Dear Bhante Sujato,
Could you please post the correct version of this important Sutta here or provide a link to it if it can be found somewhere. I have both the books by Ven Analayo on this subject. Do you agree with his findings?.
With Metta.
In fact the calculation based on Visudhimagga data would result in one in a billion!
Anyway it is not because it seems hard to get there that one has to stop trying by bypassing the Jhana issue.
Because jhana happens not to be an isolated teaching; it is the 8th component of the 8foldpath supported by the 1st seven. So if you don’t do Jhana (as he was saying) then you don’t do the 4th component of the 4 truths; you are doing a 7foldpath.
I knew all along that Jhana is mandatory. For 8 years I sincerely and with great effort tried to do the jhanas à la Visudhimagga and failed. Now I’m doing the Buddha-jhanas (Thanissaro term) and am having a great time. As Leigh Brasington (Ayya Khema student) says, better attempting something that is doable.
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I find that the most fervent defenders of Vsm jhana are those who have succeeded on that path. First they think that it is doable, since they did it, and they are prone to reject the responsibility of failure on other practitioners’ lack of dedication. Then, it would take a lot of modesty to acknowledge that the thing they have been working on (with varying degrees of effort) and in some cases taught for decades was actually not what the Buddha meant, but some overly elitist interpretation of his teaching, often defended by little more than circular arguments based on the mere belief that the jhanas must be “extremely deep”, invariably at odds with the lex parsimoniae.
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