Link for posterity
And for the record, a strict requiring of this “instrumental of time” (eg imina viharena) for contemporaneity would have us take AN 5.28’s bhāvana, defined as “parisandeti et. al.”, as taking place outside of first jhana proper. Ie “Being one having attained” first jhana, he grows the fruit of that jhana non-contemporaneous with the attainment of that jhana. This clarifies for me the notion I’ve picked up from somewhere of teachers referring to “insight after jhana” which I can’t unfortunately cite at the moment.
Here, of course, we’d want to scrutinize just how necessary this “instrumental of time” is but perhaps after I deliver on that analysis of “parisandeti et. al.” to appraise, at the least, just how active AN 5.28’s bhāvana is. There’s certainly a glaring inconsistency in taking it as overly active since our candidates for this activity, vitakkavicāra, goes away already just in second jhana.
I think here, even if we want to assume contemporaneity, we’d have to ask, if vitakkavicāra is not what is spreading that pītisukha around, just what the heck is it doing in first jhana? Or conversely, if vitakkavicāra is what is spreading that pītisukha around, what spreads it around in the second of AN 5.28’s fivefold bhāvanas where second jhana is absent of it?