“And what, monks, is right concentration? (i) There is the case where a monk—quite secluded from sensuality, secluded from unskillful qualities—enters & remains in the first jhāna: rapture & pleasure born of seclusion, accompanied by directed thought & evaluation. (ii) With the stilling of directed thoughts & evaluations, he enters & remains in the second jhāna: rapture & pleasure born of concentration, unification of awareness free from directed thought & evaluation—internal assurance. (iii) With the fading of rapture, he remains equanimous, mindful, & alert, and senses pleasure with the body. He enters & remains in the third jhāna, of which the noble ones declare, ‘Equanimous & mindful, he has a pleasant abiding.’ (iv) With the abandoning of pleasure & pain—as with the earlier disappearance of elation & distress—he enters & remains in the fourth jhāna: purity of equanimity & mindfulness, neither pleasure nor pain. This, monks, is called right concentration.” – An Analysis of the Path, Magga-Vibhaṅga Sutta (SN 45:8)
The longest section in “The Analysis of the Path” is the one describing right concentration. And it gives a fairly detailed map of the different elements in each stage. The question is, how do we relate to the map? It’s tempting to say, well, there’s this ingredient, there’s that ingredient, and so you pull the different ingredients together and hope that what you’ve got is a state of jhana. But it doesn’t really work that way. It’s like being told that durian tastes a little bit like garlic, a little bit like onions, a little bit like custard. It has a little bit of cyanide, a little bit of vitamin E. So you throw all those things together, thinking that you’re going to get durian, but what you get is an inedible mess. If you want to get durian, you have to plant the seed (meditation). Once you’ve planted the seed and keep watering the seed, the tree will grow. When it’s mature, the tree will start giving fruit. If you’ve planted the right seed, you’re going to get the right fruit. So you don’t have to go designing the fruit. You just have to be very careful to plant the right seed and care for it well.
So focus on the breath in and of itself. As you’re focusing on the breath, put aside any sensual passions. There’s the phrase in the description of jhana, “secluded from sensuality.” Some people interpret that as meaning totally cut off from any input from the physical senses. Some interpret it as meaning secluded from sensual pleasures, so that you have to meditate in a place that’s unpleasant or a place that’s very boring. But neither of those interpretations is what the Buddha means. Sensuality, in his sense of the word, is your passion for your sensual thoughts and plans: the extent to which you love to obsess about those things. So in being secluded from sensuality, you’re not trying to close off any contact with outside senses and you’re not trying to put yourself in a dull, boring place. You’re trying to develop a more internal seclusion: If you see any sensual passion coming up, you sidestep it. You put it aside.
Right here is where the analysis of the body into different parts comes in handy. If there’s anything in the body that’s got you lusting for it, you can think about all the other disgusting things right next to it in the body. If you’re feeling some greed for food, think about the whole process of getting and eating food: exactly how much work goes into preparing the food, how short a time it actually tastes good in the mouth, and then what it’s like as it goes through the digestive system and comes out the other end. In other words, you’re using some thinking here to protect yourself, to pull you away from unskillful thoughts, and in particular from sensual passion.
Notice how the breath feels and ask yourself: Is this the kind of breath sensation you could settle down and spend lots of time with? If it’s not, what can you do to change it? This is where evaluation comes in. Then there’s always the question: How do you know you’ve hit the first jhana? You can’t really know at first. It doesn’t come with a sign that says, “Now entering jhana, Population One.” The only level of jhana with a really definite signpost is the fourth, which is where the in-and-out breathing stops. There’s a sense of awareness filling the body and it’s all very still. The mind is still, the body is still, and everything’s perfectly balanced. All the breath-energy channels in the body are connected, so they nourish one another. There’s no need to breathe in and out, so there’s no in-and-out breathing at all. At that point, you know you’ve hit the fourth jhana.
Then you begin to see your body and mind in terms of the aggregates in action. You see form, i.e., the form you’re inhabiting. You see the feelings that come from the different ways the breath energy moves through the body. When you move from the first to the second jhana, you let go of verbal fabrication, and your relationship to the breath changes. Singleness of preoccupation is a factor of all the levels of jhana, but when you get into the second jhana, the Buddha uses a new term: unification. In unification, it feels as if your awareness and the breath become one. You no longer feel like you’re sitting outside of the breath kneading it through the body; you’re immersed in a lake with the cool water of a spring welling up inside. You’re actually one with the breath. You don’t have to adjust or evaluate it anymore. Things begin to meld together with a sense of oneness. That oneness remains as a factor of your concentration all the way up through the dimension of the infinitude of consciousness. This is what happens when you let go of the verbal fabrications of directed thought and evaluation. When you get to the third jhana, you let go of one aspect of mental fabrication—the sense of rapture—because it starts feeling gross. When you get to the fourth jhana, you let go of bodily fabrication. In other words, the in-and-out breath actually stops.
There are two ways you can observe the mind in the course of practicing jhana. One is as it’s in a particular state of jhana. In fact, all the way up through the dimension of nothingness, you can observe each state while you’re in it. It’s like having your hand in a glove. It can be fully in the glove, partly in the glove, or totally removed. When you’re fully in the higher jhanas you can’t observe them, but when you’re partly in them, you can. You pull the mind slightly above its full absorption—but not totally out—so that you can observe what’s going on in that particular state. Another way to observe it is, as you move from one level to the next, to see different fabrications, different perceptions, just peeling away.
So you keep it in the back of your mind that this is what you want in the practice, this is where you’re headed as an interim goal on the path. But as with every aspect of the path, you have to combine your desire for a particular goal with an understanding of the steps that will take you there. As the Canon says, desire for awakening is a good thing. But it’s a good thing only when it gets you to focus on the actual steps that will take you to awakening. And the same principle applies to jhana. You know in the back of your mind that this is where you’re headed but you can’t be obsessed with what’s written on the map. You have to be more obsessed with the causes that will get you there. You seclude the mind from sensuality. And where do you do that? By focusing on the four establishings of mindfulness.
The Buddha says that this is your territory as a meditator. If you wander off your territory, it’s like the quail who wandered away from the plowed field where he could hide from the hawk. He suddenly finds himself out in an open meadow where a hawk swoops down and catches him. As the hawk carries him off, he laments his bad fate, “Ah, I shouldn’t have left my safe field. If I hadn’t, this hawk would have been no match for me!” The hawk says, “Okay, I’ll let you go there, but even there you won’t escape me.” He lets the quail go. The quail goes and stands on top of a stone turned up by the plow and shouts to the hawk, “Okay, come and get me, you hawk. Come and get me, you hawk.” And the hawk, without bragging, just folds his wings and dives down. The quail sees that the hawk is coming at him full speed and so jumps behind the stone. The hawk crashes into the stone and dies.
This is the analogy for when you wander off into sensual passions: You’re out where the hawk can get you. But when you’re here in the body—ardent, alert, and mindful—you’re in your safe territory. Just keep inhabiting the body as you go through the day. Whether you’re in jhana or not doesn’t matter. As long as you have this sense of fully inhabiting the body, being in touch with the breath energy in the body, you’re in the right location, you’re in the proper territory. As for the map of the different stages, keep that in the back of your mind. If you look at the map while you’re driving, you’ll drive off the road. Use the map after you’ve come out of meditation to reflect on what you experienced, what happened in the course of the meditation. Over time, you’ll arrive at your own more complete map of the different stages the mind goes through, the different ways it settles down, the different types of concentration you can get into. But all this comes from having a proper sense of cause and effect.
This is why the Buddha put right view at the very beginning of the path: seeing the practice of meditation as a type of kamma, something you do to get the results you want, with the realization that the results have to come from causes. If you focus on the causes, with the sense of where you want to go kept in the back of the mind, the causes will take you there. In this case, it’s not done by focusing on your memory of what was stated in the texts about jhana. It’s done by focusing on the breath, getting to know the breath by evaluating it, adjusting it, settling in. That’s where you’ll see right concentration.
– The Noble Eightfold Path – Thanissaro Bikkhu