Wisdom Wide and Deep: A Practical Handbook for Mastering Jhana and Vipassana

by Shaila Catherine

A deliberate and wise application of attention is the root skill that every meditator cultivates.

Five classic obstacles confront meditators: (1) desire for sense pleasure; (2) aversion and ill will; (3) sloth, torpor, dullness, and boredom; (4) restlessness and worry; and (5) doubt or obstinate skepticism.

(1) the presence of the hindrance, (2) the absence of the hindrance, (3) the cause for its arising, (4) the way of its abandoning, and (5) the way for the nonarising of it in the future.

The cause for the arising of a hindrance is unwise attention, the way of its abandoning is wise attention, and the cultivation of concentration, mindfulness, and insight is the way for the nonarising of that hindrance in the future.

Recognize when a hindrance is present. Recognize when a hindrance is absent. Understand the conditions that cause a hindrance to arise. Understand the conditions that cause a hindrance to cease. Explore how to prevent the hindrance from arising again in the future.

When practicing to establish jhāna, it is enough to see a hindrance, let it go quickly, and return to the meditation object without delay. In fact, it is essential to do so, because time spent examining hindrances weakens the single-pointed focus of concentration, postponing absorption. Approach the hindrance sufficiently to understand its rudimentary function and supports; study it just enough to untangle the mind from its grip.

In meditation practice you must abandon the unwholesome states and also give attention to esteemed wholesome states, such as concentration, mindfulness, generosity, patience, and diligence.

Aversion persists when there is incorrect attention to unpleasant feeling.

Aversion has the characteristic of projecting onto an object repulsiveness that the object does not inherently contain. Aversion can never end by replacing unpleasant external conditions with comfortable and agreeable conditions, since the suffering is not caused by the external conditions. The problem is the quality of attention, not the physical situation that you encounter.

The primary method for working with thoughts is to learn to let them go. Clear the mind of compulsive clutter. In fact, much of what you will do when you begin meditation is to abandon thoughts. Sweep away fantasies of future events, ruminations about past activities, and commentary about present happenings. Train your mind to be quiet by not allowing your attention to fuel a constant stream of chatter and interpretation.

If the tendency to wander off into thought is a strong pattern, don’t wait for your formal daily meditation. Interrupt the habit as you are driving to work, cooking dinner, reaching for the telephone, walking to the toilet, or exercising at the gym. Many times every day, notice what your attention is preoccupied by and repeatedly bring it back to present awareness.

The Buddha declared, “[A liberated one] will think whatever thought he wishes to think and he will not think any thought that he does not wish to think.”32 Imagine this potential!

You must set aside the tendency to doubt in order to see the true nature of mind — only then will you no longer have doubts about it.

the Buddha compared the gladness of a mind freed from the burden of desire to the happiness of a man whose business prospered and was finally able to repay a large debt.

He compared the joy of a mind without aversion to the delight of someone who had recently recovered from a terrible sickness.

He compared a mind released from the bonds of sloth and torpor to the joy of a man who had been locked in prison and is f...

He compared a mind unoccupied by restlessness and worry to the thrill of a slave who is freed from slavery...

he compared a mind unfettered by doubt to the feeling of a merchant who, fearing for his safety and survival while traveling through a dangerous desert,...

Until you perceive the disappearance of the hindrances within your own mind, you will suffer as a debtor, sick person, pr...

arises in him, from gladness comes delight, from the delight in his mind his body is tranquilized, with a tranquil body he feels joy, and with joy his mind is concentrated.”37 With the honest recognition that the mind is unhindered, happiness develops, concentration matures, and you gain the prerequisites for entrance into jhāna.

So now I will go, I will go on into the struggle, This is to my mind delight; This is where my mind finds bliss.

As you stop resisting the fact that some things are pleasurable and other things are painful and cease diverting energy by trying to accumulate pleasant experiences and avoid unpleasant ones, you will discover an untapped potential to make significant change in your life.

They are faith, energy, mindfulness, concentration, and wisdom.

Faith manifests as clarity and resolution.

One traditional tool to enhance faith is to contemplate objects that are worthy of trust. Reflect on what is worthy to know, such as the four noble truths, the path of release, the law of causes and effects. Reflect on what is worthy to practice, such as kind and compassionate deeds, honesty, generosity, renunciation, patience, integrity, and perseverance in meditation. Reflect on the people who practice sincerely and successfully.

There are six traditional reflections incorporated into concentration practice; namely, recollections of the Buddha, Dhamma, Saṅgha (community), virtue, generosity, and heavens.

ENERGY AND EFFORT (VIRIYA)

You are mindful when you remember to pay attention, and you are unmindful when you are lost in a cloud of associative thinking and forgetfulness. Mindfulness arises in conjunction with all wholesome states; it is not present in unwholesome states such as greed or hatred.

The Buddha identified four foundations of mindfulness: body, feeling tone, mental states, and objects of mind.

Maintain a continuity of mindfulness of the body by focusing on the breath in all your activities.

The second foundation, mindfulness of feeling tone, refers to a bare impression of the pleasantness, unpleasantness, or neutrality of any present experience.

Mindfulness of feeling can free you from the agitation that comes with the push and pull of desire and aversion.

When mindfulness of feeling is developed, your orientation to experience shifts — you will begin to understand feeling as an opportunity to develop a stable equanimous presence, free of the burden of accumulating ever more pleasant sensations and avoiding painful ones.

Mindfulness of mental states, the third foundation, directs attention to the mind as it is colored by emotions such as love, joy, anger, hatred, interest, boredom, tranquility, and fear.

The fourth foundation is mindfulness of mental objects, which includes an awareness of the functions of mental states.

(5) as an all-pervading rapture that suffuses consciousness.

Central to the issue of the presence or absence of the nimitta is the question: What is the object of attention? Are you successfully screening out extraneous distractions and exclusively aware of the basic occurrence of breath? If you are thinking about yourself breathing, or imagining yourself developing concentration, such active visualizations will inhibit the formation of the nimitta.

Know the breath as it occurs, but with minimal embellishment or interpretation. Maintain continuous attention to just the basic occurrence of the breath. The subtle transformation of perception will occur as attention shifts from involvement with physical sensations to a mental sign of the breath.

Having a number of different meditation objects will stall the momentum of the single-pointed focus of jhāna practice.

Repeated contact of three aspects of cognition — in this case, a functioning mind, an object (the breath nimitta), and mind-consciousness (consciousness of the breath nimitta) — create the conditions for absorption.

bhavaṅga.

The Abhidhamma identifies this state as the life-continuum consciousness that arises between every cognitive process.

If a meditator enjoys the pleasant but unclear state of bhavaṅga and repeatedly dwells in it, the meditation will stagnate and soon the mind will dull into complacency.

In this book I use the term jhāna for rather deep states of absorption that can be sustained for a significant duration — twenty minutes, thirty minutes, one hour, two hours, or more — without the intrusion of any thought, sound, or sensation, and without the weakening of the supportive jhāna factors.

And with this delight and joy born of detachment, he so suffuses, drenches, fills, and irradiates his body that there is no spot in his entire body that is untouched by this delight and joy born of detachment. Just as a skilled bath man or his assistant, kneading the soap powder which he has sprinkled with water, forms from it, in a metal dish, a soft lump, so that the ball of soap powder becomes one oleaginous mass, bound with oil so that nothing escapes — so this monk suffuses, drenches, fills, and irradiates his body so that no spot remains untouched.

Allow the mind to rest, deeply unified with the object of the breath nimitta.

The immaterial jhānas, however, do not depend upon the presence of material forms, but only arise in the absence of the perception of matter; hence, these immaterial jhānas surmount matter.

Meditators explore the rarefied experiences of the immaterial perceptions through meditative training, encountering many subtleties, analyzing their functions, and learning to distinguish the nuances of the many experiences associated with the English words space, spacious, empty, or void.

With the complete surmounting of perceptions of materiality, with the passing away of perceptions of sensory impingement, with non-attention to perceptions of diversity, perceiving “space is infinite,” a bhikkhu enters and dwells in the base of the infinity of space. That former perception of materiality ceases for him. At that time there is a subtle but true perception of the base of the infinity of space, and he becomes one who is percipient of this true but subtle perception of the base of the infinity of space. In this way some perceptions arise through training, and some pass away through training. And this is that training. — The Buddha123

abandoning any residual attraction for the four aspects of perception listed in the Buddha’s instructions: bodily sensations, resistance, attraction to diverse perceptions, and defining boundaries. Unbound by these habitual ways of orienting toward sensory phenomena, you may relax into a direct perception of this expanse of basic space.