Polak's Reexamining Jhanas

[mikenz66]

Hi gnlaera, this is an interesting topic:

@gnlaera

He then brings the troublesome meditative instructions preserved in the Visudhimagga, identifies in it a possible illegitimate focus to these very same cessation-based attainments and somehow concludes it is indeed the evidence of how after having lost the original meditative tradition those who wrote it could only resort to the yogic influenced system / didactics they had still in vogue around them.

Now, before a debate is started note that no one is here blindly taking Polak’s hypothesis as true. The intention is to identify issues with his thesis and hopefully aggregate constructive questions we could try to bring to Polak himself.

Clearly jhana is an area of significant disagreement. I tried to explore this issue on another thread:

"Sutta" and "Visuddhimagga" jhanas

It is quite common to see the mention of “sutta jhanas” that are less absorbed than “Visuddhimagga jhanas”: I find this a little confusing, since there are a number of people who swear by the Early Buddhist Texts who interpret the jhana passages in the suttas as indicating a highly absorbed state (E.g. Vens. Brahm, Sujato, Bramali, Analayo). It’s not clear to me what is different between a “Visuddhimagga jhana” and the jhanas taught by, for example, Ajahn Brahm: Another feature of j…

The point there was that a number of EBT scholars do not equate deep jhana with yogic influence and would, I think, disagree with this statement:

@gnlaera

[Polak] presents the view that early buddhist jhanas did not imply the cessation of senses and brings to the spotlight two suttas: the MN38 and the AN11.9 …