Introducing the Jhanas

What are the jhanas?

In Theravada Buddhism, the jhanas are eight distinct conscious states of intense mental clarity and stillness that are achieved through meditation. You don’t hear much about these states in modern American Buddhism, where a different sort of meditation – sometimes called “mindfulness meditation” or vipassana – is much more popular. But in the oldest Buddhist scriptures we have available today, you see the jhanas emphasized over and over again as the primary mechanism by which devoted practitioners reach enlightenment. Pretty much any time the Buddha gives any sort of spiritual advice at all, he ends with encouraging his followers to pursue the jhanas, and whole sections of the Pali suttas are dedicated to categorizing all the different jhana states and explaining how best to reach them. There’s also good historical reason to think jhana meditation stretches back to the earliest eras of Buddhist thought, and predates many other ritual and devotional practices that are more prominent today.

I should note before I move on that a fairly prominent split currently exists in the Buddhist world when it comes to exactly what qualifies as a jhana state anyway. Many teachers and scholars believe that the early jhanas are relatively easy to access, while others insist that even the first jhana requires intense devotion and personal effort. I tend to think the suttas themselves frame things somewhere in the middle, but it doesn’t really matter when you’re just starting out – unless you’re diligently practicing in a monastic setting, the purpose of jhana meditation shouldn’t necessarily be to achieve any particular jhana state anyway. Of course, if you do happen to achieve them, all the better! But for most people who are considering jhana meditation recreationally, you should really just focus on cultivating a deeply pleasant sense of mental stillness, regardless of whether you actually enter “real” jhana states or not.

How do you enter the jhanas?

Entering the jhanas requires developing a particular mental quality that the Pali suttas refer to as samadhi. Nowadays, samadhi is usually translated into English as ‘concentration,’ but that can be a little misleading. A better translation would be ‘absorption,’ or ‘undistractedness’ – an unbroken, unified awareness of some experience or sensation. Samadhi isn’t the kind of constant mental effort you have to exert when you’re working through a tough math problem or trying to read a complex piece of technical writing. Instead, it’s more like what comes over you when you’re struck by a beautiful piece of music, or when you watch a particularly exciting action movie; you’re completely absorbed in the object of your attention, not because you’re forcing your mind to stay on it every moment, but because you’re so enraptured that your mind doesn’t want to drift away.

When we meditate, we’re working to cultivate and sustain this kind of effortless awareness of whatever it is we choose to focus on. There are all sorts of options available for this “meditative object,” but by far the most common is the breath. We call meditation focused on breathing anapanasati, which is just a Pali term that literally means “mindfulness of inhaling and exhaling.” The central goal of anapanasati is to become completely and totally absorbed in the sensation of your breath as it enters and exits the body. Throughout the rest of this guide, I’ll be covering a bunch of tips and tricks that can help you get to that point, but in terms of the basic approach, you really can’t do better than the instructions given by the Buddha more than twenty-five hundred years ago:

There is the case where a monk, having gone to the wilderness, to the shade of a tree, or to an empty building, sits down folding his legs crosswise, holding his body erect, and setting mindfulness to the fore. Always mindful, he breathes in; mindful he breathes out.

Breathing in long, he discerns, ‘I am breathing in long’; or breathing out long, he discerns, ‘I am breathing out long.’ Or breathing in short, he discerns, ‘I am breathing in short’; or breathing out short, he discerns, ‘I am breathing out short.’ He trains himself, ‘I will breathe in sensitive to the entire body.’ He trains himself, ‘I will breathe out sensitive to the entire body.’ He trains himself, ‘I will breathe in calming bodily fabrications.’2 He trains himself, ‘I will breathe out calming bodily fabrications.’

— from the Anapanasati Sutta, MN 118, translated by Thanisarro Bhikkhu

That’s really all there is to it! You just need to sit down, relax, and direct your attention towards your breathing as your mind and body both become still. Develop deep enough samadhi this way, and jhana comes naturally, without you having to “do” anything at all.

Why should I start doing jhana meditation?

Simple: Because it feels really good! During meditation, as your mind and body grow increasingly still, you’ll start to experience a distinct pleasant feeling that the Buddhist scriptures call piti. Piti isn’t just a general sense of relaxation or calmness, like what you might feel when you watch a pretty sunset or curl up with your favorite book. Instead, it’s an immediately pleasurable sensation that’s located throughout the body in a very physical, tangible way. The exact feeling is hard to describe, but Rob Burbea gets close when he calls it a “body buzz.” Other meditators have described it like a low-level electric shock, or a pleasant version of the tingling you get when your foot falls asleep, but it’s probably a waste of time to think up a bunch of metaphors that will never be quite right. What matters is that, once the piti you’re feeling becomes truly overwhelming, the joy and peace that pervades your body will take you effortlessly into jhana – an even more otherworldly, indescribably joyful experience that can’t possibly be put into words.

Of course, there are other reasons to practice jhana meditation beyond just pure pleasure. For some meditators, reaching these states for the first time is a profound spiritual experience that radically changes how they relate to themselves and others – and even those who aren’t quite so moved still benefit from a chance to explore and examine their own patterns of thought with newfound clarity and control. Plus, the general feeling of peace and goodwill you’ll feel during meditation stays with you even after you get up off your cushion and go about your day. So while it sells jhana a little short to say it’s nothing more than a way to feel good, I still want to stick up for the idea that a reliable source of well-being and joy is more than enough on its own terms, and that we shouldn’t rush to turn meditation into just another therapeutic tool or load it up with self-conscious spiritual depth. Most of us spend (at least) an hour a day doing worthless little tasks that bring us nothing good at all anyway, so why not replace those time sinks with an hour spent enjoying your own mind instead?