-moment (magga) and the fruit moments (phala) are moments of consciousness which are experienced together with a particular set of jhāna factors that correspond to each of the four jhānas, respectively.57
While the jhānas in the Nikāyas are quite clearly a part of the path to liberation (before one attains nibbāna) – for the Abhidhamma and the commentaries – the lokuttara jhāna are actually seen as occurring in the moment the mind experiences nibbāna at the time of becoming a stream-enterer, once-returner, non-returner or arahant.58 That is, the jhānas, according to this view, have no liberative value since they are only the fruit of liberation (or a concentration state which can be developed, if wished, for special powers).
Bhikkhu Brahmāli, in his article ‘Jhāna and Lokuttara-jjhāna’, has convincingly shown that the jhānas do not have this twofold meaning in the Nikāyas, that is they do not sometimes refer to ordinary jhāna and sometimes to lokuttara jhāna. According to Bhikkhu Brahmāli:
There appear to be only one possible solution to this problem and that is to assume that jhānas and samādhi in the suttas always refer to ‘ordinary’ jhāna and samādhi, even if this goes directly against the commentarial view.59
He further states that ‘when jhāna or samādhi occur in the suttas, the commentaries decide whether “ordinary” jhāna is meant or lokuttara-jjhāna.’60 In other words, when the jhānas are described as necessary in the suttas, the commentator seems to decide that this particular sutta refers to lokuttara-jjhāna and not to ‘ordinary’ jhāna (and vice versa). Bhikkhu Brahmāli ends his article with a noteworthy conclusion:
[T]he commentaries’ redefinition of jhāna/samādhi in terms of lokuttarajjhāna has the effect of shifting the reality of jhāna from being a factor of the path to becoming a result of the practice of the path. Thus, the suttas’ insistence on the centrality of jhāna/samādhi as a path-factor is undermined, an undermining which only serves to seriously distort the timeless message of the Buddha.61
As for the identification of the jhānas with the kaṣina practice (which is connected to the view that the jhānas are mere states of one-pointed concentration aimed at gaining special powers and good rebirth), there is no textual evidence in the Nikāyas for such identification. For example, DN III.268 describes the ‘ten bases for wholeness’ (dasa kaṣināyatanāni), as states brought about by perceiving different kaṣinas (earth, water, fire, wind, blue etc.) ‘above, below, on all sides, undivided,
unbounded’.62 Here we can see a specific reference to absorption by the practice of perceiving a chosen kaṣina, in such a way that the meditator is completely absorbed in it. However, this sutta, or any other sutta in the Nikāyas, does not link the kaṣinas with the attainment of the jhānas. On the contrary, Alexander Wynne has convincingly shown that the kaṣinas, the element meditation and the arūpa samāpattis are connected, but not with the jhānas. He has argued that the kaṣinas, the element meditation, and the arūpa samāpattis were borrowed from Brahminic thought,63 as a form of meditation that aims to reverse the process of cosmic creation through inner concentration.64
In light of all this, there are four obvious and significant discrepancies between the Theravāda commentarial interpretation of the fourfold jhāna model and the way they are conceived and expounded in the Nikāyas. First, in the Nikāyas, there is never any mention of the possibility that paññā-vimutti arahants – or any other arahant – achieves liberation without the four jhānas. Second, while the Nikāyas clearly state that the formless attainments do not lead to nibbāna, 65 there are various affirmations in the Nikāyas that the four jhānas are conducive to awakening66 and that they are the unique teaching of the Buddha.67 Third, the Nikāyas never identify the practice of one-pointed concentration on the kaṣinas with the attainment of the four jhānas68 nor do they refer to the jhānas as mere concentration exercises that do not involve insight into the nature of reality. Further, we cannot find in the Nikāyas any statement that the jhānas are trance-like experiences in which one is completely cut off from the five sense stimuli.69 On the contrary, the Cūḷavedalla Sutta, for example, states clearly that the ‘signs’ (nimitta) of samādhi are the four satipaṭṭhānas70 – not the kaṣinas or the brahma-vihāras – and the Dantabhūmi Sutta, to give another example, clearly correlates the deepening of the practice of satipaṭṭhāna with the attainment of the four jhānas. 71 Fourth, the commonly used idioms samatha-bhāvanā and vipassanā-bhāvanā – which express the idea that the Buddha actually taught in the Pāli Nikāyas two distinct meditative procedures – cannot be found in the Nikāyas. More than that, there is no clear correlation in the Nikāyas, to the best of my knowledge, between the term samatha and the attainment of the jhānas, while the term vipassanā is never defined as the practice of satipaṭṭhāna or associated with the term sammā-sati.
In light of these discrepancies my primary task in this study is to challenge four widespread assumptions:
The assumption that the jhānas have no liberative value, as they are taken to be an adopted element from non-Buddhist sources.
The perception that the four jhānas belong to the ‘path of serenity’ (samathabhāvanā) and can be attained separately from the practice of satipaṭṭhāna (i.e., vipassanā-bhāvanā).
The related notion that the four jhānas cannot involve ‘liberating insight’ (paññā) as they are a narrow field of awareness, an absorption in which the mind is fixed on an unchanging object of perception, and therefore, cannot reveal anything about the nature of experience.
The view that one can ‘bypass’ the attainment of the four jhānas and attain Arahantship as a dry insight (sukkha-vipassaka) arahant.
Methodology
Up until now the study of the jhānas has been primarily based on a research method that examined superficially only formulaic descriptions, without giving much attention to other accounts that illuminate the nature of each jhāna separately, or to the jhānic process as a whole. In order to rectify this lacuna, my research began by using the Chaṭṭha Saṅgāyana CD-ROM,72 for examining depictions of the various jhānic factors and for considering the contexts within which the fourfold jhāna model is described. I decided on this course of action since it seems the most comprehensive way of obtaining a fuller sense of the different ways the Nikāyas delineate the liberative value of each of the jhānas and construe the nature and role of the fourfold jhāna model as a whole in the spiritual path.
This study has phenomenological, philosophical, psychological and historical facets, and it is grounded in close textual analysis of the Pāli Nikāyas in the original Pāli. In using the term ‘phenomenology’, I do not refer to the modern philosophical school by that name, but have in mind its root meaning – the study of phenomena: 73 a systematic reflection of the structures of consciousness in the jhānic process as they are depicted in the Nikāyas, and of the phenomena that appear in these acts of consciousness. The aim of this type of investigation is to carefully define the quality and nature of the jhānic experience and its psychological and philosophical meaning from the perspective of the Nikāyas’ theory of spiritual development. I also have used critical and philological analysis but have gone beyond mere textual analysis in order to take on some philosophical reconstruction.
The history and philosophy of a distant past and ancient texts is a narrative in which the scholar moulds meaning into the different elements he or she finds. Many times, it discloses more about the scholar’s perspective, views and intellectual and emotional tendencies than about ‘real’ past events and ideas. This is an ‘obstacle’ that we cannot totally escape. The past will always be tinged by our current perceptions and our historical and cultural situated-ness. Only an acute awareness of the differences between the way people thought in the past and the way we think and perceive reality in the present can partially bypass the tendency to project current conceptual ways of thinking onto the subject matter. Acute sensitivity to the original setting, the author(s) and the audience of the studied texts is necessary in the endeavour for a meaningful interpretation. However, it cannot be perfected due to the obvious reason that we cannot be completely detached from our own personal biases and historical conditions. That is, there is no neutral vantage point from which we can reveal the ‘real’ meaning of a text; there is no way to arrive at an objective reading of a text or at the ‘original meaning’.
Thus, I find Gadamer’s hermeneutic methodology a valuable perspective for the present study. Gadamer suggests approaching a text with the presumption that the text forms a unity, an internally consistent whole, and this regulative ideal of unity can assist in assessing the adequacy of one’s interpretation of its various parts. This method starts with a specific presumption and is approached with the criterion of unity, but can be revised after rereading:
The text must be approached as an internally consistent whole because it is this assumption of self-consistency that provides a standard for keeping or discarding individual interpretations of the text’s parts. Conversely, if one denies that a given text is internally coherent from the start, one has no way of knowing whether its inconsistency is the fault of the text or one’s understanding of it.74
In this study I have approached the Pāli Nikāyas from this hermeneutic perspective. Gadamer has also maintained that the presumption of unity is not sufficient to resolve the problem of misunderstanding; in other words, one can still distort the meaning of a text. I hope this study will be sensitive enough not to fall into this pitfall. I am taking Gadamer’s suggestion to be open to the otherness and distinctiveness of the text and to the challenges the text presents to one’s own views. For Gadamer, an illuminating interpretation depends on openness to the possible truth of the study object. This assumes that the text says something new that is truer and more complete than what I previously believed about it and the subject matter. Bearing this in mind is a way to avoid confirming the original views and assumptions of the interpreter.75
When I started to write on the topic of Buddhist meditation theory in my master’s dissertation,76 I approached this object of study from the assumption that the Pāli Nikāyas present two different types of meditative procedures: samatha and vipassanā. I had also accepted the traditional view that the four jhānas and the four formless attainments are similar in nature and belong to the same meditation process. This conjecture was based on many publications on this issue both from the Buddhist tradition and from Western scholars. In my master’s disser
tation I accepted this common premise but suggested that these two meditative procedures should be understood as interrelated systems of meditations. However, as I progressed in the present study, I have challenged my own original interpretation. Putting aside categories of thinking and interpretations that were embedded in the way I read these texts before has opened the way for a fresher and illuminating reading. It exposed a different interpretation and meaning that found internal coherence where I did not see it before, clarity that I could not have imagined. Thus, because my starting point is quite different than my ending point, I feel confident that I did not simply project what I was looking for onto these texts.