My “Jhāna” Story

[mikenz66]

Thank you Bhante for drawing attention to your book. It is an extremely useful summary of the issues.

I was a little disappointed that you did not include a reference to some of Ven Analayo’s recent papers, in particular:
“A Brief History of Buddhist Absorption”, Mindfulness, 2020, 11.3: 571–586.
The final text is not available for free but the draft submitted to the journal is linked to here:  Publications by Bhikkhu Anālayo. Specifically: https://www.buddhismuskunde.uni-hamburg.de/pdf/5-personen/analayo/briefhistoryjhana.pdf.

Ven Analayo paints the same general picture of the various modern opinions about jhāna as you do. However, as you point out in your book (on the basis of his now quite old first book), Ven Analayo has a more traditional view of jhāna than those who coined the terms “sutta jhāna” and “visuddhimagga jhāna”

@Analayo

A strategy adopted in such approaches posits a substantial difference between description of absorption in the early discourses and in later Theravāda exegesis. This can be seen in the position taken by Shankman (2008, p. 101), who argued that

@Shankman

During the centuries between the composition of the suttas and Buddhaghosa’s great work, the understanding of jhāna evolved from being a state of undistracted awareness and profound insight into the nature of changing phenomena to states of extreme tranquillity in which the mind is utterly engrossed in the mental qualities of the jhāna itself.

There can be little doubt that the way of developing absorption meditation described in Theravāda exegesis, in particular in the important Theravāda path-manual, the Path of Purification by Buddhaghosa, employs vocabulary unknown in the early discourses and differs from them in various respects. It does not necessarily follow, however, that the resultant experience must be substantially different from the type of absorption envisioned in the early discourses.

Ven Analayo’s opinion that there is not a substantial difference in depth of absorption between the jhāna described in the EBTs and the Visuddhimagga is, of course, shared by a number of modern teachers and commentators. This includes, for example, Vens @Sujato and @Brahmali.

However, as you say in your Preface:

I also suggest how we—in facing contradictory teachings on Buddhist meditation—can look at the larger picture and decide for ourselves.

Understanding the terminology being used by modern teachers and commentators is a key first step to doing that. However, I do feel that using the terms “sutta jhāna” and “visuddhimagga jhāna” for the non-absorbed and absorbed interpretations is unfortunate, given that not everyone’s interpretation of “jhāna as described in the suttas” is the non-absorbed one.