Insight Journal: Your new book, Right Concentration: A Practical Guide to the Jhānas, came out this October. Can you tell us a little about it? Leigh Brasington: The first part is basically the instructions I give during a retreat. I start out by saying, “You can't learn the jhānas from a book, but if you want to learn the jhānas from a book, here's the best that I can do.” There’s an introduction to what the jhānas are, as well as a bit about the necessary prerequisites like sīla, guarding … [Read more...]
Long Retreats, Selfie Sticks, and the Five Faculties
IJ: Maybe we can start by talking about your own practice. Do you find that practice changes much from day to day, week to week, or month to month? WN: There’s some variation. Since I did a retreat a few years ago with Pa Auk Sayadaw, that great concentration master, I often include periods of jhāna practice, where I work directly with the breath and with material jhānas, and perhaps go into mettā from there. IJ: You participated in that somewhat famous 4-month retreat with Pa … [Read more...]
Mettā: What It Is, What It Isn’t
Insight Journal: How has your relationship to mettā changed over the years? Shaila Catherine: When I was first introduced to meditation in the 1980s, the classic model was a 10-day meditation retreat emphasizing mindfulness. At some point during each retreat there would be a guided mettā meditation. And I have to admit that at first I hated it. IJ: Why did you hate it? SC: I really liked the silence of mindfulness practice, and all the phrases felt disruptive. It was hard enough for me … [Read more...]
One Tool Among Many: The Place of Vipassana in Buddhist Practice
What exactly is vipassanā? Almost any book on early Buddhist meditation will tell you that the Buddha taught two types of meditation: samatha and vipassanā. Samatha, which means tranquility, is said to he a method fostering strong states of mental absorption, called jhāna. Vipassanā—literally "clear-seeing," but more often translated as insight meditation—is said to be a method using a modicum of tranquility to foster moment-to-moment mindfulness of the inconstancy of events as they are … [Read more...]
Instructions for Entering Jhāna
These instructions have been taken from a nine-day retreat offered by Leigh Brasington at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies in April of 2002. The Pali word jhāna (Sanskrit dhyāna) is sometimes simply translated as "meditation," but more accurately refers to an "absorption" into a very focused, very stable state of concentration. In the classical tradition there are several stages of jhāna, each one more focused than the previous. Some people will experience some of the jhānas on this … [Read more...]
Sharpening Mañjuśrī’s Sword
Leigh Brasington has been practicing meditation since 1985 and is the senior American student of the late Ven. Ayya Khema. Leigh began assisting Ven. Ayya Khema in 1994, and was authorized to teach in 1997. He teaches in Europe and North America. Leigh, you are a teacher perhaps best known for guiding people through an exploration of the jhānas, stages of concentration meditation known as “absorptions.” But this is not all you do, am I right? For my day job I’m a software engineer. I live … [Read more...]
Food for Awakening: The Role of Appropriate Action
The Myth of Bare Attention The Buddha never used the word for “bare attention” in his meditation instructions. That’s because he realized that attention never occurs in a bare, pure or unconditioned form. It’s always colored by views and perceptions—the labels you tend to give to events—and by intentions: your choice of what to attend to and your purpose in being attentive. If you don’t understand the conditioned nature of even simple acts of attention, you might assume that a moment of … [Read more...]
Attached to Nothing
This is an archaic poem in the Sutta Nipāta, and the language is thus rather compressed. Existing translations vary widely, and this is my best attempt to make sense of the verses while matching the traditional meter’s eight syllables per line. I think Posāla is a yogi of the old school, skilled in attaining formless states of consciousness through intensive concentration practice, including the seventh of the eight stations of consciousness known as “the sphere of nothingness.” This is a … [Read more...]
Outline of Abhidhamma
The Abhidhamma is a body of literature that emerged shortly after the lifetime of the Buddha, comprising the third of the “three baskets” (Tipitaka) of the early Buddhist canon. The word also refers broadly to a body of thought whose roots are in the psychological teachings and meditation practices of the suttas (the discourses) and whose branches reach far into the mature philosophical discussions of the Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna traditions. The Abhidhamma is essentially an attempt to … [Read more...]
The Path of Concentration and Mindfulness
This article is adapted from a workshop offered at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies, February 23-25,1996 by Thanissaro Bhikkhu, Abbot of Metta Forest Monastery, San Diego County, California. Many people tell us that the Buddha taught two different types of meditation: mindfulness meditation and concentration meditation. Mindfulness meditation, they say, is the direct path, while concentration practice is the scenic route that you take at your own risk because it's very easy to get … [Read more...]