Right Concentration
The word jhāna literally means “meditation.”d It comes from the verb jhāyati, which means “to meditate.” Many times the Buddha would give a dhamma talk and close it by saying, “There are these roots of trees, these empty huts, go meditate (Jhāyati).”
As I discovered back in 1991, the Buddha’s teachings can be divided into three parts: sīla, samādhi, and pañña: ethical conduct, concentration, and wisdom. Or to put it into the vernacular: clean up your act, concentrate your mind, and use your concentrated mind to investigate reality.
The jhānas are eight altered states of consciousness, brought on via concentration and each yielding more concentration than the previous. This way, as you pass through the jhānas, you stairstep your way to deeper and deeper levels of concentration—that is, you are becoming less and less likely to become distracted.
the jhānas don’t really lend themselves to “book learning.” Any description of them is a general description, and any set of instructions is an averaging of what typically works for people to enable them to enter these states and move between them.
The Buddha didn’t require belief—only a willingness to “come and see for yourself.”
The next step is building the foundation upon which all that follows stands: sīla, moral discipline, ethical behavior. The major ethical practice is the keeping of the precepts—227 for monks, 311 for nuns, but only 5 for lay people: To refrain from killing living beings, To refrain from taking that which is not given, To refrain from committing sexual misconduct, To refrain from wrong speech, To refrain from intoxicants.
We translate the word sati as “mindfulness,” but we need to keep in mind that it is etymologically related to the Sanskrit smṛti, which means “memory.” So being mindful means to remember. And what are we to remember? Be here, now.
The last of the preliminary practices that occurs in the gradual training is being content with little.
These four preliminary practices of keeping the precepts, guarding the senses, maintaining mindfulness, and being content with little are “off-the-cushion” practices that you need to make the four cornerstones of your basic way of life.
ON ANY GIVEN RETREAT where jhānas are taught, some people will experience jhānas; some will not. The likelihood of you experiencing a jhāna is inversely proportional to the amount of desire you have for it. After all, the instructions given by the Buddha for practicing the jhānas begin, “Quite secluded from sense desire, secluded from unwholesome states of mind, one enters and remains in the first jhāna”
The setting aside of unwholesome mind states is known as abandoning the hindrances. There are five of these hindrances, usually listed as sense desire, ill will, sloth and torpor, restlessness and remorse, and doubt. They could also be listed as wanting, aversion, too little energy, too much energy, and doubt. The overcoming of these five unwholesome states of mind is the same as generating access concentration.
The general method for generating access concentration is to put your attention on a suitable meditation object,b and when your attention wanders off, gently bring it back. Keep doing this until the distractions fade away and your attention on the object is unwavering.
This recognition that you’ve become distracted and the returning your attention to the meditation object should be done without becoming upset that your mind has wandered off yet again.
We are the progeny of countless generations of ancestors who had to not become totally fixated on what they were doing. Those who did become fixated didn’t notice a predator, got eaten, and didn’t reproduce. What we are trying to do goes against millions of years of evolution. Having a wandering mind is just how we are constructed. So it’s no big deal when your mind wanders off; you should actually consider it a victory that you noticed it wandered, rather than a defeat that it did its natural thing of wandering.
In fact it is extremely helpful if you intentionally relax when you notice you’ve become distracted, and then gently reestablish attention on your meditation object. The mind state you are aiming to create could well be called relaxed diligence.
It is not helpful to force your mind to remain fixed on the meditation object. It’s not that this cannot be done; it’s that doing so will generate a mind so tense and tight that it will not have the relaxed diligence necessary for entering the jhānas.
The strategy is to place your attention on the meditation object and then be diligent about recognizing when you have become distracted. Drop the distraction; it might be helpful to label the distraction with a one-word label. Labeling helps you disidentify with the thought stream and provides insight into where your mind habitually goes when it becomes distracted. Just remember that the first label that comes to mind is always correct—spend zero energy trying to find the “perfect” label. Then—very important—relax, and return your attention to your meditation object.
Suppose you want to drive from your home to, for example, a retreat center many hours away. Suppose someone gives you excellent directions. If the directions start out by saying something like, “When you get to the end of your street, turn right. When you get to such and such a highway, turn left,” it does you no good to start looking for the retreat center as you drive down your street toward the first turn. In order to use the directions properly, you don’t focus on the destination; you determine where you currently are and what you’ll need to do next when you arrive at the place where you change from what you are doing now to something new. This is exactly how to approach learning the jhānas.
So the first prerequisite for entering the jhānas is to put your body in a position that you can just leave it in for the length of the meditation period without having to move.
Now, this is not to say you cannot move. It may be that you have taken a position and you discover something: “My knee is killing me; I have to move because there is too much aversion.” If you have to move, you have to move. Just be mindful of the moving.
Generating access concentration can be done in a number of ways. This chapter and the next one will mostly talk about generating it using the breath, a practice known as ānāpānasati. The first word of this Pali compound, ānāpāna, means “in-breath and out-breath,” while the word sati means “mindfulness.”
When practicing ānāpānasati, you put your attention on the physical sensations associated with breathing. It is extremely important to not control the breath in any way—just pay attention to the naturally occurring breathing. If you control the breath, it does make it easier to not become distracted. But it makes it too easy, and you won’t generate sufficient concentration to enter the jhānas.
It is probably better if you can observe the physical sensations at the nostrils or on the area between the nose and the upper lip, rather than at the abdomen or elsewhere. It is better because it is more difficult to do; therefore, you have to concentrate more.
When the thoughts are just slight, when they’re not really pulling you away and you’re fully with the sensations of the breath, knowing each in-breath and each out-breath—this is the sign that you’ve arrived at access concentration.
As you start to become concentrated, you might notice various lights and colors even though your eyes are closed. These are signs that you are starting to get concentrated. There is generally nothing useful that can be done with them—just ignore them.
If the breath gets very, very subtle, or if it disappears entirely, instead of taking a deep breath, shift your attention away from the breath to a pleasant sensation. This is the key thing. You notice the breath until you arrive at and sustain access concentration, and then you let go of the breath and shift your attention to a pleasant sensation, preferably a pleasant physical sensation.
Look at most any statue of the Buddha: he has a faint smile on his face. That is not just for artistic purposes; it is there for teaching purposes. Smile when you meditate, because once you reach access concentration, you only have to shift your attention one inch to find a pleasant sensation.
Another common place people find a pleasant sensation is in the heart center, particularly if they’re using mettā—loving-kindness—meditation as the access method. Just shift your attention to the pleasantness of that sensation.
It’s also very important to let go of the breath when you make the shift to the pleasant sensation. The breath (or other meditation object) is the key to get you in—”in” being synonymous with establishing strong enough access concentration.
It’s exactly the same with the breath or other meditation object. Totally let go of it, and focus entirely on the pleasant sensation. Of course, this is easier said than done—you’ve struggled for a long time to stay locked onto the breath, and now that you’ve finally managed to do so, the first thing you are told is to stop doing that. But that’s the way it is—if you want to experience jhānas, it’s going to be necessary to totally give yourself to fully enjoying the pleasantness of the pleasant sensation.
Any attempt to do anything more does not work. You actually have to become a human being, as opposed to a human doing.
The most common problem encountered is, rather obviously, insufficient concentration. This can arise from a number of different causes. The most common cause is what I term “jumping too soon.” Someone manages to follow a few breaths in a row and immediately switches to some pleasant sensation.