Vitakka vicāra (Jhana-factors)

[silence]

@Sylvester

Let me see if I can frame your argument into a proper syllogistic form. If I’m not mistaken, the part bolded above would be this premise 1 :

Premise 1 - If sound is presented to a First Jhana-attainer, he would fall out of the First Jhana.

Hi Sylvester,
I am not sure my argument has been really captured by your description.
It would rather go like this (please correct me if I fail to capture your argument):

a. Sylvester says that a “privative sense” prevails regarding disruptive forces in the first and the second jhana both in AN 9.41 and AN 10.72:

Sylvester about AN 9.41: This passage occurs before the attainment of the second jhana and the intrusion of vitakka into that attainment. Since the negation in the bolded part points to a privative sense, it strikes me that the same privative sense must have been intended for the first jhana and its relationship to the kāmā which it transcends.

and:

Sylvester about AN 10.72 8 of the states have been shown to be viewed as “thorns”, simply because they cannot co-exist with their opposing state… The most natural reading of sound’s place in this series is that it cannot be (or at least should not be) perceived in the First Jhana.

b. Silence says that if that is the case, then a strict “privative sense” does not apply in the case of sounds and the first jhana

Since we seem to agree on this last point (I see no reason to disagree with MN 28, but I was not aware of it, so thank you for pointing that one out), then the problem of your interpretation is that it does not provide a fully consistent link between tenor and vehicle in the similes of AN 10.72. This was actually my argument.

@Sylvester

All one can legitimately say about the present participle married to the instrumental of time above is that the affliction arose when one was in the attainment; there is no basis to assert that thereafter, the attainment persisted.

Well it would be interesting to see if there are other cases where the present participle is used in such situations where the action is dropped immediately after. It is certainly the case in English, so this argument seems now indeed much less conclusive than I first thought.

@Sylvester

If the Second Jhana is supposed to be empty of vitakka, but that attainment is now afflicted by vitakka, is it still the Second Jhana?

Is it though, as you argued earlier in the case of kāmā, “afflicted by vitakka” per se? If it was not full fledged kāmā that the text was referring to, there should be no reason why it should be full-fledged vitakka it is referring to by using the same expression in the following paragraph.