32. Leaping Up

The discourses describe two approaches for how to train the mind in liberating discernment based on the practice of jhāna. In the first, you gain insight into the processes of fabrication by observing the mind as it goes from one level of jhāna to another. In the other, you observe and evaluate a state of jhāna while you’re still in it.

In both approaches, discernment performs two functions. You engage in the practice of jhāna with commitment and reflection first to discern the fact of fabrication in each level of jhāna. In other words, you see how that state of concentration is intentionally put together. Then, based on a desire for even greater calm, you refine your commitment and reflection to arrive at a value judgment, discerning the drawbacks of those fabrications and the jhānas created from them.

As we’ve already noted, this value judgment is a necessary part of liberating discernment. You fabricate states of jhāna based on desire and passion for them, and you feel desire and passion for them because of a value judgment: that the effort that goes into them is amply rewarded by the pleasure, rapture, and pleasing equanimity they provide.

So to free yourself from the fetter of desire and passion, you have to arrive at the opposite value judgment: They’re not worth the effort they require. You get yourself to see that even though these are the ultimate fabricated states, the fact that you have to keep on fabricating them means that they’re still not satisfying. They require subtle but continual effort. True peace and calm would have to require no fabrication at all. Only when the mind is struck with the realization that nothing fabricated can provide satisfactory happiness will it genuinely develop dispassion for all things fabricated and then incline to the unfabricated.

An example of the first approach, observing the mind as it goes from one state of jhāna to another, is the following passage, which focuses on the first step of reflection: realizing the fact of fabrication in the jhānas. As you progress up the ladder of concentration, you see how the three types of fabrication—verbal, bodily, and mental—fall away.

This process is like subjecting a hunk of ore-bearing rock to heat. As the temperature rises progressively higher, first any lead in the rock melts and flows out, then the zinc, then the silver, then the gold.

You need to follow the approach of commitment and reflection to watch these fabrications fall away. Otherwise, you just stay absorbed in the jhānas. However, simply observing these types of fabrication fall away isn’t enough to develop dispassion for them. You have to desire to contemplate further for the sake of the even greater calm that can come only when you arrive at the value judgment that even the highest levels of concentration are not worth the effort that goes into them.

The Canon describes many ways in which you might arrive at this value judgment. The Buddha himself describes one way that he himself followed, presenting it as an inner battle between his determination for greater calm and his resistance to relinquishing something he already had. Training for greater and greater calm at each step of deepening concentration, he had to use discernment to overcome the desires that resisted that training. He did this by contemplating the drawbacks of the state he was in, and the rewards of abandoning and relinquishing whatever perception within that state was still afflicting his mind.

Here’s how he described bringing the mind into the first jhāna.

Then, as he stayed in the first jhāna, any perceptions of sensuality that occurred to the mind struck him as an affliction.

So he saw that it would be good to go to an even higher stage of jhāna. But then again he encountered resistance in his own mind. He followed a similar program of contemplating the drawbacks of the state he was in, and the rewards of abandoning whatever perception was still afflicting his mind.

These were the afflicting perceptions that he noticed as he ascended the stages of jhāna:

After contemplating the drawbacks of the dimension of neither perception nor non-perception, he attained the cessation of perception and feeling. As he saw that with discernment, he gained total release.

In this case, the Buddha’s liberating value judgment came through reflection devoted to seeing the drawbacks of the state he was in, along with the rewards of going beyond that state.

It’s worth noting that at each step along the way, his reflection was motivated by a determined desire: to overcome any other desires that stood in the way of deeper calm. If he hadn’t been motivated by that determined desire, he would never have been able to master concentration or to arrive at the value judgment that inspired dispassion. This is an excellent example of how he used desire strategically to overcome the desires that stood in the way of awakening.