Getting more than I bargained for: my discovery of pīti and sukha

Using a mindful body-scan

I discovered one way of developing the experience of piti quite by accident when I was working on a mindfulness exercise.

Some years ago I began to practise a body scan as a stand-alone exercise. All I knew was that some meditators practised a mindful body scan, and I thought I'd try it. I found it was very effective in keeping my mind occupied with what it was doing. It was much more difficult for distractions or wandering thoughts to arise. I found it took quite a lot of effort to do the scan, and so I mostly reserved it for those days when I was more than usually distracted. If walking meditation failed to quieten my mind, this body scan would do it.

I didn't just move around the body though. Knowing that mindfulness is a broadly focussed awareness, I worked by expanding my awareness from one small area of my body into larger and larger areas until I could embrace the whole of the body with awareness. As my focus came to include one new area of the body after another I noticed sensations arising in many of these areas.

At first I thought I was simply becoming aware of existing sensations I had not noticed before. Gradually I came to see that these were new sensations springing up under my awareness. Usually they appeared in the new part of the area I was focussing on. Sometimes they appeared in places that had already been included. And sometimes they sprung up in the area I intended to incorporate next. These were new physical sensations, and they came into being as I brought awareness to one area after another.

Eureka!

Then one day I had a eureka moment. As I steadily expanded my awareness around the body I remembered the illustration of the bath attendant skilfully kneading the bathing ball. He was trying to add just enough water to the bathing powder so that the whole of it was fully wetted, yet without becoming so wet that it fell apart. I was trying to hold together my awareness of each part of the body, so that I could be aware of each new area, yet without losing awareness of previous areas. This took skill, effort and persistence, and I felt it was analogous to the skill and effort of the bathing attendant.

Slowly I began to realise that the growing mass of tingling sensations I was conjuring up was what the ancient texts called pīti. Was this body scan exercise the first stage of Jhāna? If so, it would represent a very different understanding of "first jhāna" from what has existed in Theravāda Buddhism since before Buddha-ghosa's time. Yet my experience seemed to be fully consistent with the Four Stages of Jhāna Text and the Four Illustrations of Jhāna Text. That meant it was consistent with what the early Buddhist discourses say about Jhāna practice.

It was "born" of seclusion

The enhanced body-sensitivity I experienced was "born" of seclusion, and was accompanied by intention and attention. I had gone to my quiet place, where I could practise without interruption. In that place I was attempting to set aside all the distracting thoughts that were troubling me, including wants or desires, fear or anger, and all the other manifestations of my internal reactivity. I was trying to separate myself from "sensory pleasures and harmful qualities of mind" and develop mindfulness. The body scan exercise was my way of letting go of such things.

It involved much intention and attention

As I engaged with the body scan I kept enlarging my awareness to include one new area of the body after another. To do this I kept forming an intention to expand awareness into the next part of the body, and then sought to hold my attention on that next place, along with the whole area already included in the scan. Was this what was meant by those two words in the text which I've translated as 'intention' and 'attention'?

What those two words mean

Other translators give "accompanied by applied and sustained thought",^Footnote 1 "accompanied by directed thought and evaluation",^Footnote 2 and "while placing the mind and keeping it connected".^Footnote 3 All of these translations are trying to bring out the distinction between two similar words in the original text, vitakka and vicāra, both of which have something to do with thinking.

One writer explains that difference by saying vitakka is "the initial application of attention, the mind's capacity to aim, direct and apply attention to objects it perceives", and vicāra is "the sustaining function that accompanies the initial application … it anchors attention in the present moment … or yokes the mind to the object".^Footnote 4

How we form intentions and sustain attention in the body-scan

My own expression, "with (or without) intention and attention" is intended to reflect these understandings. If we use the language of other translators we may say that the body scan begins by "placing the mind", "applying thought" or "directing thought" towards one part of the body, for example the face. This is the "initial application of attention". In other words, we begin by forming an intention, choosing to direct attention towards the face.

Having formed that intention we then continue by "keeping [the mind] connected" to the face with "sustained thought" involving "evaluation" of what is detected on the face. This is the "sustaining function" which "anchors attention in the present moment" and "yokes the mind to the object". In other words, our intention to focus on the face is followed by sustaining our attention just there.

This sustained attention continues until we create a new and larger intention, for example to direct attention to "the face and both sides of the head". With that new intention we then sustain our attention on this larger area of the body. That doesn't mean thinking about the area, it means continuing to be aware of that area and whatever sensations may arise in it.

This was not a state of absorption

The four stages of jhāna have been widely misunderstood, so I need to say clearly that what I experienced was not the deep state of absorption which the Theravāda tradition, and most academic authors, understand as "jhāna". For example, one modern meditation teacher writes,

"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. When students report that they have attained jhāna, I expect that absorption would easily be repeated sitting after sitting, again and again …".^Footnote 5

I do not find this kind of absorption, without the intrusion of any thought, sound or sensation, in the Jhāna Text, in the Jhāna Illustrations, or in the Sixteen Steps of Anapana practice. Nor did the author of that passage develop her understanding from those early sources, but from lists of "jhāna factors" found in the later Abhi-dharma writings, from the much later writings of Buddha-ghosa, and from teachers in the modern Theravāda tradition.

I was still able to think, though my mind was no longer overpowered by reactive thoughts or feelings. I was still able to hear the sounds in my environment, and to feel sensations of warmth or coldness, of touch and pressure. I was not detached from reality.

This is an important distinction. Nothing in the two Jhāna texts we've read, nor anything in the Anapana steps suggests we should enter a state of absorption. On the contrary, in Anapana practice every step, including the experiences of pīti and sukha, is accompanied by the knowledge of each in-breath and each out-breath. We never lose that bigger awareness.

A warning

The mindfulness teacher Thich Nhat Hanh warns against states of absorption (which he calls "concentrations"), states that he believed the Buddha once practised but then rejected because they don't lead to liberation from suffering, yet which later found their way back into the Buddhist movement. He wrote,

"There are also states of concentration that encourage the practitioner to escape from the complexities of suffering and existence, rather than face them directly in order to transform them … The results of these concentrations are to hide reality from the practitioner." ^Footnote 6

How these states of absorption returned to Buddhism, and how that changed the way all four stages of jhāna were understood we'll leave aside for now, but that will be explored in a page in the Understanding part of this website. [Page not written yet]

How I understand Steps 5 and 6 of Anapana

My claim is that the body-scan exercise is itself the first stage of Jhāna, a preparatory stage in which pīti and sukha are experienced in a partial way as they are built up, a preparation for the later stages of jhāna. When we have scanned the whole body these experiences become self-sustaining. The intentional scanning practice can then cease, but the experiences continue as long as the whole-body experience and stillness of Steps 3 and 4 continue. That is the second stage of Jhāna, in which we enjoy "an inner tranquility of mind, a state of integration" with no loss of awareness, but ready to face our reactivity and how it causes us to suffer. It's important to give enough time to experience Step 6 fully, for that is what will prepare us for Step 7.

So Step 5 is equivalent to the first stage of Jhāna. At that step we develop the experience of pīti. Then Step 6 may be seen as equivalent to the second stage of Jhāna. We relax as we finish the scanning exercise, but we continue to experience both pīti and sukha, or, if you like, pīti-sukha.

Although the Anapana steps don't mention the complexities of the texts which describe of Jhāna practice, they do parallel the stages of Jhāna, and those parallels can be helpful when we seek to know how to practise the Anapana steps.

Footnotes

• 1. Ñāṇamoli and Bodhi 2015 [1995]: The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha, Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications.
• 2. Bh. Ṭhānissaro, dhammatalks.org.
• 3. Bh. Sugato, suttacentral.net
• 4. Shailer Catherine 2011: Wisdom Wide and Deep, Somerville, MA: Wisdom, p. 63f.
• 5. Shailer Catherine 2011: Wisdom Wide and Deep, Somerville, MA: Wisdom, p. 75f.
• 6. Thich Nhat Hanh 2006 [1990]: Transformation and Healing, Sutra on the Four Establishments of Mindfulness, Berkeley CA: Parallax Press, p. 42.