I think jhana training arose from the dharana practices of the time. With very limited personal resources and knowledge of the āgamas, I can say that I do not know of a Chinese [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Āgama_(Buddhism)]āgama correlation to the
Maha-Saccaka Sutta - which sutta speaks to Gotama's first experience of first jhana as a child under a rose-apple tree (this certainly reminds me of the way persons are instructed to generate pce in actualism). This may mean the Chinese āgama for this sutta is lost or that that sutta was not part of the older records. Anyone know the history of the Maha-Saccaka Sutta and chinese āgama?
Because I wonder if jhana training is, in part, a result of Gotama's own a) finding there to be no lasting path in his dharana training under Alara Kalama, and b) his knowledge that people immersed in a dharana/dhyana (jhana) culture could simply not be unbound from their attraction to/longing for certain mental states without studying and exhausting them first, seeing for themselves that these states are like an entire other universe(s), then able to discover that even their astounding novelties are not causing
the lasting end of dukkha.
So, I'm looking at the
Latukikopama Sutta: The Quail Simile (MN 66, page 551-559, Bhikkhu Bodhi, The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha, Wisdom Publications) (italics added):
With the abandoning of pleasure & pain — as with the earlier disappearance of elation & distress — he enters & remains in the fourth jhana: purity of equanimity & mindfulness, neither pleasure nor pain. This is called renunciation-pleasure, seclusion-pleasure, calm-pleasure, self-awakening-pleasure.
And of this pleasure I say that it is to be cultivated, to be developed, to be pursued, that it is not to be feared.And where the perturbations of each jhana (1-3) are indentified until fourth jhana (my italics again):
"There is the case where a monk, with the abandoning of pleasure & pain — as with the earlier disappearance of elation & distress —
enters & remains in the fourth jhana: purity of equanimity & mindfulness, neither pleasure nor pain. Now that, I tell you, comes under the imperturbable.[2]
But that even this unperturbable state is to be abandoned and transcended (as with jhana 1-3):
"There is the case where a monk...enters & remains in the fourth jhana... That is its transcending. But that, too, I tell you, isn't enough. Abandon it, I tell you. Transcend it, I tell you. And what is its transcending?
So, all the jhana are encouraged (for whatever reason, be they Gotama's own jhana or be they jhana well-known at the time (e.g., that Gotama would have learned from Alara Kalama/Uddaka Ramaputta), categorized into a simple 4-level organization with the arupa developments in fourth.
Cessation is the final jhana-transcendence.Buddha responds to Udayin's questions asking what jhana surmounts the preceding jhana in order that one may surmount that and move on (to the next mental-object attraction for which
one has developed a longing perhaps without even realizing they are in a cycle dependent on
novel mental objects)...ending finally with (page 559, my bod emphasis)
"And what surmounts [the base-of-neither-perception-nor-non-perception]? (...) by completely surmounting the base of neither-perception-nor-non-perception, a bhikkhu enters upon and abides in the cessation of perception and feeling (here Bhante has a footnote, 681, page 1271). That surmounts it. Thus I speak of abandoning even the base of neither-perception-nor-non-perception. Do you see, Udayin, any fetter, small or great, of whose abandoning I do not speak?"So, total cessation (no feelings nor perception) surmounts the utmost jhana product.
So, Gotama gives away the "meditation shop" freely; he removes meditation from all mystique and profiteering...provides the whole jhana training up to the cessation of feelings and perception (something akin to unconsciousness), so that one can train and never become dependent on a guru nor a mental state ("mental-object") nor any higher promise, and he is candid about the unanswerables of what happens after death (for one who has no kama, again, an issue that would need cultural resolution in that time) (
Vacchagotta a sutta also found in the
Bieyi za ahan jing, although any translator notes are totally unknown to me; Bhikkhu Analayo's work on this is having some publisher issues with this distribution. The link I included here is just to provide a link to person's interested in the sanskrit texts that went to China. Their comparison with Pali and Tibetan texts helps to see where aspects of the traditions' canons begin to diverge)
In removing meditation from mystique and costly guru dependence and the longing of special states Gotama accelerates practioners through what they culturally may think they need to do to be "awake"
(or, more likely to my mind, what we humanly actually perceive ourselves go through in A/P-like experiences such as OOBE and which experiences haunt a bit with longing questions, thus creating another source of craving and mental perseveration which legitimately require a deep study in order to be released of the longing associated with such events) and this allows practitioners to more quickly get to sati - and nibbana (here and now unbinding). This transparency around meditation allowed every simple human being to be free on the basis of their own direct investigation of themselves, the foundation of own body, the foundation of own feelings, the foundation of own mind, and the foundation of own aggregates (known to others at the time), just a human applying intelligence and effort to "What am I?".
At the end of the day, he hides nothing and the end result does not station one's experience in the cessation, it does not station one within a jhana: he repeats that one becomes unbound, coming to know things as there are,
nibbana being unbound from mental fabrication and craving, consciousness becoming willingly, completely "'unstationed' (appattithita)" "due to the complete absence of craving" (footnote 53, page 261, Bhikkhu Anālayo, citing Samyutta Nikaya II 103)(see also B. Peter Harvey's book
The Selfless Mind)
So, I get the impression that as I had to exhaust my interest in
the spellbinding and paralyzing gratifications within the knowledges of suffering (years), and before that I had to exhaust my interest in re-experiencing that
first amazing A/P event, then after knowledges of suffering there was the need to know directly the unsatisfactoriness of equanimity, and there is now the point of studying jhana and trying to avoid grasping it, in order to train in it and know its impermanence.
In some ways (maybe all ways) the sati in actualism is far better than jhana because it is always there, always leading one to just know actuality and to know it receptively. Perhaps only the gross or subtle mental lingering "want more of something special/other wordly/novel" causes the pursuit of jhana and therefore the need to train in it and personally discover that it, too, has fabricated nature. That even this novelty of mental-objects also is not finally satisfying.
So, jhana --- just as disgust served to exhaust the dark night mental perseverations and propelling one towards equanimity through the desire for deliverance --- jhana propels one to see directly for themselves that all mental states culminate in just cessation. My brief experience with
this a cessation (and people can certainly dispute that I had a cessation experience after which the khandhas seemed to arise progressively) was sort of a bland, "guh?", and I definitely noticed a quickly responding attraction, like a fish to a shiny lure, to the consciousness khandha when it re-arose, adding brightness. This consciousness attraction gave me a cautious feeling at the time -- I could feel the mental attraction for it, but I had not yet learned to know the needy pull of craving every time it arises. That needy attraction to the consciousness khandha is well-described as
a magic show of the mind in the Kalakarama Sutta -- that even without a guru, one can spend a long time in the longing for mental novelties.
Not that these mental states are bad either: when Aggi-Vacchagotta attains to arahatship his siddhis develop and Gotama seems to commend his condition: " (...) The bhikkhu Vacchagotta has attained the threefold true knowledge and has great supernormal power and might (...)" Thus, the exhortation to orient oneself wholesomely and to live wholesomely, to cultivate wholesomeness. Also,
Gotama seems to have chosen for himself chose to go through the jhanas immediately before death (perhaps to confirm in the final moment there was no wanting for any of the states, that they were indeed unbound or to have a last look?):
Then the Blessed One, emerging from the cessation of perception & feeling, entered the dimension of neither perception nor non-perception. Emerging from that, he entered the dimension of nothingness... the dimension of the infinitude of consciousness... the dimension of the infinitude of space... the fourth jhana... the third... the second... the first jhana. Emerging from the first jhana he entered the second... the third... the fourth jhana. Emerging from the fourth jhana, he immediately was totally Unbound.
Therefore, neither wanting jhana nor not wanting jhana is desirable. A person is making every training effort to become simply aware of craving and
then unbind from craving and cease creating craving through delusional fabrication. In MN 125, Dantabhumi Sutta (page 995, Bhikku Bodhi's translation of the Middle Length discourses, Wisdom Publications, 1995), Aggivessana is --- after progress
ive training --- exhorted to see "mind-objects as mind objects"[1]
One choses this exploration willingly out of disgust for what arises from craven behaviour and the positive effect one experiences by training in receptivity, piti, sukkha, increasingly removing oneself from causing harm through compulsive actionThe practices nurse the mind and personhood along in a sensible training from gross to subtle pleasures, training one away from unwholesome cravings by skillful, pleasant means) until one is released, independent, "Nibbana and the Path coalesce just as the Ganga and Yamuna rivers coalesce***" (footnote 11, page 273, Bhikkhu Anālayo citing Dīgha Nikāya II, 223 in his book
Satipatthana: The Direct Path to Realization) where
nibbana is literally "unbinding" (from all craving and fabrication), and "here and now" is said to be also Buddha's definition (Bhikkhu Anālayo cites Anguttara Nikaya V 64 as providing Buddha's definition of nibbana "here and now", however, Bhikkhu Bodhi's full english translation doesn't arrive until later this summer, so I cannot excerpt this). Consciousness becomes "unstationed" (appattithita) anywhere due to the complete absence of craving (footnote 53, page 261, Bhikkhu Anālayo, citing Samyutta Nikaya II 103)(see also B. Peter Harvey's book
The Selfless Mind)
One could have a "WTF??" moment and wonder, "all this training to realize it's just to show at every level of novelty-craving, there is no satisfaction and things are just as they are?" But, this cannot be concluded
(in my experience, anyway). One is wholly and wholesomely transformed by going through the training. A person can get calf implants, but that does not make them a marathon finisher nor give them that freedom of mind, born of personal, wholesome effort and candid, clear study.
___________
***These rivers (rivers in general) are very familiar, useful metaphors in Vedic tradition and such analogies pervade the yogas --- illustrating with the catastrophic nature of floods and droughts, how one's thoughts and actions, one's vital nadis (srotas), need also to be studied and skillfully (res)trained.
[1] Bhikkhu Bodhi explains his translation "mind-objects" on the basis the Burmese-script Buddhasasana Samiti edition of the Majjhima Nikaya and on the Buddhist Publication Society of Kandy, Sri Lanka; he also cites the Chinese translation of the Sanskrit counterpart to the MN (the Madhyama-āgama) mentions all four jhanas here.
[lots of wee edits: again bound by impatience]