SuttaCentral
I am unaware of even a single mention of any specific non-Buddhist individual during the Buddha’s time practicing jhāna. Nor of any mention of anyone at all practicing jhāna before the Buddha trained himself in jhāna practice after his rose-apple tree memory recall.
If you have any evidence to the contrary, I’m happy to hear it!
You might like to check out Venerable Anālayo’s book Early Buddhist Meditation Studies. Click the link for a free PDF version. If you go to page 163, where the section “Pre-Buddhist Absorption” begins, you’ll find his evidence-based argument for the jhānas being practiced before the Buddha.
Nigantanataputta questions the ability to attain the second jhana, but not the first SN41.8
Bāvari the brahmin has divine eye (usually developed after developing 4th jhana) Snp5.1
There was another sutta where a person before the Buddha’s time developed a partial ability to see past lives and came to the wrong view about maha brahma, etc.
with metta
I have had a lengthy discussion about this with Bhikkhu Anālayo and I remained unconvinced of his argument. That was before his published this book. So now let’s examine his argument point by point:
The Aggañña-sutta and its parallels, for instance, present the practice of absorption as something undertaken by ancient brahmins during an early stage in the evolution of human society.
So let’s have a look. Telling a story of the past, the Buddha says:
They put away (bāhenti) evil, immoral customs, Vāseṭṭha, is what is meant by Brahmins, and thus was it that Brahmins became the earliest standing phrase [for those who did so]. They, making leaf huts in woodland spots, meditated therein. Extinct for them the burning coal, vanished the smoke, fallen lies pestle and mortar; gathering of an evening for the evening meal, of a morning for the morning meal, they go down into village and town and royal city, seeking food. When they have gotten food, back again in their leafhuts they meditate. […] They meditate, Vāseṭṭha, is what is meant by the brooding one (jhāyakā).
The term translated here as ‘meditate’ is jhāyanti. Do this specifically refer to the jhānas in the technical sense? I am under the impression that this term refers more generally to meditation, closer to our modern sense of the word, rather than being only applied to jhāna. Please correct me if I’m wrong. But the far more important flaw to this point is yet to come.
Now, he continues:
Now certain of those beings, Vāseṭṭha, being incapable of enduring this meditation in forest leaf-huts, went down and settled on the outskirts of villages and towns, making books. When men saw this, they said: These good beings, being incapable of enduring meditation in forest leaf-huts, have gone down and settled on the outskirts of villages and towns, and there they make books. But they cannot meditate. Now, these meditate not, Vāseṭṭha, is what is meant by Ajjhāyaka (repeaters, viz., of the Vedas).
The Buddha is explaining the etymology of the word Ajjhāyaka. And yet we know that this etymology is entirely false. According to Prof. Richard Gombrich, the Buddha was using satire to make fun of the Brahmins by doing this. As you may know, Ajjhāyaka is a term to denote people who are engaged in learning the Vedas.
And so, if the second part of this story is made up, as satirical fiction, would we not be mistaken to assume that there is any truth in the first part? We cannot reasonable assume that the first part is historical fact when we know that the whole description of the first part is to set it against the second, which we know is fiction.
Let’s take the next point - MN79. OK, I did say ‘specific non-Buddhist individual during the Buddha’s time practicing jhāna’. I should have stuck with that statement referring to pre-Buddhists - I think I have remembered one example of a contemporary. But let’s see this one… While it does not mention any specific individuals who were practicing them, it does mentions that they know and teach about them, so at least have doctrine related to them, up to the 3rd jhāna.
But my main issue with this sutta being used as evidence of pre-Buddhist jhāna, which Analāyo is using it for, is that the Buddha had already been teaching for who knows how long by the time of this conversation. I don’t know if there is any way to date this sutta, but he could already have been teaching for decades. And we know that the Buddha did not even know all of his followers, and nor they he - remember he once stayed the night in a barn with a Buddhist monk who did not recognise him, for he had never met him?
I bring this up to highlight how many people practiced Buddhism at the time of the Buddha, and it would be no surprise if there had been people who had trained in Buddhist practice, and then left the Buddha’s group, perhaps gaining their own students, or for some non-Buddhists to have learned Buddhist practice from some Buddhists. That there were non-Buddhists practising jhāna at the time of the Buddha is no proof that their jhāna practices did not originate from the Buddha.
I raised this point to Anālayo and he had nothing to neutralise this point with.
Here is what Anālayo concludes, however:
this discourse seems to reflect the existence of an ancient form of practice that led up to the attainment of the third absorption.
His note on that sentence reads:
This is explicitly stated in the commentary, Ps III 275,2; Bodhi in Ñāṇamoli 1995/2005: 1287f note 784 explains that according to the commentary these practitioners “knew that in the past meditators would … attain the third jhāna”.
I certainly have no intention of taking the word of the commentaries as factual evidence of what happened before the time of the Buddha!
Anālayo continues:
However, by the time of their meeting with the Buddha, the actual practice to be undertaken to reach that goal had apparently fallen into oblivion.
I do not see any conclusive evidence in the sutta that this group was referring to practice in a time before the Buddha. It mentions no individuals attaining jhāna, only mentioning that they have doctrine about the first 3 jhānas, and I see no mention of any discussion on the age of that doctrine. Thus, no even questionable proof that they are referring to a pre-Buddhist practice. And remember, there were plenty of samanas making new religions a the time, like the Buddha and a number of his contemporaries.
Anālayo’s next point:
Also to be kept mind here is that, during the time of his quest for awakening, the Buddha-to-be trained under the guidance of the two teachers Āḷāra Kālāma and Uddaka Rāmaputta
I have never seen even a single mention in any Early Buddhist Text of those two practicing or even mentioning jhāna. Yes it is a very common assumption that they did practice jhāna, but as I said, to my knowledge, not a single mention of it. And some very serious problems with the assumption that they did, specifically that it would make the Buddha’s story of him remembering his jhāna experience as a kid, saying he discovered it as a path, and then having to train himself with difficulty to achieve the jhānas step by step!
To find an alternative explanation is hard since we have the assumption that one must go through the 4 jhānas to reach the immaterial attainments. However, I believe that there are potentially explanations which can resolve the problem of those teachers never having taught the Buddha jhāna. If we assume they did, then that seems to make the Buddha’s own account false, so even if we don’t, we are left with a huge problem there.
Anālao’s next point:
Another discourse suggestive of the existence of absorption meditation practices in the ancient Indian setting before the advent of the Buddha is the Brahmajāla-sutta, which together with its parallels examines a range of various views.
Please note the word ‘suggestive’!
Also Anālayo says that this sutta
examines a range of various views
In arguing against another scholar’s point of view, he also states:
This seems to misconstrue the purpose of the discourse, which is not the provision of a survey of actually held views
Am I mistaken in reading this to mean that Anālayo is open to the possibility that not all of these views were actually held?
To me the sutta appears to be a logical analysis of varieties of possible views. Yes, perhaps some of them really were held! But can you see the analytical nature of this survey of views? It seems to me that analysis has been applied to cover the possible permutations of views as hypotheticals, even if some of them (which would be expected in fact) are actually held. That is quite a common strategy in later Buddhist philosophy also, no?
And it also seems likely to me that many of these views could potentially be held by Buddhists, and/or ex-Buddhists. We know that many Buddhists had wrong views. We have plenty of examples of the Buddha confronting monks with wrong views, and correcting them. And even of suttas which are probably from a time after the Buddha, in which we can see debate between different views embodied in the stories by different groups of bhikkhus.
So these of views which relate to jhāna, they could be
Or if some or all of them are also actually held views, they could be held by
Anālayo does say:
It would hardly work to imagine that the wrong views described in this discourse all came into existence only after early Buddhist practitioners had discovered and then introduced absorption practice as something entirely new in the ancient Indian setting.
But I see no solid evidence to support that assumption. However, this sutta could very well function as a manual of what views to not fall into. Since it lays out the traps methodically, it could have served as a remedy both for any Buddhists at the time, or in the future to come, who had wrong views on this (that would be potentially extremely important, as a check on the views and pitfalls, for people to memorise and spread through the community, as these suttas (assuming it was really from the Buddha’s time, but also even if it was composed later) were presumably used for exactly that - memorised teaching manuals to spread the Buddha’s doctrine to the wide and extended community, most of which were not with the Buddha most (or even all) of the time. This strengthens the idea that this could have been composed as a list of hypotheticals, rather than real contemporary doctrines of non-Buddhists whether in the Buddha’s time or beforehand.
Anālayo makes another point:
In fact, had the Buddha discovered absorption as such, one would be at a loss to understand why the discourses do not celebrate this discovery in a way comparable to their drawing of attention to his discovery of the four noble truths as a teaching unheard of before.
I cannot remember the reference now but I seem to remember a or more than one sutta which does seem to say that the Buddha did discover jhāna. Anyone have the reference? But also might it be worth remembering that the practice of jhāna was neglected greatly - even Buddhaghosa seems not to have practiced jhāna! And the Mahāyāna seem to have abandoned the practice long ago. Could go some way to explain why these non-jhāna practicing transmitters of the texts did not make a bigger deal out of the discovery? Even though, if my memory is right, they did preserve mention of it?
And that’s it - those were his arguments for pre-Buddhist jhāna.
Yeah, sorry I take back about contemporaries
No mention of jhāna. Only assumption. Not an unfair assumption as such, but this is my point - the whole case for pre-Buddhist jhāna appears to be based on assumption, with not even a single solid reference to any individual practicing jhāna before the Buddha renounced Jainism, with the one exception of the Buddha’s own childhood jhāna experience. If the Buddha knew that it was practiced, then I find this total omission extremely strange, to say the least. And even more strange that the Buddha had to teach himself how to attain the first jhāna, and each successive jhāna, step by step, with difficulty! I see no reason to assume that the Buddha’s community believed that jhāna was being practiced before the time of the Buddha. If anyone does have any evidence, I would really like to see it!
Thanks for this detailed argument, you make some great points.
Sometimes SN 2.7 (included in AN 9.42) is quoted to give this idea, but it is a mistake. This was discussed in an earlier thread:
Ah thank you @sujato. So that leaves us, at my count, with no claim that he was the first to discover it; and also no evidence of anyone doing it before him. I am also unaware of any evidence from any non-Buddhist sources for any pre-Buddhist jhāna practice.
To be honest, I think the whole question is misframed. It’s not a compassionate way of putting it. Rather than saying, “do pre-Buddhist contemplatives fit into this Buddhist framework”, we should ask, “What kinds of contemplative practices were pre-Buddhist contemplatives doing? What did those practices mean to them? How did they influence Buddhist practices, and how were they influenced in turn?” And that, I think, is a more interesting conversation.
Right, yes nice question! And I cannot see that we can say with any certainty that they were practicing jhāna, since we do not seem to have any evidence to support such an idea.
From what I can see, it seems that a major influence on the Buddha was the culture of rejection of sensual pleasure. That makes up one third of the aspects of the Middle Path. Another is his Jain practice, according to the stories we have received through the suttas anyway. Those two make up the extremes to be avoided. And the third, the path itself, namely jhāna practice, seems to have come initially from his memory of his own accidental childhood experience of jhāna - so far as I am aware, the Buddha gives that memory as his sole influence as considering taking up jhāna practice, for which after that memory recall, he has to train with effort, finding his own way to re-attain that state and work up through the next 3 jhānas step by step, overcoming the obstacles with no guidance.
And he adopted that jhāna path in part specifically because it fit his inherited preconception that sensual pleasure was to be avoided; whereas the pleasureful jhāna experience is a pleasure not of the senses.
I think this would be the “non-compassionate” approach of claiming that their meditative attainments were not exactly how the Buddha described jhana, so it has nothing to do with jhana.
However, the Buddha himself speaks of meditative achievements of his teachers in MN26. In DN1 he talks about how some develop wrong views due their meditative attainments.
For example:
“In the first case, bhikkhus, some recluse or a brahmin, by means of ardour, endeavour, application, diligence, and right reflection, attains to such a degree of mental concentration that with his mind thus concentrated, [purified, clarified, unblemished, devoid of corruptions], he recollects his numerous past lives: that is, (he recollects) one birth, two, three, four, or five births; ten, twenty, thirty, forty, or fifty births; a hundred, a thousand, or a hundred thousand births; many hundreds of births, many thousands of births, many hundreds of thousands of births. (He recalls:) ‘Then I had such a name, belonged to such a clan, had such an appearance; such was my food, such my experience of pleasure and pain, such my span of life. Passing away thence, I re-arose there. There too I had such a name, belonged to such a clan, had such an appearance; such was my food, such my experience of pleasure and pain, such my span of life. Passing away thence, I re-arose here.’ Thus he recollects his numerous past lives in their modes and their details.
“He speaks thus: ‘The self and the world are eternal, barren, steadfast as a mountain peak, standing firm like a pillar. And though these beings roam and wander (through the round of existence), pass away and re-arise, yet the self and the world remain the same just like eternity itself. What is the reason? Because I, by means of ardour, endeavour, application, diligence, and right reflection, attain to such a degree of mental concentration that with my mind thus concentrated, I recollect my numerous past lives in their modes and their details. For this reason I know this: the self and the world are eternal, barren, steadfast as a mountain peak, standing firm like a pillar. And though these beings roam and wander (through the round of existence), pass away and re-arise, yet the self and the world remain the same just like eternity itself.’
Their attainments seemed to have much the same effect as the jhanas described in MN36:
“When my concentrated mind was thus purified, bright, unblemished, rid of imperfection, malleable, wieldy, steady, and attained to imperturbability, I directed it to knowledge of the recollection of past lives. I recollected my manifold past lives, that is, one birth, two births…
Their problem seems to be that they did not have the correct wisdom/insight, not that they could not develop concentration.
Actually, his teachers were, as mikenz66 correctly noticed:
Considering the culture in which Buddha arrived to teach Dhamma, all these things were not entirely new for many of his listeners. His essential breakthrough, in comparison with his contemporaries, was to realize the Anatta and Paticcasammupada. Please correct me if I am wrong.
Well captured under the Four Noble Truths, in my opinion.
I believe there was a ascetic called Asitha who in king Suddhodhana’s (Prince siddharta’s father) court prophesied the coming of a Buddha, but died and eventually went to the immaterial realms because of his training in immaterial absorptions. This would mean meditation was practiced and for people who have renounced living with minimal distractions, it is likely, and not unlikely, that jhana would have appeared. What the Buddha brought that was unique to the world is wisdom-insight or panna aspect of the practice- the five aggregates, three marks, four noble truths, DO etc.
with metta
We have no evidence of pre-Buddhists attaining states which were “exactly how the Buddha described jhana”, as you put it. But more to the point, we do not have any evidence of any pre-Buddhists even practicing or teaching about anything even called jhāna!
Immaterial states, not jhāna. DO you have anything to suggest otherwise?
So far I see only speculation as a basis for this view, however common it might be. I see no evidence. If you have any evidence, please present some!
Hi Senryu,
Of course. I agree because that is what I said.
However, we do have evidence from the suttas that I quoted that they were doing similar practices, with much the same results (removal of hindrances, and so on).
Perhaps you could explain what you think the differences were? That might be a more interesting question.
@mikenz66 sorry can I clarify, you mentioned about his teachers, one of whom we know practiced immaterial attainments. Is that what you are referring to? Are you pointing out fruits of their immaterial attainments? Or are you saying there is any evidence that they were practicing jhāna, or had attainments that are specifically from jhāna, not immaterial attainments?
Both what he says about his teachers and also what he says about the attainments of others in a number of suttas, including DN1, as I quoted above:
@mikenz66 if you don’t mind could you please explicitely state exactly what attainment you believe they attained which can only be attained through jhāna practice, not immaterial attainments? Thank you.
I’m not sure what you are asking. I have quoted a sutta that talks about something that sounds very similar to jhana because it talks about the suppression of hindrances, etc. In the particular case that I have quoted it leads to the recall of past lives.
If you want to put the case for something else, such as that they had only immaterial attainments, skipping past the usual four jhanas, by all means present the arguments.
Supernormal abilities are specifically gained tthrough immaterial attainment practice. That’s why arahants differed in having those abilities or not, depending not on whether thye practiced jhāna (they all practiced jhāna), but whether they practice the immaterial attainments. See Anālayo referencing this topic:
In SN 12.70 at SN II 123,26 and in a discourse quotation in the Mahāsāṅghika Vinaya, T 1425 at T XXII 363a14, the arahants deny that they attained supernormal powers or the immaterial attainments and then explain that they are liberated by wisdom.
I don’t know if seeing past lives classes as one of these powers or not, but either way, it makes total sense to me that immaterial practice could give such a fruit as this, since it is so explicitely connected with latent untapped powers.
But if this is not classed formally as one of those powers, do you have any references to show that that attainment is specifically produced by practicing jhāna, and clarity over whether it is never referenced as a fruit of immaterial attainments? If so, that would be significant. I would love to hear about it.