I'm not sure exactly where I first came across the name of Leigh Brasington. He's a meditation teacher who has specialized in teaching the concentration states called jhanas. You can get a sense of his no non-sense style from his geocities era website. His emphasis is on simplicity and functionality. His book, Right Concentration: A Practical Guide to the Jhanas is made in this same mold (though with more attractive and up to date formatting). The emphasis throughout is on the practical part. This makes it an exceedingly and useful meditation book if you have a dedicated practice, and pretty much useless if you don't. It's a great beginner's guide to the jhanas, but these are already a relatively advanced topic. Accordingly, for the rest of this review, I'm just going to completely geek out.
The book is divided into two sections. In the first, he gives detailed instructions for finding each of the first four "material" jhanas (1-4) once you have established access concentration. Since he specializes in teaching the jhanas at retreats, I have to assume that these instructions are much the same as you would get as an introduction in that setting; certainly, they are similar to this public lecture. Alongside these instructions, he reviews the descriptions of each jhana given in the Pali suttas, and the simile associated with each. He also discusses how to find the four "immaterial" jhanas (5-8), though with a bit less detail than he gives for the first four.
The second section is a comparative textual analysis of the description of the jhanas in the suttas and the (historically) much later Visuddhimagga. It is really aimed at academics and other teachers who are deeply versed in buddhist literature, and it's super heavy on the Pali. The whole point of this section is to convince you that his version of the jhanas are very close to what the Buddha himself actually taught. He is responding to the accusation that he teaches a "lite" version of the jhanas. Apparently the version in the Visuddhimagga requires concentration levels that only a few full time monastics are likely to experience. Brasington doesn't deny the existence of these "heavy" jhanas, he just wants to defend his interpretation as being true to the Buddha's teaching, in addition to being a much more practical technique for the householder. I'm not really qualified to comment on the question, but his exposition seemed convincing to me. Generally, I'd say that what I've read of the Buddha suggests he was a deeply practical dude, so it seems unlikely that he spent a lot of time discussing states he knew only a few folks would ever experience. I take the basic premise to be that Enlightenment is for everyone.
I am, it turns out, qualified to comment on the instructions he gives in the first part. Because I've tried them. And they work. They're actually remarkably simple, though that doesn't necessarily mean they're always easy to execute. Let me quickly cover the whole sequence of instructions, including the similes I find to be such a useful aid.
0) Access Concentration. He actually devotes an appendix to various methods of establishing access concentration, because without it there's not much point in reading his book. I just use the breath. Since my first encounter with meditation was a 10 day Goenka retreat, I still sometimes follow his body-scanning method. Brasington actually mentions a recording of his teacher, Ayya Khema doing a guided version of the technique that might be cool to try out. Lately, however, I've found the whole nostrils --> slow scan --> fast scan sequence I learned to be a bit redundant, so now I mostly just carefully follow my breath for a bit till I don't really have to make much conscious effort to stay with it anymore.
1) First Jhana. The defining characteristic of the first jhana is glee or rapture. As in stupid grin, just scored a date, type glee. This is the translation he proposes for the Pali word "piti". To get this feeling to arise once you're in access concentration, you just shift the focus of your attention from the breath (or whatever object you use) to some pleasurable sensation in your body. That's it. You just replace one object with another. Focus intently on the pleasurable sensation -- I find it my belly sometimes, in my throat at others, occasionally in my hands -- with the same steadiness that you used to focus on the breath. After a moment, the pleasure sort of spontaneously blooms and spreads and suddenly you go up like a roman candle and are experiencing this intense face-breaking grin. Welcome to the first jhana. It takes a little practice to hang out in this state because at first it can be so gleeful that it just doesn't feel sustainable. Brasington helpfully explains that there's a volume knob, though it can be tricky to find and manipulate without shutting things down entirely. The simile given in the suttas is the feeling of being completely covered in a frothy soap; more or less what we would today call a bubble bath. This effervescence is a great image.
2) Second Jhana. For the second jhana, you let go of the intensity of the glee that the first jhana produced and get focused on the more subtle happy sensation that accompanied it. Brasington calls this a foreground-background switch. Practically speaking all that seems to be required for this is to take a deep breath and calm down a bit, while shifting your attention to the happy happy joy joy you're feeling after all that glee. The simile for this one is a deep spring of cool water that constantly refills from below. I tend to imagine one of those fountains where the flow has been adjusted so that it continues to just barely overflow all the time. This is a pretty cool place to hang out, just staying focused on the happiness continually welling up from inside you.
3) Third Jhana. To get to third jhana you take another deep breath and completely let go of the bubbly glee that was still in the background of the second jhana. This is again another calming step that brings down the energy level, and moves the focus to a point lower in the body (the higher the number the "deeper" you go). The objects shift from the happiness of the second jhana to a more post-orgasmic general contentment. Everything is copacetic. The Buddha's simile asks us to imagine a lotus flower floating just under the surface of a pond.
4) Fourth Jhana. Just let yourself sink to the bottom of the pond. The fourth jhana is all about the feeling of perfect equanimity, a state so still that it requires nothing of you. The sense of sinking to the bottom is so palpable that I find myself slumping over, and sometimes even see a film image of the the surface of some water from far below it. Everything gets very quiet. Even very light breathing feels like a gargantuan experience. The simile describes the view of someone who lies covered by a white sheet from head to toe. I take it this is supposed to describe the diffused white light nimitta of deep concentration. While the sinking feeling does seem to be associated by a perceptible visual lightening, I can't say that this image works as well for me as the bottom of a pool image.
Since I only sit for an hour a day, I've explored 1 and 2 fairly consistently and 3 and 4 more occasionally. I think I even found 5 once, for all of 30 seconds or so. It can take a while to get still enough to find these states, even when you already have some idea of where they are on the map of your own experience.
A fair question would now be, "what's the point of all this?" Brasington is very clear about it -- the jhanas have no importance at all in their own right. They are just some weird hallucinatory states that lots of human brains seem to share when they try to get very focused. The only reason to experiment with them is to develop them as a tool to improve your concentration. He calls them "concentration multipliers". The basic pattern is pretty clear. Each new level substitutes in a more subtle, more slippery, and more abstract, object of meditation for the last. So you're basically teaching yourself to become as focused on more and more abstract experiences as you were on the very concrete experience of the feeling of your breath. This is meant to come in handy when your trying to experience impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and not-self as the three characteristics of all your experience during your insight practice.
The goal of vipassana is often stated as "seeing reality as it is", that it, as being defined by the three characteristics. As if we were supposed to gradually discriminate experience into finer and finer units until we reach its atoms, and then notice that all atoms follow the same "laws" of impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and not-self. We can discuss my reservations about this formulation some other time. One thing to notice about it immediately though, is that these characteristics of reality are highly abstract. I'm hardly arguing one can't have a direct experience of an abstraction. After all, I take great pleasure in philosophy, and what else would that be? I'm simply saying that while the jhanas may seem pointlessly esoteric at first, perhaps they become less so when viewed as tools to progressively develop this capacity for feeling an abstraction. And it's exactly that capacity which seems to be at the core of insight meditation.
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