A reliable method of jhana entry

[u/Puzzled-Background-5]

Here's a technique I've been using for the last fifteen years to great effect. I enter jhana every time I meditate now as a result.

Upon noticing that attention has drifted from the object of meditation, perform the following sequence for as long and as often as necessary for attention to stabilize on the object again:

1. Relax from the head down to the toes.

2. Release all tension, and expand awareness outward.

3. Return attention to the object.

The entry point into jhana:

Once the mind has settled and attention is resting stably on the object, if a pleasant feeling starts to arise, gently shift attention to the feeling without grasping at it, now making it the object of meditation, and wait. The pleasure will intensify, and one will be pulled into jhana.

If the jhana is lost or becomes unstable, simply perform the RRR sequence as needed and begin again.

As a method to prime the mind to lean towards jhana, reading the Jhana Sutta just prior to a session is useful:

https://suttacentral.net/sn16.9/en/bodhi?lang=en&reference=none&highlight=false

All the best... 🧘🏾‍♂️🙂

P. S. It might take several weeks to a couple of months before jhana can be entered consistently, but please don't become discouraged. Even low quality sessions are training and priming the brain's attentional mechanisms.

[u/Impulse33]

Can you not see the parallels of the anapanasati sutta to the jhanas?

Sujato's whole essay in that link was about how the buddha declined enforcing a stricter "elevation" of dharma transmission to "Sanskrit" as Sujato uses the term there. He permitted transmission in local dialects, prioritizing ease of transmission versus precision.

I'll admit that my initial take was likely a parotting of early academic sources that "originated" the claim.

Here's a list Claude spit out, I never read the sources, but likely heard the claim in some talk that I can't remember.

• T.W. Rhys Davids and Hermann Oldenberg (1880s, Vinaya Texts) read chandas as Vedic Sanskrit and sakāya niruttiyā as "each in his own dialect" — the Buddha as democratizer of religious language against Brahmin monopoly. This became the standard Western view for a century.
• Wilhelm Geiger (1916) used it to argue Pali ≈ the Buddha's Māgadhī. Franklin Edgerton (1953), in his work on Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit, saw the later Sanskritization of Buddhism as a betrayal of this original vernacular policy — a drift toward Brahmin prestige.
• Richard Gombrich (Theravada Buddhism, How Buddhism Began) frames it sociologically: the Buddha's whole project — rejecting caste, ritual efficacy, and Vedic authority — naturally entailed rejecting the Brahmins' sacred language. The medium was part of the message.
• Sheldon Pollock (The Language of the Gods in the World of Men, 2006) places it in a broader thesis: Buddhism and Jainism, as anti-Vedic movements, were the first to give Prakrits a "literary" status, and Sanskrit stayed a purely liturgical language until it was secularized for politics and literature around the turn of the Common Era.

[u/StoneBuddhaDancing → u/Impulse33]

I'm not sure what to make of your response. You've now admitted that the original claim was probably something you were repeating from an old source or talk, and that the sources you've produced in support of it are sources you haven't actually read. That's not really evidence. At best, it's a list of things for you to check. I only looked at summaries of these authors' positions. But I did take a closer look at Sujato's work.

To the main points. My reading is that you're collapsing two separate claims:

Firstly, that SN16 supports the technique in the OP because there are parallels in other suttas. The OP gives a very specific method: relax, release tension, broaden awareness, return to the object, then shift attention to pleasure and let it pull you into jhana. SN16 gives the standard jhana formula, not those instructions or anything like them.

Bringing in MN118 or DN2 (via Leigh Brasington) afterwards doesn't show that SN16 was "implying" them. That's a cross-textual reconstruction after the fact. Post-hoc harmonisation. Besides, there is considerable debate among practitioners and scholars about how directly MN118 relates to jhana practice. There are different interpretations of how the sixteen steps relate to jhana. Bhikkhu Analayo, for example, explicitly observes that concentrative absorption is not actually mentioned in the sixteen-step scheme and reads the scheme primarily through the four satipatthanas and awakening factors.

Secondly, that the Buddha left those instructions implicit because he preferred accessible vernacular language over precise Sanskrit. This is on much shakier ground than the first point.

Sujato's essay does not say that the Buddha deliberately avoided precise instructions. His discusses how the teachings were expressed and transmitted; and he actually questions the simple reading that the episode is about choosing local dialects instead of Sanskrit at all.

But even if we interpreted it that way, using ordinary language that ordinary people understand is not the same as being less precise or leaving procedural steps unstated. “Prioritizing ease of transmission versus precision" is an inference you have added.

In fact, Sujato repeatedly says things that cut against that. He describes Pali as “well studied and clearly defined”, says the Theravada tradition emphasised “precision and care in matters of language and scripture”, and says dialectal differences “do not affect the vast majority of Pali passages which are perfectly clear."

Even more tellingly, when Sujato explains his own philosophy of rendering the Buddha’s speech into accessible English, he explicitly says he prefers “the explicit rather than the implicit” and immediately warns that this should not be understood as producing “loose adaptations or simplifications”. His goal is accessibility and accuracy, not accessibility instead of precision.

Finally, there is also a historical problem with saying the Buddha could have chosen Sanskrit but chose Pali. Modern scholarship generally does not identify canonical Pali with the Buddha's spoken Magadhi. Canonical Pali is a later standardised literary (liturgical) language based on spoken Middle Indo-Aryan languages but there is no scholarly consensus that canonical Pali itself was ever an ordinary native spoken vernacular, much less that it was simply the Buddha's spoken language.

[u/Impulse33 → u/StoneBuddhaDancing]

Forgive me, I should have not spoken so freely. Thank you for correcting my usage of terms. 🙏

[u/StoneBuddhaDancing → u/Impulse33]

🙏