A sutta witness to "vitakkavicārā" unequivocally being "thinking and ruminating"

Discussion
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There is no contradiction; nor did i discern you pointing out a contradiction.

Sujato agrees with MN 19.

Its hard for me to derive clear meaning from this statement. The word ‘vicara’ is not found in MN 117:14.2 and Sujato appears to be unusually suggesting Samma Sammā Saṅkappa here is Samma Samadhi. This is not convincing.

Sujato told you the Pali text of MN 125 on Sutta Central is corrupted (with the repeated phase: “sensual pleasures”). Access to Insight uses a different Pali text, which indicates the stopping of thinking prior to the 2nd jhana:

The Tathagata then disciplines him further, saying: ‘Come you, monk, fare along contemplating the body in the body, but do not apply yourself to a train of thought connected with the body; fare along contemplating the feelings in the feelings… the mind in the mind… mental states in mental states, but do not apply yourself to a train of thought connected with mental states.’

Dantabhumi Sutta: The Discourse on the 'Tamed Stage'

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How would rupa be ceased with jhana? Nama I guess would make sense but only if we discard the arupa samadhis first. Traditionally, jhana is directly tied to the rupadhatu, so it would be considered an escape from kama, not rupa. This is what I mean about people making up their own theories. I doubt any traditional Buddhist source says anything like “the goal of jhana is the cessation of namarupa.” It would be considered part of the process, but it isn’t meditation that does that, it’s awakening.

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I mean the goal of jhana is the development of psychic powers, if we just read the patipada as a straightforward description of early buddhsit praxis withput feeling the need to align it to all the technical and numerical terminology that develops in the rest of the canon.

Once the astral body has been produced it is used to see the past lives, the arising amd passing of beings, and finally the distruction of the poisons of sensuality, desire for “being” and desire to “know”.

Thats what the patipada says, ten or eleven times over, at the beginning of the first big book of buddhism, as asserted by all the vinaya traditions except the sarvastivadans.

(Pardon my oversimplifications, but that is, imo, the basic picture here.)

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Namarupa minus nama is no longer namarupa. Nama ceasing is namarupa ceasing. Water, earth, fire, and air are still seen , but they do lose something. They find no footing, that is, they lose their substance without contrast or distinguishing features to identify them and so cannot be labeled or named. There is only the seen, only the heard, and only the felt.

Both the Pali Athakavaga and its Chinese counterpart mention the importance of the cessation of namarupa. See Snp 4.11 and Y13

I suspect “[When] mentality ceases, and materiality becomes no more” should be read [When] mentality ceases, materiality becomes no more.

Ultimately, I think meditation should inform the reading of the text and vice versa. My own meditation experiences have led me to my own conclusions.

Added later:
I think it is safe to say that nama ceases when sanna ceases. Rupa remains in some weakened sense.

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Thank you for your oversimplification!

That is the most interesting ( to me) comment I’ve read on here so far. Feel free to drop the Pali and speak my language more often lol :grin:

I must find this patipada - this sounds like one of the things I’m looking for to further understandings I have come to - but not by the way of Buddhism. :pray::smiley:

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Hello Charles,

Could you please give some recommendations on what exegetical texts from the Buddhist tradition you have in mind here?

Thanks.

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I see what you mean now. This would be a temporary cessation of awareness of form, which would amount to a formless samadhi or cessation samadhi I would guess. Jhanas themselves wouldn’t reach that point in the tradition scheme of eight or nine levels of samadhi. Ultimately, though, this isn’t the way to the cessation of form. When you wake up from samadhi, form is back again. It hasn’t itself ceased, awareness of it was suppressed. [<- Actually, this isn’t right. The traditional view was that a practitioner can be reborn in a formless realm from practicing formless samadhis, so it can be an ultimate way to the cessation of form.]

I’ve begun a forum wiki that collects them together in one place recently. It may not include many new sources to those who are well read, but I hope that it would eventually be useful to anyone who wants to research topics surrounding the four jhanas in various languages, not just in Pali. It will require some help from others to become as comprehensive as I would like.

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When you say “wake up from samadhi”, what do you mean? Are you talking about when you are up and about interacting with people or in some state while still on the cushion? I am trying to imagine how the Buddha could navigate the world and complex social interactions without name and form in some sense. I think final nibbana occurring at death implies that all other experiences of nibbana are temporary. If not, what was the significance of his final nibbana?

I believe, possibly erroneously, that nothingness is emptiness. No one is home, but it is still luminous. There is unparsed sense data. Visual data at least. The lights don’t go out. The person is gone along with the notion of a separate world. That is, the duality is gone. If blacking out is the goal. I have not gotten there. That sounds more like Jain mediation to me.

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Formless samadhis, perhaps the fourth jhana too, were depicted as deep trance-like states in Buddhist texts. There are a number of passages that comment on this specifically, like the Buddha telling the story in the Parinibbana Sutta of not hearing the thunderclap of a lightning strike outside his hut while he was meditating. It isn’t unconsciousness, but one appears unconsciousness to an outside observer. I’d say that the abode of nothingness was an inner experience during that sort of meditative state, not an experience while walking about and conversing with other people.

I think the problem of making sense of these experiences in the context of ordinary life is the reason for the two truths in Buddhist thought - conventional and ultimate. The conventional truth is the reality of relativity and relationships between people and things. The ultimate truth was considered an underlying reality accessed in meditation or through a sudden epiphany, depending on the Buddhist tradition.

The thing to remember when looking at Snp 4.11 is the context of that dependent origination chain. It was commenting on how conflicts and disputes arise. Ultimately, the problem is the conceptional errors of having a subjective and limited awareness of the world that’s distorted by affects like attachment and dislike. We grasp onto what we experience, form theories around it, and then collide with the difference of our ideas and those of other people, who have gone through the same process. It’s hinting at the need to circumvent this process through meditative experience, the need to overcome attachments and trace them back to their beginning.

It reminds me of the ox-herding story in East Asian Buddhism (which ultimately, goes back to an EBT simile!). One re-enters ordinary experience with a different point of view after having completely discarded it in meditation. But the experience is still an ordinary experience, full of names and forms. The attitude, or level of involvement, changes when one realizes they aren’t so substantial as they seemed. To a Zen Buddhist, this was fine as an endpoint to the spiritual journey.

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In your view, was the endpoint different for a Theravadin? My understanding is that even a Theravadin arahant would encounter all the usual names and forms upon emerging from samadhi. For example, Mara shows up now and again to sow doubt in the Buddha’s mind, which is a defilement that he had transcended as an arahant. Is this a wrong understanding?

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I think it has to be thought of this way:

  1. The ordinary person/atta/jiva lives in the center of a world of attractive worldly forms (sannasanni) where there is pain and mental anguish. This is the clump of salt sitting at the bottom of a pool of water. This is perception. I believe that non-perception is being unconscious or oblivious/unattentive.
  2. For the person (atta/jiva) to completely disappear, body, mind, and world must cease altogether temporarily during meditation or at death. This is just the pool of fresh water. There is still attention. There is no pain or suffering here. This is nibanna.
  3. The living sage can navigate the world and engage in complex social situations while minimizing suffering by putting comprehension into the foreground, that is, by centering attention on comprehension (most importantly comprehension of language. This pushes the seen, the heard, the felt into the background. There are no attractive worldly forms here. When a response is required speech both actual and imagined, as well as, actions are kept in the background along with the self. This is not being self-centered. Mental anguish is minimized or eliminated here, but the sage can still respond. This is the pool of salt water with no clump at the bottom. Neither perception nor non-perception. I think this is where one emerges from the pools washed clean (@josephzizys). I believe this is Mahamudra(@Green). On your death bed, you should enter and maintain final nibanna if possible.

I do not believe that raw sensations, ie. bare knowledge, are considered form, at least not attractive worldly forms. Attractive worldly forms arise out of perception. Even the body is a result of perception. One can feel body parts without them being “assembled” into a body.

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You’re right, of course, I wasn’t trying to say the situation is entirely different. I think Theravadins are much more perfectionist that a Zen Buddhist. Their concept of an arahant is that they have utterly destroyed their defilements and any possibility of any sort of bad behavior, etc. They are like perfectly purified human beings.

Zen Buddhism was not so much about this kind of idea. It was more focused on transcending suffering and difficulty caused by delusion. I suppose they were thinking of the Daoist sage as much as they were Buddhist idea of enlightenment. When one has fully entered the natural flow of life without fighting against it, problems disappear.

To get back to vitakka and vicara, the more I read Buddhist commentaries on the subject, the more I think these two things represent mental distraction. Distractions come in many kinds: Sounds, sights, feelings, thoughts, memories, and so forth. In some cases, it’s on the level of the senses like hearing a noise or seeing something move. Or it could be a feeling or a thought, which is purely cognitive. So, these words are covering a wide variety of things. Essentially, vitakka is a short time when the distraction first happens, and vicara is the period of time spent thinking about the distraction instead of the thing one is contemplating. Vicara naturally dissipates until the meditator places their attention back on their subject of meditation, whatever it is. Commentators used metaphors like ringing a bell to try to explain this. Vitakka is the sound when the bell is first struck, vicara is the sound as it gradually becomes quiet.

They also make is fairly clear that jhana doesn’t involve a cessation of mental activity. That was something that happened after the four formless samadhis in the later exegesis. In suttas, jhana is often depicted as the contemplation of various subjects like dependent origination. In fact, descriptions of the enlightenment of a buddha is often the realization of dependent origination while meditating. It doesn’t sound like cessation of thought to me.

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I wouldn’t want people like me to miss out on the lovely metaphor of training the elephant mind :pray:t2: :elephant:

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I think of vitakka and vicara as visual saccades. Something catches the corner of your eye and the eye muscles react involuntarily to examine it to determine a response which is what you are saying here I believe, but that is only the second jhana. In the second jhana there is undivided attention and discursive thought is possible. To get to the fourth jhana you need to lean into the visual field. In the seen is only the seen. Imagination and discursive thought ceases. This is where there is no “you” in “that” (the world). One must see the end of the world and then return. It is when you widen the scope of your attention and bring in the other senses, the heard, the felt, and the known that you can think about and process what you have done. But the center of attention rests on the known/comprehension.

I believe the difference between the second jhana and neither perception nor non-perception is that you have more information and your center of attention has moved and rests on the known rather than the seen. You have seen the “end of the world” and noticed changes that occurred going into and out of the different stages of concentration. You can now try to articulate the process. You have gone from sanna to nibanna to panna.

I see your point that the Buddha is said to have meditated to the eight jhana and comeback up to the fourth to attain awakening. The atthakavagga and the parayanavagga do not mention levels of jhana, though they do mention jhana. I think the problem came later when levels of jhana were enumerated and subsequently added to. I suspect the Buddha taught sanna to nibanna to panna.

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I disagree. Here is how the fourth jhana is described in MN119.

“Their mind becomes stilled internally” is the key here. Internally is the “mental” activity. Mental activity is stilled, that is, the mental activity temporarily ceases. Externally is the seen, heard, and felt. It is the experienced “physical” world. The mind is the union of the experienced person or agent and the experienced world. It’s all in your head/mind as they say.

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There is a context for that phrase that provides us with what it means, and it imparts its meaning to that context. This is how language works. It’s how the world works. Generally speaking, in a paragraph with a coherent thought, one sentence provides information for the next one, and the next adds information to the previous one.

To understand the passage you’ve cited, one needs to read the entire description of the fourth jhana without the metaphor for pure equanimity that has been inserted into the middle of it:

Furthermore, a mendicant, giving up pleasure and pain, and ending former happiness and sadness, enters and remains in the fourth absorption, without pleasure or pain, with pure equanimity and mindfulness. Their mind becomes stilled internally; it settles, unifies, and becomes immersed in samādhi.

What has been stilled are the disturbances caused by pain, pleasure, happiness, and sorrow. The fourth jhana is the culmination of the previous three jhanas. It arrives at pure mindfulness and equanimity, meaning that there are no more distractions to prevent one from developing wisdom. The pond has no more waves, but it’s still full of water, so to speak.

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In your analogy, what is the water? I think the water is the mind or portions of the brain. Does this mind have agency? Has the sense of being a person ended? Is there discursive thought?How does one ever realize not self without experiencing it directly? Most importantly, what has unified? What was many and become one?

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Well, before I answer that question, we should revisit MN 119 and MA 81. I’m kind of surprised you didn’t correct me when I combined the refrain that’s found at the end of each of the mindfulness exercises in MN 119 with the fourth jhana. If you’ve read the sutta, you’ll know that it contains exercises like contemplating all the parts of one’s body, being aware of one’s surroundings so as not to be clumsy, and so on. Each of those exercises end with that same refrain:

Tesaṁ pahānā ajjhattameva cittaṁ santiṭṭhati sannisīdati ekodi hoti samādhiyati.
Their mind becomes stilled internally; it settles, unifies, and becomes immersed in samādhi.

It really doesn’t have anything to do with the fourth jhana per se, other than the jhanas were considered a type of mindfulness exercise. I didn’t recall this in the morning when I replied to you; I assumed it was because the phrase about inner peace occurs in some dhyana descriptions in Chinese, and I’m getting old. This stuff blurs together at a certain point.

But let’s look at what MA 81 says instead, because it’s different.

如是比丘隨其身行。便知上如眞。彼若如是在遠離獨住。心無放逸修行精勤。斷心諸患而得定心。
“Thus, a monk follows his physical actions, knowing the above as it truly is. If he thus goes into seclusion and lives alone, his thoughts aren’t careless. He cultivates diligence, stops mental disturbances, and attains a concentrated state of mind.

This is repeated after each of the mindfulness exercises. It’s more explicit about a monk going into seclusion and practicing meditation. It doesn’t use the “internal stillness” language, but instead says that disturbances of the mind are stopped (斷心諸患), and then he attains a settled or concentrated mind (得定心).

Is this meaning different than what we read in MN 119? Yes, literally it is different, but I think stillness in Pali doesn’t mean refer to something different than ending disturbances in Chinese. They are two ways of describing the same thing.

So, there’s that.

All I mean with the pond metaphor is that the mind isn’t disturbed. The water is settled. The water would be one’s mind. The waves would be the emotional disturbances that are said to stop in the fourth jhana. In the third jhana, the problem is attachment to the happiness experienced in it. That has to be let go to reach the fourth jhana. So, the equanimity of the fourth jhana is one that isn’t bothered anymore by desire or dislike caused by pleasant or painful feelings. It’s not that the meditator ceases to think; rather, they cease to be derailed by the pleasure they feel while in samadhi. With pure equanimity, they can think clearly and understand correctly. Then, when they contemplate subjects like dependent origination or the aggregates, they can penetrate the realities those teachings describe.

That is the way I see it at this point after reading a lot of the commentaries that exist on the subject. Contemplating topics like dependent origination isn’t included in the Abhidharma commentaries, but they are mentioned in sutras. In many cases, samadhi isn’t the end goal of practice, rather it’s the way to develop wisdom, so it’s the next to the last step of practice.

There are types of meditation that sound very similar to what you are associating with the jhanas. The formless samadhis or the three samadhis of emptiness, signlessness, and wishlessness sound more like what you are thinking about. And there’s the samadhi of cessation, of course, in which conceptions (or perceptions) finally cease. Abhidharma texts contain debates about those kinds of samadhi, asking questions like “How is it different than being unconscious? How does the meditator emerge from samadhi if they have no mental activity?” So, those were definitely considered to be states of mind without mental activity. But they don’t have discussions like that about the fourth jhana.

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I think you are right. I believe “pure bright mind” in MN 119 is the state described in SN 25.118 and Ud 1.10 .

I was aware of the repetition of

It appears first in the meditation instructions and last in the description of the fourth jhana. I thought the repetitions in between were interpolations. I experimented with the instructions, considering different meanings/interpretations of both “parimukhaṁ” and “vitakkavicārānaṁ.” Taking parimukham to refer to the entirety of the visual field, I took vitakkavicaranam to mean saccades and thoughts that follow them. This leads to a purely visual experience free of thought and imagination that is “the end of the world” and the end of self/person. I suspect this in the state of nothingness/emptiness/nibanna. Unified here means no perceptions or distinctions.

If you interpret “parimukhaṁ” and “vitakkavicārānaṁ” to mean putting the visual field in the foreground and consequently every other sense in the background and vitakkavicaram to mean saccade only, you get pure bright mind/(neither perception nor non-perception?). That is my take on it anyway. I suspect this is Mahamudra. Unified here means unification of the senses including mind and its thoughts.