Jhāna meditation – "consuming" our reactivity
Jhāna meditation, and its connection with "nirvāna"
The significance of the two words used in Steps 5 and 6, pīti and sukha, is that they indicate the nature of this second phase of Anapana practice. Taken together, they make it clear that with these two steps we are beginning a form of meditation usually called "Jhāna meditation". This is still a mindfulness practice, a more intense form of mindfulness of the body.
You may wonder what this new Pāli word, jhāna, means. By the way, I'm sorry to introduce these three Pāli words as we explore the Anapana steps. Without them we really can't understand what the Anapana practice is about, and we're just getting to the heart of it.
"Jhāna" gets its name from the verb "jhāyati" which means both "to meditate" and "to burn, be on fire, be consumed". Footnote 1 When fuel is burned—whether it's the wood on a fire, or the oil in a lamp—that fuel is eventually used up. It's consumed. That's why I'm calling it, "consuming" meditation. Now let's ask what another word means, one you already know and which is very similar to jhāna. What does nirvāna mean? It means "the ceasing to burn, going out". Footnote 2 These two ideas are closely linked. When fuel is consumed, the fire eventually goes out.
This connection between these two ideas was clearly important to the early Buddhists. There's a brief couplet that is quoted four times in one of their collections of texts, the Saṃyutta Nikāya, which goes,
Just as an oil lamp depends on both oil and wick that it may burn,
when oil or wick come to an end, left without sustenance, it goes out. Footnote 3
There is one conclusion we can draw from all of this, though we may not quite understand it yet. The practice of Jhāna meditation is what leads directly to a state which the early Buddhists called "nirvana". And if the second phase of Anapana practice is also a form of Jhāna meditation, then it too leads to the same state. But what is nirvana, apart from the "going out" of some fire or flame, and where is it that this new phase of Anapana practice leads us?
Where the second phase of Anapana practice takes us
Before we begin to practise Step 5, we need to look ahead to see where it will take us. It leads most directly to Step 6 and the experience of sukha, "well-being". This is a holistic sense of ease or comfort that affects the body, the feelings, and the mind. It's an essential part of the unusual and often misunderstood path the Buddha is said to have taken, and which Anapana practice is based upon.
Looking further ahead, Steps 5 and 6 lead to the next two steps, 7 and 8.
Step 7. One trains oneself, "Experiencing reactive movements of heart-and-mind I'll breathe in;"
one trains oneself, "Experiencing reactive movements of heart-and-mind I'll breathe out."
Step 8. One trains oneself, "Stilling reactive movements of heart-and-mind I'll breathe in;"
one trains oneself, "Stilling reactive movements of heart-and-mind I'll breathe out."
This really is the heart of the Anapana practice, the stilling of our reactivity.
The stilling of our reactivity
As the page on human reactivity explained, reactive movements are the effect of what the texts call our conditioning. Each of us is conditioned by all the experiences we've passed through in life. As a result we've developed different responses to new experiences. There are issues in all our lives which continue to affect us. We may find that troubling issues arise as we sit quietly in meditation. Many of the distractions and wandering thoughts will be connected with some of these issues.
When we come to Step 7, it will be time to engage with some of those issues. They may cause our reactivity to arise, and when they do, Step 7 asks us to sit with that reactivity and to experience it. That may sound like an unpleasant and difficult thing to do, even a dangerous thing. Often we have deliberately put to one side painful issues. They are too hard for us. But the order of these Anapana steps is important. What we cannot face, in an ordinary, untrained state of mind, we can not only face but embrace once we've worked through Steps 5 and 6.
The well-being of Step 6 is both our defence, but also our tool with which to transform whatever issues give rise to our reactivity: to our fears, our regrets, our hurts, our anger, our disappointments, as well as our unreasonable desires and greed. Once we see those issues in the light of our fully-developed mindfulness, and protected by our well-being, they may well appear rather different to us. That is what will enable us to move into Step 8 and bring that reactivity to stillness.
Jhāna meditation, nirvana and the stilling of our reactivity
Now I think we're in a position to tie all these ideas together. Jhāna is what consumes whatever fuels our reactivity. When the fuel has been consumed, the flame of our reactivity simply goes out for lack of anything else in life to create that reactivity. What is the non-reactive state or condition of life? The going out of that fire is what was called "nirvana". Now let's spell out the conclusion we came to before, but with this added understanding. The practice of Jhāna meditation is what leads directly to a state of non-reactivity, which the early Buddhists called "nirvana".
Jhāna practice "consumes" our old habits, our old reactions to life, our old ways of seeing things. In the end, whatever life may throw at us in future, we find we can accept with equanimity. We can take life as it come, without the old reactivity. That is what's called nirvana. It doesn't mean life will never hold problems or difficulties for us. What it means is that we'll be able to face those problems and deal with the difficulties as they arise.
The page on Nirvana in the Background section of this website gives a number of the early Buddhist texts which show how it was understood at the time when the Sixteen Steps text was composed. It was a psychological state, one free from greed, anger or delusion—or as we might say, free from reactivity. It was an unconditioned state, a state of mind free from our prior conditioning. And the way to this unconditioned state in which we are free from our old reactivity, is mindfulness of the body. So two of the texts there closes by encouraging the hearers to practise jhāna.
Three paths to the same conclusion
On this page we've worked with the meaning of the two words jhāna and nirvāna. In the earlier page, Arriving at Step 5 we looked briefly at the earliest traditions of how the Buddha created Jhāna practice and how it led him to the liberation he had been looking for, nirvana. On the Nirvana page, in the Understanding section, we can read several short suttas from the early Buddhist texts, which point us to the same conclusion. Nirvana is a state free from reactivity, which we can develop through mindfulness of the body, or Jhāna. All three approaches complement each other and all lead to the same conclusion.
A much misunderstood path
Alas, jhāna meditation is no longer what it was at the beginning of the Buddhist movement. The Buddhist understanding of jhāna has changed. For how this has happened, see the page "How Jhāna practice has changed" [not yet written] in the Background part of this website.
But as we work with Step 5, we can recover what "Jhāna practice" once was, and we can practise it anew. The next page on Step 5, What this "Consuming" meditation is like, will give us some practical insights and show us what is involved in practising it. Since Jhāna is so misunderstood today, it may be better if I refer to it with an English name from now on. Perhaps the most suitable name for what we'll be practising in the Second Phase of Anapana is "Consuming" meditation, the meditation that "devours" our reactivity.
Footnotes
1. Dictionary of Pāli, entries on jhāyati I and on jhāyati II
2. Dictionary of Pāli, entry on nibbāna
3. This couplet is found in SN 22.8, SN 36.7, SN 36.8, SN 54.8. The words "that it may burn" are a form of the verb "jhāyati", and the words "it goes out" are an identical form of the verb "nibbāyati", the verb from which nibbāna (the Pāli version of the word we know better as "nirvana") gets its name.