Polak on Jhāna and Early Buddhist Meditation – 29OCT26

Greetings, Friendlies. :)

This just hit my inbox:

From the email:

Meditation has become the practice most people associate with Buddhism, but the early texts tell a different story. …

Polak compares early Pali Nikayas—the scriptural layers that predate the Theravada tradition— with early Chan sources.

He finds a shared, largely overlooked emphasis: that ethical conduct and a specific way of life are the preconditions for meditative attainment, not concentration practice alone. Reading the two side by side, he suggests Chan may be less an innovation than a return to something already present in the earliest Buddhist texts.

Polak also looks at jhana … [some early texts] place more emphasis on removing mental hindrances—sensual desire, ill will, sloth and torpor, restlessness and worry, and skeptical doubt—beforehand than on the technique of concentration itself.

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