Right Concentration: A Practical Guide to the Jhanas

by Leigh Brasington

JUNE 4, 1988: It’s forty minutes into the forty-five-minute sitting before lunch—and my back is killing me. I slide forward on the little cushion I’m using as a zafu and my sit bones slip onto the mat, but my tailbone remains on the cushion. The result is instantaneous. My hips are thrust forward, correctly aligning my vertebrae and thus relaxing all the muscle tension in my back, and a huge flood of joyous energy fills my whole being. Immediately two thoughts arise: “I’m gonna always sit like this!” and “This must be what that Dutch woman was talking about when she asked that question ‘What do I do with all this joy I’m getting?’” I was at Ajahn Buddhadasa’s Wat Suan Mokkha in southern Thailand, and they told me there that what I was experiencing was called pīti. I didn’t really understand what was happening—I just knew I liked it and that my motivation for sitting in meditation had changed from doing it because I knew it was good for me, to meditating because I wanted to.

Over the course of the next two years, I found I had fairly regular access to the pīti depending on how regular my sitting practice was.

I attended a ten-day retreat with Venerable Ayya Khema,

insight practice.

loving-kindness (mettā) practice, can also generate concentration,

wisdom practices—practices that are intended to help you “see the way things are” (or perhaps more accurately “what’s actually happening”).

Buddha makes it abundantly clear4 that your examination of reality should be done with a concentrated mind.

What the Buddha is pointing to with the word samādhi is the ability of your mind to not become distracted—the ability of your mind to remain aware of a specific, chosen topic without unintentionally wandering off to some other topic.

samādhi throughout this book, you should strive to keep in mind that it really is referring to a state of indistractability.

Upon emerging from the jhānas—preferably the fourth or higherf—you begin doing an insight practice with your jhānically concentrated, indistractable mind.g

They are simply a very useful way of preparing your mind, so you can more effectively examine reality and discover the deeper truths that lead to liberation.

Jhānas are best learned on a ten-day or longer meditation retreat where the teacher describes the states in a general fashion and describes the instructions, again in a general way. Then the students have time to try out the instructions for themselves.

A skilled jhāna teacher can modify the instructions as the teacher comes to understand to some degree how the student’s mind works.

You must also “guard the doors of the sense faculties” lest “evil unwholesome states assail” you.3 This does not mean you don’t look, you don’t hear, and so forth; it means you do not get carried away by what you see, hear, sense, and cognize.

It’s perfectly OK to enjoy the pleasures that come via the senses—but don’t let your enjoyment of them lead you to becoming even more entangled in the world of delusion.

It’s also necessary to develop habitual mindfulness.

So being mindful means to remember. And what are we to remember? Be here, now. Pay attention to what’s actually going on in the present moment, in the place where you are currently located.

the gradual training, the Buddha suggests that you pay attention to your bodily activities throughout the day.

When you are attempting to learn jhānas, this unrelenting mindfulness is the most useful of all the practices4 given in the Satipaṭṭhāna Suttas.

The last of the preliminary practices that occurs in the gradual training is being content with little. We unfortunately live in a culture that says that any less-than-perfect situation can be remedied by obtaining more of something—usually more of whatever the person doing the saying is selling.

spiritual path is not about acquiring anything—it’s all about letting go.

throughout the two and a half thousand years of Buddhism, the jhānas were not considered a topic to be taught to lay people simply because it was believed their lives were far too busy to be able to undertake the m...

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.

The likelihood of you experiencing a jhāna is inversely proportional to the amount of desire you have for it.

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”

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.

upacāra-samādhi, which we translate as “access...

access concentration means concentration strong enough to provide access to the jhānas.

We could define access concentration as concentration strong enough that no hindrances arise.

More practically, we can define access concentration as being fully with the meditation object, and if there are thoughts, they are wispy and in the background and don’t pull you away into distraction.

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...

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 aimi...

It is not helpful to force your mind to remain fixed on the...

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

Sometimes all it takes is just being persistent in returning to the meditation object for these hindrances to drop away. But sometimes a hindrance (or hindrances) turns out to be quite sticky. The five hindrances are discussed in detail on the web page “Abandoning the Five Hindrances” at http://rc.leighb.com/more/Abandoning_the_Five_Hindrances.htm, and general methods for working with each of these hindrances are discussed there.

If you have an especially persistent, recurring hindrance, the general methods may not work. Sometimes it helps to give that particular distraction a funny name—like maybe “Rumpelstiltskin.” Then you can dialogue with it when it shows up: “It’s you again, Rumpelstiltskin. Well, this is not a good time for you to be showing up; please go away!” Giving it a funny name robs it of some of its power. Talking to it like a petulant child also weakens its hold.

If you are craving to experience a jhāna, you have the hi...

refrain from what Ayya Khema called “result thinking.” Don’t focus on what you hope or think or expect should happen.

Don’t focus on, or even think about, the destination.

It needs to be comfortable, because if there is too much pain, the unwholesome mental state of aversion will naturally develop.

if you are too comfortable, you might be overcome with sloth and torpor, which is also an unwholesome mental state

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. The intention to move will be there before the movement. Notice that intention; then move very mindfully, and then resettle yourself into the new position, and notice the mind working to get back to that place of calm that it had before you moved. It is very important that you not move unmindfully.

ānāpānasati.

When practicing ānāpānasati, you put your attention on the physical sensations associated with 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.

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;

Since you are trying to generate access concentration, you take something that is doable, though not terribly...

but eventually—you’ll find that the mind locks onto the breath. You’re really with the breath, and the mind is not wandering off. Any thoughts you have are wispy and in the background. The thoughts might be something like, “Wow, I’m really with the breath now,” as opposed to, “When I get to Hawaii, the first thing I’m going to do is . . . .”

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.