Vitakka vicāra (Jhana-factors)

Q & A
409

I think it does:

"With his mind thus concentrated, purified, and bright, unblemished, free from defects, pliant, malleable, steady, and attained to imperturbability, he directs and inclines it to knowledge and vision. He discerns: ‘This body of mine is endowed with form, composed of the four primary elements, born from mother and father, nourished with rice and porridge, subject to inconstancy, rubbing, pressing, dissolution, and dispersion. And this consciousness of mine is supported here and bound up here.’ Just as if there were a beautiful beryl gem of the purest water — eight faceted, well polished, clear, limpid, consummate in all its aspects, and going through the middle of it was a blue, yellow, red, white, or brown thread — and a man with good eyesight, taking it in his hand, were to reflect on it thus: ‘This is a beautiful beryl gem of the purest water, eight faceted, well polished, clear, limpid, consummate in all its aspects. And this, going through the middle of it, is a blue, yellow, red, white, or brown thread.’ In the same way — with his mind thus concentrated, purified, and bright, unblemished, free from defects, pliant, malleable, steady, and attained to imperturbability — the monk directs and inclines it to knowledge and vision. He discerns: ‘This body of mine is endowed with form, composed of the four primary elements, born from mother and father, nourished with rice and porridge, subject to inconstancy, rubbing, pressing, dissolution, and dispersion. And this consciousness of mine is supported here and bound up here.’

"This, too, great king, is a fruit of the contemplative life, visible here and now, more excellent than the previous ones and more sublime. DN2.

Unification doesn’t imply an intensity so great that all conscious awareness is lost. Even to know there is bliss, there must be recognition active. It is only in asanna states of very intense samadhi, apparently that such recognition is completely ‘crushed’ by the force of the concentration (the forced fabrication of…) but these are pre-jhanic states, and unhelpful for the development of insight, because they lack recognition, and antta sanna works through sanna or identification.

with metta,

410

For 16 APS it’s absolutely clear, how he translates and how he personally interprets the body in step 3 of 16 APS (anapana). You can look up in his two Satipatthana books (one analyzing Pali Satipatthana sutta, the other the Chinese Agama parallels). In his interpretation he uses the words “anatomical body” to make it clear he’s not talking about any other kind of body in 16 APS.

As for his personal interpretation of jhana, I don’t know exactly the fine nuances of his interpretation, but at least he translates STED 3rd jhana (standard ebt definition) correctly from pali, and agama chinese, and tibetan.

“Correct” meaning kāya = body. Now if someone personally has an interpretation of what “body” means in 4 jhanas (in the pali->english, chinese agama->english, tibetan->english), then I’m not so concerned, but at least the translation for kāya needs to be consistent in 16 APS and 4 jhāna contexts so the same word for kāya (in translated term) needs to be used consistently in 4 jhana similes, MN 119 (kayagatasati) and satipatthana suttas (and their parallels).

As @alaber 's post (#393) which kicked off this discussion shows, not translating kāya consistently through as Bhante @Sujato has done in the 4 jhana similes to the 3rd jhana formula itself, led to @alaber mistakenly believing Bhante personally interprets 4 jhanas as body being physical, based on how he translated kāya=body in the jhana similes.

Bhante Sujato’s 3rd jhana translation:

“personally”(kāyena) experiencing the bliss (sukha).

If not personally, then who else would be experiencing the bliss? In other words why would the Buddha bother to waste extremely valuable real estate in the short jhana formula to state something obvious? Clearly the “kāyena” is to differentiate physical from mental body, just as in numerous 7sb (awakening factors), the Buddha goes out of his way to specifiy pīti (rapture) as manassa (mind), passaddhi as having both physical and mental parts (kāya passadhi & citta passadhi), and the sukha that results from passadhi affecting “kāya”. In the 3rd jhana, “pītya ca virāga” (rapture as a jhana factor is dropped out), and since we already now the Buddha emphasized the predominant mental aspect of pīti, then the quality of bliss/happiness/joy present as “sukha”, (sukha vedana has both physical and mental components), the “sukhanca kāyena” is to qualify that it’s the physical part of sukha vedana that he’s talking about. This is very straightforward and clear. The mental aspect of bliss, the pīti that dropped out, is replaced with upekkha/equanimity.

Searching for pītimanassa in the pali suttas turns up (64) references for the 7sb sequence:

pīti-manassa kāyo passambhati, passaddha-kāyo sukhaṃ vedeti, sukhino cittaṃ samādhiyati

enraptured in mind, body becomes pacified, one with pacified-body, sukha he experiences. Happy, his mind enters samadhi.

7sb and 4j (jhanas) are covering the same territory. There isn’t a separate samadhi attainment for 4j, and a different one for samadhi-sambojjhanga where there’s a physical body.

This is why Vism. goes out of the way to try to deemphasize 7sb, and recast it as something only enlightened beings experiences as marks certifying their enlightenment. In the EBT, 7sb are factors that lead to awakening, and they are the default way, the default method that one should use to enter samadhi and jhana.

411

I think the last verse of Ud 1.10 might provide a clue. It is a list of four things that need to be “understood” that ends in pleasure and pain that seems to have something to do with the training Bahiya was told about.

Ud1.10
And when a sage, a brahmin, finds understanding
through their own sagacity,
then from forms and formless,
from pleasure and pain they are released.”

I think this is backed up by Snp 4.2. It to describes a training program. Its reference to understanding contact, the seen and heard correspond to forms and its reference to understanding perception corresponds to formless.

Snp 4.2
Rid of desire for both ends,
having completely understand contact, free of greed,
doing nothing for which they’d blame themselves,
the wise don’t cling to the seen and the heard.

Having understood perception and crossed the flood,
the sage, not clinging to possessions,
with dart plucked out, living diligently,
does not long for this world or the next.