SuttaCentral
Be careful with these kind of statements. These are not helpful. You never know what someone is going through. Being one who’s struggled with suicidal thoughts a lot of my life, this would be very troubling if someone said this to me and I was in a depressed state having these thoughts as I was in the past.
Please think before making statements like this. What if the person you wrote this about committed suicide after reading this. How would you feel then?
With Metta
The monks who remained alive had also listened to the Buddha.
Your words reminded me of another kind one who said:
May you live long and prosper
Thank you for sharing your experience. 
I’m terribly sorry, I didn’t think it would be triggering to ponder the lack of suicidal impulse someone might have. I’ll just refrain from the subject in general. There isn’t usually a reason to discuss suicide anyways.
Translations are translations. The original text is intact. A difference in words describing jhana doesn’t change the reality of jhana. This is just one translation work. Bhante @sujato ‘s translation I imagine is perfectly fine for him and is in-line with his own understanding, experience and interpretation. He isn’t necessarily wrong and this translation isn’t a threat to anyone’s practice today or in the future.
I personally prefer the more traditional translation, but that is just in-line with my own understanding, experience, and interpretation which isn’t any more right than his.
Be happy you have an open venue associated with this translation where you can voice this particular concern, but at some point you may need to realize you’re “beating a dead horse.”
On a personal level, I enjoy B. sujato’s writing style for his english translations. But as a translation that’s meant for mass consumption, and I believe it very will likely become the post popular over time, because it’s free, available digitally with very user friendly interface, and written in an easy to understand way, then there’s a responsibility to make sure the translation is unbiased, follows higher standards than just publishing a printed book.
B. Sujato’s V&V translation is not unbiased, and does not follow his own high standards , among them, principle of least meaning and ockham’s razor is usually correct. The V&V of first jhana, translated as he currently has it, is a tremendous obstacle for people in their belief that they can attain first jhana. Similar to lets say 20 years ago before Obama was President, trying to convince young black kids in America that they can get into an ivy league school and become President of the USA. No black kid would believe that. With V&V translated in an unbiased way, every other translator translates V&V the same way in first jhana as it is outside first jhana. An unbiased V&V first jhana, is more like telling young black kids, if you go to school every day, do your homework, you absolutely can graduate an American high school (it’s really not hard). First jhana is more like that. Ajahn Brahm first jhana, is essentially VRJ (vism. redefinition of jhana) without the abhidhamma. And B. Buddhaghosa in Vism. says the odds of being able to get first jhana, is something on the order of between one in 1 billion, or one in 1 million.
The USA has a population has about 300 million, and Barack Obama was one out of 300 million. The US high school education is ridiculously low standard. Anyone, even below average intelligence, if they show up every day, do their homework, can graduate 12 years of school. The difficulty of first jhana is more like that. It’s not hard, it’s just people are actually so lame they don’t do their homework and go to class everyday. If they actually spent 1 hour every day working on first jhana, they could do it after some time. A low quality jhana within 4 years is very attainable.
I agree with everything you wrote in the post, but you’re missing an important point. This is not just B. Sujato expressing his view in a peer group and us allowing the legitimacy of his view. He’s publishing something that is likely to become the most popular english translation available.
See @crizna’s posts in this thread, 11, and 23
https://discourse.suttacentral.net/t/v-v-in-sphu-artha-abhidharmakosavyakhya/11316/11
https://discourse.suttacentral.net/t/v-v-in-sphu-artha-abhidharmakosavyakhya/11316/23
A translator has a responsibility to translate in an unbiased way, and not override conventional meanings of ordinary words. That just wreaks havoc on the rest of the world.
It’s like baking a chocolate cake. What you were talking about is tolerance of people’s freedom to choose and argue merits between whether they use milk chocolate, dark chocolate, chocolate from germany or belgium, how much chocolate to use, etc. But chocolate is chocolate. Ajahn Brahm comes along and says, the Buddha actually means ‘banana’ when it says chocolate.
The cake that comes out is not going to be chocolate cake.
We both want the Dhamma accessible to all. That is clear. We both want an end to esoteric nonsense. And we both want everybody to grasp first jhana quickly and well.
What is less clear to me is how “place the mind and connect it” could be an obstacle. It is indeed exactly what I do. In fact, it is also the exact opposite of sitting in daydreams, which would indeed be a tremendous obstacle.
When I look at minds fed on the internet, I see dis-placement and dis-connection. I see minds habituated to illusion as offered through video cards. I have worked with people who have wistfully wished to vanish into the machine. I have heard this many times. I have seen Matrix and become concerned. This dis-placement and dis-connection is a very clear and present danger to minds fed on the internet. Bhante’s “place the mind and connect it” is for me the exact prescription for this dis-ease I see all around.
How could “place the mind and connect it” be a “tremendous obstacle?”
Hey Frankk, is it possible to keep all this stuff in one thread? I think everyone here has seen enough of all this. Publishing a new thread every week (or every day even) is not helping your cause and its not making the D&D a better place either.
Just a simple request.
The recurring implication that your translations are unbiased stands out as rather peculiar. And the rhetoric that not accepting your view as absolutely authoritative will lead to universal cataclysm (“havoc on the rest of the world”)? Get a grip.
@frankk, I’d just like to say how much I appreciate your contributions to this topic. I (rather reluctantly) subscribed to the A. Brahm/Sujato school of thought on the definition of jhana for a while (though I agreed with Ven. Analayo that they are only necessary for the Anagami stage). But I’m now reconsidering, thanks it part to your posts. BTW, have you posted anything about the need for a nimitta to enter 1st jhana? One thing I found unpersuasive about the “deep jhana is the only true jhana” model is that the “light nimitta” phenomenon for 1st jhana doesn’t really seem to be clearly mentioned in the Suttas. It seemed like such a crucial marker for entering jhana wouldn’t have been omitted, if it really were a requirement.
IMHO the real potential for damage doesn’t lie with the “heavy jhana only” model per se, but the claim that heavy Jhana is also a requirement for stream entry. One thing I like about meditation teachers like Daniel Ingram and Culladasa is that they recognize the different degrees of depth of Jhana, and don’t say the “heavier” versions are a requirement for stream entry. Even many ppl who favor the “heavy jhana only” model, like Ven. Analayo and lots of the posters at dhammawheel (from what I can recall), say the need for these Jhanas don’t kick in until the Anagami stage.
In regards to how to deal with the translation — I’m a big fan of BibleHub, where different Bible translations of verses can be laid out on the same page, along with a lexicon and commentary. This makes it easier to compare and contrast different translations. Ideally, it would be nice for a similar feature to be implemented at SuttaCentral at some point in the future.
The Mahasi Sayadaw, in his writings, presents a well-reasoned and documented case that an intense degree of samadhi is required at the moment of any path (magga-phala) attainment. And that can be (1) jhanic absorption, OR (2) highly developed (vipassana) khanika samadhi. His 3rd type of samadhi – upacara – also, but only indirectly, as it’s a precursor to other two.
If that’s true and I am not saying it isn’t, then can we also stop using loving-kindness to translate mettā because that is not what the word means, even though people want it to mean that. Mettā has a literal analog in English and it is amity: goodwill & friendship. Loving-kindness if it had a Pali equivalent would be something like karuṇāpema NOT mettā.
If you want people to do brahmavihāra practice properly, telling them mettā is living-kindness sends people in an emotional misdirection. Which may be unrealistic, unproductive, and ultimately unfruitful. Was Buddha Gotama not dismissive of pema: emotion driven love? Is there an emotionless form of love? I don’t think so. Respect, goodwill and friendship are without emotional entanglements. This is what is meant with mettā which has its root in the word mitta.
There are plenty of other English translations of Pali words that are equally as awful. For instance, sati doesn’t mean mindfulness or even awareness and also doesn’t have a direct English analog, but actually should be translated as ‘persistent-remembrance.” I am not gonna go into other examples because I have better things to do.
Translations are always personal and private, even if done by a group of individuals. There is no objectivity in human pursuits. We are subjective beings.
If you think you can do a better job, go for it, but don’t be surprised when others make objections to your work, because they inevitably will. The work of translations is never done nor settled…
Much mettā.
Isn’t that a strawman argument?
What @sujato is translating isn’t even close to replacing green with non-green. He isn’t saying “undirected thought and non-evaluation.”
His isn’t making a fatal conceptual deviation here either.
I don’t agree with the translation, but I am also not threatened by it. He isn’t rewriting jhana and making it that so in the future no-one could possibly know what the original Pali words mean in context.
I’m probably not up-to-date with the discussion, but “placing the mind and keeping it connected” does to the casual eye look very different than “thought and evaluation”.
How is ‘placing the mind’ similar to ‘thought’ - and how is ‘keeping connected’ similar to ‘evaluation’?
There are different approaches to translating, but I can’t see this as a literal translation(?) It rather seems to me that B. Sujato did an interpretative translation, which I don’t share, but in the end I find legitimate.
I can still find it legitimate if I may. I don’t know the exegetical literature, but I know that translators have to make decisions. And I’m sure that monastic translators give it some thought.
The problem that I have is that I don’t find the suttas particularly revealing when it comes to jhana anyway, not even in the pali. Sure, with practice we can identify with interpretation x or y and find our interpretation the most correct one, but the suttas just don’t have enough meat on the bone for my taste. So we need interpretations and a discourse anyway.
It is very puzzling to me that “placing the mind” should be considered non-thought. It is puzzling to me since I read “placing the mind” as “continuous awareness of the focus of meditation, including its name and form”. As a student daydreaming I receiving continuous admonishment to place my mind properly on my homework. Is this experience not shared?
And evaluation being “connecting the mind” completely matches my own evaluation of implications that are connected (by implication) from the focus of meditation. As a programmer, I literally “follow the links/connections” to evaluate an expression. That is how we are actually taught evaluation works in software. We follow the name/form bindings during evaluation.
I have recently been wondering the same thing. Seems like the same subject about V&V is being posted in a new thread with a different title almost every week recently. Regardless of how these new posts start, they seem to revert back to the same arguments and points about V&V.
Is this consistent with this forum’s procedures, purpose and etiquette? This is a genuine question because I previously had the impression that when we post, we are supposed to investigate whether there exists a thread already addressing the topic. If so, then I understood that the guideline is to post in that existing thread rather than create a whole new thread.
What’s the purpose of creating new threads every week or so that seems to address the subject?
Wishing everyone peace and freedom from ill will. May we discuss and discover in harmony.
“… the casual eye” – maybe too casual in this context.
That’s central, though hardly addressed, to this “problem”: not looking critically at the vagaries of meaning of “thought”, “think” in English, yet anguishing over it in Pali. AND there insisting of a single uniform meaning, which it doesn’t have in English or other languages – so why must it in Pali?
In English, “I thought of you.” and “Having thought it through…” – the same?
A “thought” - is that a unitary image, word, concept? Or an involved logical process?
“Thinking of you” – as little as bringing an image to mind, or going through trains of thought? (Hint: it’s not definitive; both extremes are possible in English.)
“Placing the mind” is a very normal and commonplace meaning of “thought” in English. And “evaluation” implies holding the mind to it, observing in an ongoing sense.
Much… too much ado over nothing!
Indeed. Well put.
That’s how I feel. There’s nothing detrimental with Bhante Sujato’s translation.
Then I guess this topic (alas, topics) are gladly not for you. But we shouldn’t devaluate if people feel strongly about it (again: keeping the tone pleasant). And it’s easy to see how it’s relevant for many people, when…
People have to figure out how to approach the issue of meditation, and I can understand that for a group of people it means struggling with the language of jhana and meditation.