Ethical and Doctrinal Questions Regarding Restrictions on Teaching Jhāna to Lay Practitioners

The Watercooler
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I listened to a talk by Ajahn Brahm, in which he stated (if I understood correctly) that in Vietnam there has been, at least at some point, a policy or rule within parts of the Saṅgha whereby lay practitioners were discouraged or explicitly forbidden from being taught deep meditative attainments, particularly the jhānas.

I am unsure whether this was an officially codified regulation, a directive from specific Saṅgha authorities, or a more informal but culturally widespread pedagogical convention, and I would appreciate clarification from those familiar with Vietnamese Buddhist institutions and history.

My question is primarily doctrinal and ethical:

On what ethical or Vinaya-based grounds could a restriction placed on lay practitioners (rather than on monastics) be justified?

Is the rationale related to concerns about insufficient sīla, the risk of attachment to meditative attainments, or the possibility of misinterpretation of jhāna experiences outside a monastic training context?

From the perspective of the Nikāyas, where jhāna is presented as the defining element of Right Concentration or Stillness (sammā-samādhi) within the Noble Eightfold Path, and where highly accomplished lay disciples are not entirely absent, how can limiting systematic jhāna instruction for laypeople be reconciled with the apparent universality of the path to liberation?

Does such a policy risk conflating institutional or pedagogical caution with ethical necessity, and if so, how is this distinction addressed within Dhamma–Vinaya reasoning?

Finally, if lay practitioners are structurally prevented from receiving instruction in deep concentration, does this effectively curtail their capacity for profound realization, including stream-entry or higher attainments, and how is this ethically justified in light of compassion and the Buddha’s statement that the Dhamma is taught openly and without a closed fist?

I ask this question with respect for cultural context and monastic discipline, but with a sincere interest in how access to liberating practices is ethically and doctrinally regulated within the Theravāda framework.

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I do not know the specifics of the situation, but I can talk in generalities. :slight_smile:

There’s knowledge that is built on other knowledges and practices. For example, for industrial applications of arsenic, you wouldn’t just teach them to use arsenic - one needs to know a certain laboratory principles, and the dangers of arsenic, before you tell them to handle such lethal materials.

And it is the final step. :slight_smile:

Right View comes first, so on and so forth.

Specifically, jhanic experiences can be overwhelmingly blissful, and furthermore, can be a door to mind-made realms and experiences as told in DN 2.

These are extreme experiences by any measure of the word. In itself, they can be both useful but also harmful, depending on the practitioner’s conditioning. Much like arsenic, which although has legitimate uses, is highly dangerous.

Therefore, there’s prudence in limiting the public retreats and practices to most basic forms of practice. There’s prudence in focusing on basic Ethical training, which I also think would help most people before they’re introduced to Jhānas.

MN 143 is a good example for this:

When this was said, Anāthapiṇḍika the householder wept and shed tears. Ven. Ānanda said to him, “Are you sinking, householder? Are you foundering?”

“No, venerable sir. I’m not sinking, nor am I foundering. It’s just that for a long time I have attended to the Teacher, and to the monks who inspire my heart, but never before have I heard a talk on the Dhamma like this.”

“This sort of talk on the Dhamma, householder, is not given to lay people clad in white. This sort of talk on the Dhamma is given to those gone forth.”

Although, again, Anāthapiṇḍika was also just a lay follower as he received this teaching. :slight_smile:

So, there’s nuances and edge cases to rules always, but the main point is, just like a university course has Year 1, 2 and ao on courses that build up on one another, Jhāna training is presented as the final step of the N8P, that’s fruitful once all the other factors are in place. :slight_smile:

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As a lay person, Mae Chee Kaew got engrossed in strange and unusual experiences in samadhi for about ten years until Ajahn Mun forbade her to meditate. After she ordained, Ajahn Maha Boowa realized that her problem was that she was addicted to these visions and she believed that following them would lead to nibbana. He knew that she had a powerful mind but needed a skilled teacher to restrain her excesses and train her to direct her mind properly.

He taught her to develop Right Samadhi, to restrain the pull towards thoughts and images of external phenomena that entered her awareness and instead move her focus on her own body and her mind. She needed to redirect her awareness away from her consciousness and direct it to her mind. The phenomena that she was experiencing in her consciousness was as real as the physical objects of the human realm, but contemplating that was misguided awareness, not the awareness of the mind. It took a lot of time and effort for her to come around.

A situation like this may be an example of why monastics in Vietnam may have this rule, if indeed they do.

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I have started listening to a book on YouTube about her life because I didn’t know who she was. However the book says that after 20 years of marriage she was able to become a nun and I had understood that until very recently it was not possible to become nuns because you only had monks in this tradition. So it seems there are a lot of peculiarities and situations I do not understand because this is so different from my own culture and the institutions I know. I am becoming a bit discouraged I don’t know if there is a systematic way to learn about Buddhism, both the theory and the way It Is practiced today, without becoming constantly confused and misunderstanding things

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Không biết ông ấy đã lấy thông tin này ở đâu, nhưng dường như có một sự hiểu lầm nào đó.

Đa số Phật tử Việt Nam không quan tâm đến thiền, nên nói rằng có một chính sách hay quy định nào đó trong Tăng đoàn cấm họ hành thiền là điều phi lý. Đa số tu sĩ Phật giáo Việt Nam theo Đại thừa, và nhiều người trong số họ, trong khi bận bịu với những hoạt động như là cúng bái, cầu siêu, dâng sao giải hạn…, cũng chẳng quan tâm nhiều đến ngay cả các pháp môn mà trên danh nghĩa họ là môn đồ, chứ chưa nói đến bốn thiền của Tiểu thừa. Cho nên nói rằng họ đưa ra một quy định nào đó cấm Phật tử hành thiền cũng là điều phi lý.

Đối với một số ít tu sĩ Theravada, theo tôi được biết thì cũng không có ai công khai cấm các Phật tử thực hành thiền định. Và với các khoá vipassana thường xuyên được khai giảng, sẽ thật phi lý nếu trong Tăng đoàn có ai đó cấm các cư sĩ hành thiền.

Có lẽ chỉ là, sau khi nghe lời khuyên của thầy về sự khó thực hành của jhana trong đời sống cư sĩ, một số đệ tử đã hiểu lầm thành sự cấm đoán. Trên thực tế thì khá nhiều người Việt, gồm cả tu sĩ và cư sĩ, đã sang Myanmar để học tại các trung tâm Pa-Auk. Không ai cấm họ cả.

(Tôi đoán bạn là người Việt Nam sống ở nước ngoài nên tôi viết bằng tiếng Việt).

_________

I do not know where he obtained this information, but there appears to be some kind of misunderstanding.

Most Vietnamese Buddhists are not particularly interested in meditation, so the claim that there is some policy or regulation within the Saṅgha that forbids them from practicing meditation is implausible. The majority of Vietnamese Buddhist monastics follow Mahāyāna Buddhism, and many of them - while being occupied with activities such as ritual services, prayers for the deceased, and star-offering rituals to avert misfortune - do not show much interest even in the practices they are nominally affiliated with, let alone the four jhānas of the Theravāda tradition. For this reason, the idea that they would establish a rule prohibiting lay Buddhists from practicing meditation is also implausible.

As for the small number of Theravāda monastics, to the best of my knowledge none of them publicly forbid lay Buddhists from practicing meditation. Given that vipassanā courses are regularly offered, it would be absurd to suggest that someone within the Saṅgha prohibits lay practitioners from meditating.

It is more likely that, after hearing their teacher’s advice about the difficulty of practicing jhāna in lay life, some disciples misunderstood this as a prohibition. In reality, quite a number of Vietnamese - both monastics and laypeople - have gone to Myanmar to study at Pa-Auk centers. No one has prohibited them from doing so.

(translated by ChatGPT)

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Are you sure it’s Vietnam and not Thailand?

What you’re relating seems more reminiscent of Thailand in the 1960s and 1970s when the monk Phra Phimontham and his acolytes were at the height of their power. Phimontham was a promoter of Mahasi-style vipassanā meditation and his efforts in this field sometimes assumed a rather authoritarian form.

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She became a mai chee, which is a lower form of nun in Thailand, they wear white like novices do, and perform a lot of domestic chores in monasteries. You are right that ordination as bhikkhunis (brown robes) has only recently become available. So the clue is in her name.

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I have heard this said about Vietnam by Vietnamese expatriates that this is the case. Further research seems called for.

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Well, it is true you have to be careful as a layman getting into Jhāna… it can quickly ruin your marriage and your career and lead you to becoming a homeless renunciate :rofl:

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Wouldn’t that be great for all of us laypersons!!!

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Depends on who you ask! :face_with_hand_over_mouth: Sounds great to me!

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Great but scary in equal measures Bhante. :folded_hands:

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Change often is. Change often is.

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That’s another thing I am confused about because the Buddha as a young boy experienced a deep meditation under the rose apple tree but after that he seems to have gone on to live his ordinary life and forgot about it for a long time, got married and even during his spiritual search for a long time did not consider that the Jhana could be the way to get enlightened

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The time in his quest that he recalled the rose apple tree memory was when he was striving as an ascetic, restraining his body. The main thing that he realized when reflecting on his experience under the rose apple tree was that joy and stillness was the gateway, not asceticism.

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DogenSC Forum Management Committee

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1d

I do not know the specifics of the situation, but I can talk in generalities. :slight_smile:

There’s knowledge that is built on other knowledges and practices. For example, for industrial applications of arsenic, you wouldn’t just teach them to use arsenic - one needs to know a certain laboratory principles, and the dangers of arsenic, before you tell them to handle such lethal materials.

And it is the final step. :slight_smile:

Right View comes first, so on and so forth.

Specifically, jhanic experiences can be overwhelmingly blissful, and furthermore, can be a door to mind-made realms and experiences as told in DN 2.

These are extreme experiences by any measure of the word. In itself, they can be both useful but also harmful, depending on the practitioner’s conditioning. Much like arsenic, which although has legitimate uses, is highly dangerous.

Therefore, there’s prudence in limiting the public retreats and practices to most basic forms of practice. There’s prudence in focusing on basic Ethical training, which I also think would help most people before they’re introduced to Jhānas.

MN 143 is a good example for this…

I have to say that likening the jhanas to arsenic is a stretch. Gautama is talking about human nature, about satisfying something in our nature that seeks a particular freedom:

And what… is the ceasing of action? That ceasing of action by body, speech, and mind, by which one contacts freedom,–that is called ‘the ceasing of action’.

(SN 35.146, tr. Pali Text Society vol IV p 85)

The ceasing of volitive activity is the stuff of the jhanas:

…I have seen that the ceasing of the activities is gradual. When one has attained the first trance, speech has ceased. When one has attained the second trance, thought initial and sustained has ceased. When one has attained the third trance, zest has ceased. When one has attained the fourth trance, inbreathing and outbreathing have ceased… Both perception and feeling have ceased when one has attained the cessation of perception and feeling.

(SN 36.11, tr. Pali Text Society vol IV p 146)

”These are extreme experiences by any measure of the word”–these are everyday experiences, as in the Mahasatipatthana Sutta (DN 22) description of mindfulness.

The fact that concentration is the last leg of the eight-fold path, or the penultimate link in the “links of awakening”, does not mean that all these things cannot be part of a mindfulness that can extend for seven days and seven nights, as Gautama described in Mahasatipatthana Sutta.

Then there’s the ten-fold path, ending with knowledge and freedom.

I’m grateful to P.bodhi for clarifying the situations, vis-à-vis Vietnam.

Incidentally, quoting MN 143 out of context as you did makes it sound like the Gautamid is speaking, but it’s Sariputta. Also, the householder implores Sariputta to teach everything to white-robers by the end of that sutta, not to hold back, even though Sariputta might not feel “struck” to deliver such teachings automatically.

Old vs Contemporary Translations for Samadhi/Jhāna
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can you explain who they are?

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simonew

6m

can you explain who they are?

No. I’m guessing they are Vietnamese. According to Google translate, they are writing in Vietnamese. But you knew that…

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It isn’t to say that they’re the same thing as arsenic (even if a case could be made!) but rather, it’s a metaphor for saying it’s a potentially dangerous experience if rest of the factors aren’t combined, according to the suttas. :slight_smile:

For example, all of the false views in DN1 are said to be the result of samadhi experiences, and seeing how these views propagate suffering, I don’t think it’s a stretch at all, from the sutta side of it. :slight_smile:

Not only that, but they’re such supernatural states, that claiming to have attained them is strictly against the Vinaya (and even on these forums, to give an example).

From the modern medical side of it, there’s ample literature of meditation induced psychosis.

And also in DN2, Fourth Jhāna is the basis of mind-made bodies and mental experiences.

Right after the description of mind-made bodies, we have the descriptions of:

They wield the many kinds of psychic power: multiplying themselves and becoming one again; materializing and dematerializing; going unobstructed through a wall, a rampart, or a mountain as if through space; diving in and out of the earth as if it were water; walking on water as if it were earth; flying cross-legged through the sky like a bird; touching and stroking with the hand the sun and moon, so mighty and powerful; controlling the body as far as the realm of divinity.

Seeing how people don’t do these things in real life, the simple explanation is that these are meditative experiences. I hear there are meditators that can attest to these kinds of experiences, of course we can’t divulge in such anectodes here. :wink:

Hence, I would consider a meditative experience in which you touch the sun or move through the mountains, rather extreme experiences indeed. :slight_smile:

In any case, from the PTS translation you’ve supplied:

If you consider the cessation of breathing an “everyday experience”, you must surely have a livelier everyday experience compared to me! :sweat_smile:

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Yes, I am Vietnamese and I am currently living in Vietnam. I can state with confidence that there is no official regulation of the Saṅgha that prohibits laypeople from practicing meditation.

Of course, I do not know everything, and it is possible that a few individuals may hold such views or act in that way. I think this can happen in any country or in any Saṅgha. A bhikkhu may discourage his lay students from practicing meditation if he believes they are not yet ready. However, to generalize from a few isolated individuals acting in some specific and unknown circumstances, and then claim broadly that laypeople in Vietnam are prohibited from practicing meditation, is inaccurate.

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