Mastering the Core Teachings of Buddha - An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book

Third, concentration states can be a welcome and valid vacation from stress, providing periods of very deep relaxation and peace that can be an extremely important part of a sane, compassionate and healthy lifestyle. The Buddha highly praised those who had mastery of the concentration states, and this should serve as a reminder to those who underestimate their great value or erroneously feel that not enjoying one’s life is somehow “spiritual.” Fourth, concentration practices can help the insight practitioner stay somewhat more mentally stable and balanced as their old concepts of their existence are rent asunder by insight practice. However, if these states end up blocking this process by solidifying a sense of self as being anything or creating aversion to clearly experiencing suffering then they become a hindrance.

This is a very tricky balance. If a student clings to stability or fluidity they will surely not make progress in insight. However, if they plunge into the fast and harsh vibratory experiences of insight practice without the soothing effects of concentration practice to help them stay somewhat grounded, the student can be a bit like someone who has taken a small dose (or a big dose in the worst cases) of LSD or drunk way too much coffee. I spent the first five years of my practice giving only a moderate amount of attention to the samatha jhanas and I now realize that this was probably an error.

Sometimes spiritual openings can be extreme and dramatic, and being able to slow things down and calm down can sometimes be very useful and skillful if we have to deal with the world and deal with these openings at the same time. In short, if you want to gunk up your insight practice because you simply need to slow down so as to be able to get on with your life or not completely flip out, such as to study for medical school boards, etc., one way to do this is to indulge in concentration states. Coupling this with formal resolutions to not make progress in insight can be very effective.

135

Concentration vs. Insight

There are many concentration states, and they become progressively more refined as one masters them. A brief description of the concentration states follows. It is basically straight out of the standard texts and very accurate. Regardless of the tradition you are following, when you begin to get some mastery of its concentration practices you will go through these states in this order up to the level of your current ability, though some people can master skipping over jhanas.

The specific object of meditation may limit the level of jhana that can be attained, as well as color the experience of these states. Such details are spelled out in various canonical texts, such as The Vi

suddhimagga and the more readable but harder to find Vim

uttimagga .

Bhante Gunaratana’s The Jhanas, included in his more complete work The Path of Serenity and Insight, is a scholarly work on the subject, as is Nyanatiloka’s Path to Deliverance (published by the Buddhist Publication Society out of Sri Lanka).

Some of these texts (particularly the first two) go into long and sophisticated discussions about which posture and which object might be best suited to the individual proclivities of various types of people. It is unfortunate that this sort of information is not in common use today.

I suppose that a suit off the rack will work for most occasions, but there is something about one that has been tailor made. I am told that there are still a few monasteries that provide this sort of traditional training.

Unfortunately, this topic is way too complex to treat properly here, but those of you who are that serious about these subjects are highly advised to check out the original sources. They contain an astounding amount of powerful information but unfortunately make for fairly tedious reading.

Many traditions use the breath as the primary object initially and then shift to the qualities of the states themselves as the object of meditation when they arise and the concentration is strong. The quality of a jhana can either be “soft” or “hard” depending on how solidly one is in the state. In soft jhana, the qualities of that particular state are definitely recognizable in a way that is different from the ordinary experience of those qualities to the degree that we are confident we are in the altered state defined by those qualities.

136

Concentration vs. Insight

In really hard jhana, it feels as if our mind has been fused to those qualities and the object with super glue, as if we were nothing but a solid block or field of those qualities or that object, as if they and the object were the whole world with nothing else remaining. Getting into really