Samatha meditation: any form of meditation intended to cultivate a one-pointed focus on an unchanging meditation object, or samadhi.
Samadhi is pleasant. The mind in samadhi is calm and undistracted; the body experiences physical pleasure. Every meditation experience includes some degree of samadhi, and it is common to mistake this pleasantness as the end goal of meditation. In actuality, the pleasantness is a temporary side-effect; the end goal is liberation, and if one single-mindedly pursues samadhi in one's meditation, one misses the real fruits of a meditation practice. According to the Theravadan Buddhist path, liberation arises from insight into the true nature of reality, which in turn arises from Vipassana or insight meditation. The effectiveness of insight meditation is said to be greatly enhanced by samadhi, and this is the more wholesome reason to pursue samatha meditation.
I began earnestly pursuing samatha meditation in 2009 when I did a weekend retreat, followed several months later by a two-week retreat, taught by Tina Rasmussen and Stephen Snyder. During the two-week I experienced a deep state of samadhi called jhana; this state is said to be extra powerful in enhancing the effectiveness of insight meditation. Since then, I have wished to build my skill in attaining jhana so that my insight meditation can be more effective. Although jhana is very valuable in this way, it's also difficult to achieve and master (depending on the standards for jhana; more on this below), and that is one reason why most Western lay practitioners do not master it. Over the past decade the jhanas have been taught much more in the West than they had been previously, but still, although a good number of experienced meditators have now been exposed to jhana practice and have tasted the state of jhana, few have mastered it such that they can enter jhana routinely and make use of it in the course of their daily practice, or even in the course of their Vipassana retreat practice.
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After the happy and rewarding, though effortful, retreat of 2009, I signed up for a two-month retreat in 2011 to develop my skill in jhana. This retreat was going to be taught by Pa Auk Saydaw, the great master who had taught Tina and Stephen. I was joyful on the fifth day of this retreat to experience the familiar jhana state I'd experienced in 2009. After emerging from the state, I went on my afternoon run with a post-jhana lightness and mental clarity that was also familiar from 2009. My joy was short-lived, though. When I reported this experience to Sayadaw, saying, "I think I entered the first jhana today," he immediately replied, "Full absorption is sure". (The jhana state is described as a state of absorption.) With Sayadaw's Burmese accent, it initially sounded like "pull abchorpchon eschure," and it took a while for me to comprehend the disappointing message: my teacher did not think I'd entered jhana to his standard-- if I had, I wouldn't have had any doubt about it. The immediacy of his answer suggested he knew this before I even said a word. It is said that great masters have the ability to sense the jhana factors present in other meditators for a short time after each meditation session; I wonder if he saw that I did not have all five of the necessary factors.
Every day on this retreat I practiced with sincere determination. The teacher's assistant instructed me to not try to enter jhana again until the nimitta, a bright white light seen with the mind's eye, was strong and continuous. This never happened. A weak nimitta was sometimes present but usually it was completely absent. As the retreat progressed I developed an aversion to samatha practice. I strategized techniques to work with the aversion, to ignore it, power through it, or inspire my way past it. After six weeks I felt so angry and discouraged that I abandoned samatha practice and spent the rest of the retreat doing the Vipassana practice I'd been doing as my main practice since I became a regular meditator in 2001. Aversion to samatha practice was persistent and I did not try to do this practice again for several months, perhaps over a year.
Was the jhana I'd experienced in 2009 not "full absorption"? Was the state I reported to Sayadaw in 2011 the same as what I'd reported to Tina and Stephen in 2009, or somehow lesser? The fact is that in the world of meditation there is a wide range of standards for jhana (see Richard Shankman's book for a review), and Pa Auk Sayadaw is known for having probably the most rigorous standards in the world. In both 2009 and 2011 I'd experienced some kind of absorption that some experts would have called jhana. Each state called jhana is useful as preparation for Vipassana meditation, but the deeper the jhana (the more rigorous the standards), the better.
I did not intend to choose the teacher with the most rigorous standards. My path simply led me to him. He had taught my good friend Shaila Catherine, and she advised me to learn his method. At the time I didn't know there were choices. On the other end of the spectrum, in 2012 another teacher, Kenneth Folk, led me through what he considered to be all eight jhanas in the course of a single skype session. I played with those states for a couple of weeks but never made them an integral part of my practice. Let's try to remember ... yes ... I do remember how to enter Kenneth's first jhana, I just did so and it took me about two seconds to enter it! I never placed value on this jhana. I see now that I never even believed that it could be a useful prelude to Vipassana meditation. It just seemed too easy. Let me say that it would probably not be easy for a beginning meditator. It was easy for me, someone who'd practiced Vipassana for over a decade and who'd just come out of a 2-month silent retreat.
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Fast forward to 2017. This year I am, by choice, unemployed. I have vast amounts of leisure due to good health, financial security, and few obligations. I have felt interest in again pursuing samatha meditation, but at a more leisurely pace than before, without necessarily going to any retreat centers but by, instead, creating conditions of seclusion in my own home. So far I have done three four-day periods of seclusion, of "home retreat", and I am now in the midst of a seven-day. During all of these home retreats I've explored, with varying levels of intensity, samatha practice. I intend to talk about these explorations in another blog post.
Postscript: I just noticed that earlier this year I wrote another post on this same theme.
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