Early Buddhist Meditation: The Four Jhanas as the Actualization of Insight — Keren Arbel

“Bhikkhus, just as the river Ganges slants, slopes, and inclines towards the east, similarly, a bhikkhu, who develops and cultivates the four jhanas slants, slopes, and inclines towards Nibbana.” [SN V.308]

“There is no jhana for the one without liberating wisdom, no liberating wisdom for the one without jhana; the one who has jhana and liberating wisdom he indeed is in the presence of nibbana.” [Dhammapada v.372]

These citations from the early Buddhist texts in Pali (i.e., the suttas), and many others in these inspiring texts, captured my curiosity from the first time I heard about the jhanas from my Dhamma teachers and from books I have read on Buddhist meditation. The references to these four specific psych-somatic states, which the Buddha called “the four jhanas”, and the frequentness in which they appear in the path taught by the Buddha, awakened a deep interest in me, first as a practitioner of vipassana meditation, and later on, as a scholar.

I assume that anyone who heard about the jhanas in most traditional Theravada practice environments heard that these states are not necessary for insight and awakening. However, anyone who read the suttas, quickly realize, that these four states, appear repeatedly in the Buddha’s descriptions of the path to liberation. Reading the suttas over many years I have found many passages in which the Buddha refers to the four jhanas as intrinsic and essential to the development of liberating wisdom and awakening.

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I very much like and approve of Arbel’s conclusion to this fine essay:

Thus, I would conclude that the four jhanas should not be conceived as a meditative technique at all. They are not concentration exercises that one can choose to practice as a basis for vipassana meditation; rather, they are the actualization and embodiment of the deepening of insight and non-clinging. Thus, the fourth jhana – as the culmination of this meditative process – is the optimal experiential event for the utter de-conditioning of unwholesome tendencies and for transforming deep epistemological structures. It anticipates an awakened awareness for an un-awakened practitioner, and therefore, it is the threshold of awakening.