The mysterious unexplained disappearance of Kāya and Vitakka in the Jhānas by B. Sujato

Discussion
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@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.

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24

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.

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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.

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27

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.

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28

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.

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31

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.

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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.

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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.

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34

“… 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!

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35

Indeed. Well put.

That’s how I feel. There’s nothing detrimental with Bhante Sujato’s translation.

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36

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…

  • samadhi is seen as essential for liberation
  • jhana for samadhi
  • subtleties in language matter to the mind, the unconscious, and how to direct one’s efforts
    .

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.

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It’s also obvious to bilingual people that there is no one-to-one function between the words of two languages which preserves meaning.

Part of my job is giving feedback on students’ academic papers which they write in English, but their native language is not English. Almost always the genuinely funny English bloopers come from a naive direct translation which makes sense in their native language, but makes no sense in English.

If there was a one-to-one function between the words of languages that preserved meaning, there would be no translators or academic fields like natural language processing or machine translation; we would just have to find the function and we could make a computer do the translation for us.

The idea that you have to translate according to a one-to-one correspondence between Pali and English words is an incredibly naive approach to translation. To me, this approach only makes sense from the perspective of someone who 1) is fluent only in English and 2) has never been exposed to the academic ideas behind translation.

When I read the academic writing of someone who is translating word-for-word their native language into English – this is how I can tell they are not good at English.

Like, the fact that Ven. Sujato is able to go beyond a mere dictionary lookup is actually a sign that he knows Pali really well.

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38

Yup. Desputing over this is trivial to me and I am probably not gonna engage in it any further. Last time I did I think it was mid-summer.

If anyone thinks people are gonna miss out on jhana because of some choice words in one translation work then that’s a shame. It’s also nonsense. If your meditation success depends on meeting specific criteria from a linguistic discription then you’re more likely to fabricate the description into your mind rather than have the actual experience for yourself. You shouldn’t be going through a checklist like an airline pilot just prior to take off. Not the best approach for meditative-absorption.

120 years ago Ajahn Sao taught “buddho” breath meditation and never elaborated on it to students. “Just go do it, don’t question.” I imagine plenty of people got to first jhana without a detailed linguistic map, reported back to Ajahn Sao their extraordinary experiences and were told “welcome to jhana.” Even if you don’t know what jhana is and just do breath meditation you’ll know of this extraordinary state you can achieve. No checklist needed. Semantics hold little weight.

Just my two cents.

Cheers.

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So it means you just repeated “Buddho”, didn’t question it, and are liberated now?

Please, if you describe it in such easy terms, then you seem to suggest that liberation is easy and yourself are liberated because you followed your own advice. If you’re not, how can you suggest it’s simple? People are struggling in different ways - not just your way.

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No, I think it means you just repeat “Buddho”, don’t question it, and are liberated eventually, maybe, if that’s your karma. IMO

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42

What if, yes, samadhi is essential, but not necessarily the jhana form? Particularly when the exact nature of jhana is a matter of debate, i.e. interpretation where the EBTs don’t unambiguously define it, at least in terms that contemporary commentators can agree on.

The (written) EBTs were extracted from oral traditions, which continued to develop, e.g. with the famous ancient commentaries. In fact, interpretations across the whole 2.5 millennia are all essentially commentaries (including those voiced in these discussions).

Then there’s the Mahasi approach (counterbalance to the PaAuk method at the other extreme) which presents, on the basis of the written traditions and lineages of practice, viable alternatives to the fixation on jhana as the exclusive samadhi needed for liberation…

And most modernist emphasis on the “problems” surrounding jhana is pressed by (lay) “authorities”, relying on modernist linguistic analysis (and associated other biases), which is as yet a relatively immature field.

This is to suggest that the entire “jhana wars” phenomenon frames, narrows the issue to a scope which perpetuates itself in ongoing dukkha – i.e. the struggles people go through trying to figure it out in their own practice.

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I am only a beginner. I have practiced meditation according to the Teaching (at least to the best of my ability and understanding) for less than one year. Here is my perspective on this debate.

There are a ton of translations out there besides @Sujato’s. I doubt that anything will make them go away at this point. Nor should they go away. If they contain the truth, and if this one doesn’t, then the truth will survive to be investigated by others. Practitioners will do best to investigate for themselves and decide accordingly.

But wait, you say! What if this one point is just too important? What if it’s going to throw people off the Path?

To that I have a simple answer. Probably the most interesting modern thing I’ve read about advanced meditative states is B. Thanissaro’s “Jhana Not by the Numbers,” which seems to speak more or less directly to this discussion. Here is the part I think is especially apt:

[A]s a teacher, [Ajaan Lee] tried to instill in his students these qualities of self-reliance, ingenuity, and a willingness to take risks and test things for themselves. He did that not only by talking about these qualities, but also by forcing you into situations where you’d have to develop them. Had he always been there to confirm for you that, “Yes, you’ve reached the third jhana,” or, “No, that’s only the second jhana,” he would have short-circuited the qualities he was trying to instill. He, rather than your own powers of observation, would have been the authority on what was going on in your mind; and you would have been absolved of any responsibility for correctly evaluating what you had experienced. At the same time, he would have been feeding your childish desire to please or impress him, and undermining your ability to deal with the task at hand, which was how to develop your own powers of sensitivity to put an end to suffering and stress. As he once told me, “If I have to explain everything, you’ll get used to having things handed to you on a platter. And then what will you do when problems come up in your meditation and you don’t have any experience in figuring things out on your own?”

Right view seems to come to the fore here; each person must develop independently the type of right view that allows them to discern meditative attainments themselves. Other approaches, like following set formulas – made out of words! – are perhaps not so good, for just the reasons stated.

Even way back where I am in this stuff, it still seems obvious to me that it’s better to have one meditator who knows what he sees in his mind – and we should prefer this to the most perfect and detailed word-picture of the meditation of the Buddha.

Words have never been terribly good at making maps of the mind. At times we may find, in describing a mind state, that it is well captured, if not completely captured, by a set of words and their opposites, a condition that the philosopher G.W.F. Hegel called “sublation” (Aufhebung).

And if that can happen elsewhere, then maybe it’s happening here? I really don’t know. I would welcome a peaceful resolution to this matter, however, even if it must be done only by covering it over with grass.

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44

All I see is people trying desperately to prove they are in jhana. Its an ego trip, or people trying square what must belong in a round hole.

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For what its worth, my opinion on this highly debated topic is a boring and conciliatory one. Both sides are right because the pali terms involved like jhana and vitakka have a broad semantic field, and they are not super precise technical terms like we’d like them to be.

Translating vitakka as thinking or placement is really not going to make much of a difference either, because all meditators will start with a coarse “thinking about meditation” anyways, and later it will get more and more subtle as they gain more experience.

Its a [mostly] pointless argument, basically.

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46

…because subtle verbal thought and placing the mind (samadhi) are both qualities that are found in the first jhana. Under the circumstances…

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