The Five Jhāna Masteries

In a recent teaching in the Pragmatic Dharma Sangha, Vince Horn walks through the five classical jhāna masteries from the Visuddhimagga — adverting, entering, abiding, exiting, and reflecting — weaving in personal stories from his training with Kenneth Folk and Daniel Ingram to show how these ancient skills map onto the lived experience of concentration practice.

Vince: So today we’re going to be exploring the five jhāna masteries. This is a teaching which, as I understand it, comes out of a text called the Visuddhimagga. So this is part of the commentary tradition of Early Buddhism. A thousand years after the Buddha was alive, people had been practicing this stuff for quite a long time.

They came up with these models and maps to describe what the Buddha was talking about when he talked about jhāna. Now, the Buddha never said all of these things. This isn’t a list from the Buddha. Rather, it’s a useful way of looking at what it is that we’re doing when we train in jhāna absorption meditation, and what the different skills involved are. I’m going to go over these different jhāna masteries and then also kind of weave in some stories of my own experience in doing this training.

The first of the jhāna masteries that we’ll talk about is called adverting. Now, this is a funny word because we don’t usually use it in English very often, but if you think about it, the opposite of to advert is to avert. So if you think about it — if you avert your eyes from something, you’re looking away. Advert is the opposite. You’re looking toward something. So we’ll start with adverting. If we want to learn how to train in jhāna, we have to be able to point our mind in the direction of the jhāna state. If you think about it, if you want to call someone, you have to know their phone number before you can reach out to them.

Likewise, you have to know the sort of jhānic address of the state you’re inclining toward. And you have to advert toward that state to call it up and to be able to see that it’s present. When we advert to the state, in a way it does emerge. It’s just that we’re not in it yet. So in a way, this connects with access concentration. Adverting is very important. We first have to call up the jhāna, whichever jhāna state it is that we’re working with, and you could say in a sense that mastery with adverting is developed gradually as you learn each of the jhānas and you know where they live, you know their address, you can advert to them — until you know where all of them live, or all the states that you’re trying to access, where they abide.

And you have enough of a recollection to do that. You can’t really advert to them if it’s just sort of random and happenstance that you’ll end up in the jhāna. Maybe someone guides you into it or you just randomly pop into it. But there’s not a sense of mastery yet because you can’t really call it up.

Another metaphor I’d like to introduce here that I found helpful is the elevator metaphor. So in practicing jhāna, adverting is like pressing the button on the floor you want to go to. And then of course the elevator starts working in your favor. Hopefully it’s working. It comes down, the door opens, and when the door opens — to me, that is the adverting.

You’ve called it up and now you see that it’s there. The natural thing next, right, is to enter into the jhāna in the same way that you’d enter into the elevator. So when we enter the jhāna, we are developing the ability to really, fully and smoothly and quickly gather our full attention into the state.

So this is the move from calling it up to going in, and now we’re absorbed. This is properly what you could call absorption. So we’ve entered the state. Now once we’ve entered the state, there’s another — it seems obvious in retrospect to say this, but there’s another thing we have to do, which is we have to learn how to abide in the state.

We’ve got to learn how to actually maintain this sort of uninterrupted, sustained, unwavering absorption without disturbance. Because if we can enter into the state, but then the second we hear a sound it pulls us completely out, or the second we have a stray thought it just yanks us out of the state — then we haven’t quite learned how to really be absorbed. This makes sense, right? It’s pretty logical.

I think here it’s also maybe useful to note that sometimes when we think about jhānic mastery, this is the only thing we’re thinking about — abiding in the state. We think, okay, the measure of my jhānic ability is how long I can be in the state, or maybe how complete it is. Because when we’re abiding in the state, it might be more or less immersive. If it’s really not that immersive, it’s a very light experience of the state — a very small amount of strawberry concentrate in a large glass of water versus the strawberry puree. If it’s that kind of thing, then well, we can abide there, but it’s not going to feel so solid.

Or you could be in the super hardcore Pa-Auk, exclusive jhāna estate, where you’re in it for like three hours, four hours or whatever it is. Or there’s even crazier stories of yogis who spend days in jhāna states. Let’s assume that those are probably true. There’s some kind of Olympic level people out there that can do these things.

Okay, great. That’s abiding, but that’s not all that there is to the jhāna. There are actually kind of warnings in a lot of these meditative traditions that come out of India — to not abide forever in the jhāna, because then you will die. So this next mastery is quite important.

You want to be able to exit the jhāna. Now, normally for us, we don’t have to do a lot to exit the jhāna because things are grabbing our attention and pulling us out of the jhāna state. But here, this is the intentional mastery of knowing when you want to exit and being able to do that at will.

Whether that is by setting a predetermined amount of time that you want to stay in the jhāna — what’s called an adhiṭṭhāna or resolution — or you actually are in the state, you’re probably not in a completely absorbed state. Say you’re in a light state of jhāna, and then you intentionally make the effort to exit the state.

The reason you have these resolutions, these jhānic resolutions, for the really hard jhāna estate — and especially the hard exclusive jhāna state — is because if you’re really in it, then you’re not going to be able to think consciously about it while you’re in it. So that’s why you have these resolutions, like, “I’m going to come out in an hour.”

To be honest with you, this has never been a really huge issue for me. I’ve never had the issue of being scared I’m going to be locked into jhāna. I know some people that are more like natural concentrators — this is probably more of a useful skill. But often the case is we don’t want to leave the jhāna when we’re in it. It’s not great to leave. So actually exiting is a useful skill also in terms of practicing non-attachment — of letting go of the state, of being willing to relinquish it.

And then finally — and this is very important — upon exiting the jhānic state, we can reflect on it and we can say, okay, what was that like? What did I notice while I was in the state? Were the jhānic factors present — the five jhāna factors? Were the hindrances present? What was I experiencing? Was it predominantly physical? Was it mental? You can kind of take stock in a variety of ways here in the reflection phase to see what was present and how the state was constructed.

This is important because the more we learn the basic patterns of how these states are composed, the easier it is to advert to those states. The more we understand the states, the easier it is to find them again, to locate them and enter them and abide in them. The more this becomes normal, the easier it is.

Now, my training in shamatha jhāna — before I realized that the vipassanā jhānas and the shamatha jhānas were really describing the same territory from two different perspectives — I had trained mostly in vipassanā jhāna. Working through the first four on the path to stream entry in that model. And after some years of doing that, I finally found I had some facility with that, some newfound facility.

At the time I was starting to work with Kenneth Folk. This was in 2006. And he said, “Vince, one thing you can do, since you’re in this phase of practice where you have the ability to move through these different states and you’re not stuck anywhere — this is a great time to learn the jhānas.” And here he was referring to the shamatha jhānas. And he explained to me, he said, “If you’re in New York, which is like where you are now with the vipassanā practice — New Jersey, just across the river, is where the shamatha jhānas live.”

It’s not far. You’re in the same basic location. What he was really telling me is that regardless of what practice or object you used to enter the jhānas, once you’ve done that, you’re not far away from entering these other jhānic states through a different doorway because you’re already inside.

It’s just a question of — you’re inside. Now you’ve got to find the room. That’s like the one you’re looking for. You’ve done the hard work, actually. So we reflect on the jhāna. I said that we can learn the patterns better. When we learn the patterns better, we can advert to these states easier. The more we do that, the more mastery we develop, the easier it becomes.

My training with Kenneth and Daniel — those are the teachers that I really did a lot of jhānic practice with, because they were really interested in that stuff — they had me doing things like, Kenneth taught me to ride the jhānic arc. He said, “Just allow the jhānas to naturally rise, to go up to the highest jhāna that you have access to.”

And then you’ll notice that then they go down back. And I don’t know if this is just scripted — like if he was telling me this and thus it happened — or if this is what normally happens and I was just tuning into it. To be honest with you, it’s an open question for me. But the reality was I was able to do that.

I was able to go up through the eight jhānas and then come back down, all without having to make a particular effort. I just kind of watched it happen. And that was really useful for me, for beginning to become more confident that I knew these patterns and that I could name them. And this isn’t — this is a lot like being able to learn the constellations, the star constellations, right?

Everyone can look up at the stars. But not everyone can name the patterns there in specific ways that others would recognize. So in a way, you could say these jhānic states are like the Buddhist wisdom tradition’s attempt to describe the cartography of the mind — to develop a kind of interstellar cartography of states.

And in that sense I find it helpful because... do constellations really exist? Perception is real. We’re always interpreting our experience, so we can’t avoid using schemas and maps and models. They’re really helpful for the kind of mind that we have, which is constantly trying to make sense of reality.

And so here I think they’re real in the sense that they’re helpful for pointing to things that other people can discover. Are they real in some absolute sense? Probably not. Or yes, you could say they’re completely real. Either way seems like a fine answer to me.

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