Welcome to Developing the Jhana Factors in Daily Life. This is a practice that starts exactly where we are and takes us, gradually, further and further into experiences of stillness and calm.

Throughout this course, you'll find the text of each video beneath the talk. You don't need to read these, but they may pull out key ideas and exercises for reference. These materials will be collected for download in each unit's workbook.

Welcome

Welcome to this course, which is on developing the jhana factors in daily life and in meditation. My name is Sarah Shaw and I work on Buddhist texts. The intention of this course is to find out more about these jhana factors that are often spoken about in meditation, and to see if we can become a little bit familiar with them as things we can find in daily life and then develop properly in meditation.

The seaside analogy

While I was thinking about this course, the image came to my mind of going for a walk by the seaside on a very, very hot day. Perhaps we've been in towns, we're very hot and sticky and not feeling very good. You find yourself by the ocean and you walk along the sand and somehow the mind feels refreshed. So you might decide to put your toes in the water, you might splash your face, the sea air is very invigorating. And then maybe you go for a swim. But you have to learn how to swim before you can enter into the ocean and just do it.

So the jhana factors seem to me—each one of them, when developed—to have a sense of letting our mind refresh itself. 

Most of us are spending most of our day perhaps in very cramped conditions, trying to travel with lots of people around, looking at our phones. And these jhana factors don't really get a chance to grow properly in us. We're always being scattered and concentrating on other things and somehow not allowing the mind to refresh itself. But when we walk by the ocean on the beach, immediately we feel this lifting and this sense of the cares of the world sort of being washed away, if you like, a little bit.

The aim of this course

The intention of this course is really to look at the skills involved in swimming when you do actually want to enter the ocean and find out more about it, and feel that you are safe there and can look after yourself and feel strong there. 

So during these six units, we'll be taking each one of the jhana factors in turn, and then we'll be looking at them working together, in meditation, and just seeing how we can enhance our daily life by sometimes developing one that perhaps is needed.

Eventually, with a deep meditation, the jhana factors can grow so that we are ready, if you like, to take the plunge and do a bit of swimming. But we need to have a good basis for that and a good basis for the mind. 

So I hope, if anything, that this course will help to explain some ways we can help ourselves, take care of ourselves, and have an adventurous time, but still keep safe and look after ourselves as well.

What is jhana?

So there's been a lot of discussion recently: what is jhana? And in a way, I think it's interesting because when I look at the discussions that people have about it, it seems to me that it's very refreshing to be by the seaside. And that anyway is what is called samatha, or calm, within this metaphor. It's just very nice to be by the sea. You might put your toe in the sea, you might splash around a bit, you might just put some on your face. And this is getting to know something more. Or you might then enter in and really immerse yourself.

It seems to me that the state of jhana is something which we can get a sense of, and then we can learn the skills to enter more deeply. And I think jhana, this state of deep meditation, is something which will come to us when we're ready. And as a meditation, it is very deeply transformative. 

Jhana is described as changing so many things and it's important that it does so in the right way. So the Buddha often talked about right concentration, that it's good concentration and jhana is good concentration. The mind comes to stillness.

The example of Mahanama

There was a lay person, Mahanama, at the time of the Buddha, who had actually attained stream entry, which is the first stage of enlightenment. But he lived in a house. We find out from one sutta (discourse) that he lived in a house full of children and was very busy! And in another sutta, he goes to the Buddha and says, "I really don't know what to do. I can't find a way of freeing myself from being pulled in to all the activities in my daily life." And the Buddha says that he just needs to practice more jhana, just to develop more stillness. And then quite naturally, his mind will become more free.

So even if we don't know so much about this state, there is this sense that there is a place where we can go to—we can splash in the water perhaps and learn how to enter more deeply. It's a place that is refreshing. And this sense that there is such a place is just a very nice thing to know in one's life. 

An exploration

So we're going to explore this state and what it feels like to be by the ocean and to learn how to enter it maybe sometimes, and I hope you will just enjoy exploring it and find that that itself is a way of helping to set up the conditions for good development in meditation.

We'll also be doing a bit of meditation within the units. I was taught meditation a while ago in the style of samatha breathing mindfulness. And it took me a while to realize just how lucky I was to learn this method, because it was of a kind of meditation that didn't really come to the West, as it wasn't considered very fashionable in the Asian countries. So other kinds of meditation came to the West, and I was just very lucky to find it. 

So I hope you enjoy just trying this meditation out and seeing how it suits you and just getting a sense that this is something that is really very adventurous and interesting.

Come and see

I think many of us feel now that we've got all kinds of information overload and that our minds are being pulled in many directions. Beneath that, so many people feel that something is almost calling them, that there is a kind of mystery there that we'd like to explore. I've always felt that about meditation, and I still do now. It's something which does lead on, as the Buddha said: ehipassiko (come and see), opanayiko (it leads on).

So I hope you enjoy the course and I hope it makes you feel that you would like to pursue this more. There is a kind of mystery about things, but there's also a sense that we can journey into it safely, and have guidance, and enjoy the journey.