Why aren’t the jhanas more popular?
The mix of pleasurable and non-addictive qualities of the jhanas raises the question: why aren’t they more popular?
In a sense, they are extremely popular, and have been for millennia, in the form of religious mystical experiences. Jhanas appear in both Buddhism and Hinduism (under different spelling), and share similarities with other deep contemplative practices, including various Christian mystical practices, Sufism, Mormonism, and others. What’s unique to the jhanas is they can be entered on command, without relying on external, chance events like the grace of God.
Many jhana practitioners also compare their experience to the use of psychedelics. We hope write in a future post on the similarities between jhanas, religious mystical experiences, and psychedelics.
Why isn’t jhana practice more popular? That seems to be changing — we estimate jhana practice is up 2x in 5 years in advanced Western meditation circles. But our best guess is a combination of difficulty to learn and historical accident.
Most jhana meditation teachers expect students to have hundreds of hours of prior meditation practice or more, and they prefer to teach jhanas in a residential retreat setting (e.g. as described in this podcast). The invisible and hard-to-talk-about nature of meditation also means students learn at very different speeds. The lucky learn on their own, or quickly upon receiving instruction – others spend months or years, guessing with their teachers about whether or not they’re progressing.
With the caveat that we’re not religious historians, it seems jhanas were very commonly practiced in the earliest Buddhist texts. Over time, they mythologized until some traditions taught only “one in a 1000 monks” were capable of reaching jhana after years of training.
Later traditions arose that de-emphasized jhanas altogether, including the tradition that most influenced luminaries like Sharon Salzberg, Jack Kornfield, Joseph Goldstein, and others credited with bringing Buddhism to the West in the second half of the 20th century.
In the last 5-15 years, Western teachers of jhanas accessible to lay people have published new books and become well-known (e.g. Culudasa, Leigh Brasington, Rob Burbea, Kenneth Folk, Ajahn Geoff, Bhante Gunaratana, Richard Shankman, Bhante Vimalaramsi, and others teaching deeper jhanas like Ajahn Brahm, Shaila Catherine, Tina Rasmussen, Steven Snyder, and Beth Upton). We intend to write a separate post on the landscape of jhana teachers and their differences.
