Listen to the entire interview at www.dharmachats... In this Dharma Chats clip, B. Alan Wallace talks with host Daniel Aitken about the relationship between Jhana and Shamatha.
its very interesting he chooses not to teach the 9 stages of shamata with intimate instruction on the breath, which would ensure 100,000s of ppl will reach it quickly all over the place. i guess its cos he knows ppls bodhichitta is weak naive very contrived and little tested, meaning most ppls minds will automatically sink away from undertaking hardships involved in progressing bodhichitta and instead stick like a magnet to merely enjoying their refined immune-to-human-suffering lives.
he wrote a book on it so there’s that. whether or not someone has compassion is a separate matter, one could do or not do this method with compassion. and you’re also assuming one is easier than another. some would argue that jhana is much easier to attain with metta rather than without. this assumption that a practitioner of classical buddhism/theravada/jhana is automatically aspiring to be a pratyekabuddha is presumptuous and more of an elitism imo, also a bit insulting. it’s not the middle ages anymore we don’t need to continue insulting these other schools so that we can get the king to sponsor us…or whatever.
@@mayploy6869 yes metta is harder than jhana but bodhichitta is much harder than metta. bodhichitta is much harder than even arhatship, which is the real contested point between the 2 schools, but it should be somewhat obvious, bodhichitta gives birth to buddhas, the other dont. nevertheless everyone accepts that for example the more advanced pratyekabuddha arhats accomplish limitless metta and compassion, which is what allows them to save ie. turn into arhats, entire countries, continents, and sometimes even planets/multiple planets. so noone asserts sravakas and pratyekabuddhas cannot cultivate love and compassion. the difference is they by definition lack bodhichitta, until their circumstances radically change at some distant point in the future while they enjoy their perfection/cessation. books can be taught from an academic pov or from an intimate pov describing how each of the 9 stages look from the first-person eg. what each of the parts that make up stage 4 look like as you progress into stage 5, what occurs as one steps into stage 5 and coarse excitation and coarse dullness cease, what specifically occurs with the eyes and vision as you begin to grapple with stage 5. what it looks like to then conjoin ones uninterrupted attention on the meditation object with uninterrupted freshness and sheer lucidity as one accomplishes stage 6. then how ones newly developed pretty decent samadhi produces the skill to be able to locate subtle excitation/medium excitation for the first time and peel away its causes using your scalpel-like samadhi. etcetc.
@@5piles these overly complicated descriptions of the stages of shamatha are simply leading up to the first jhana. it all happens in a few seconds or minutes according to your experience in actual jhana practice. it comes from this irrational fear that mahayanists have that jhana leads one astray from enlightenment. so they don’t want to enter jhana but only access concentration. if you read the actual nikhayas you will realize the historical buddha said this practice was indispensable. scholars and monasteries from mahayana onwards love to make this way more complicated than it needs to be, and then turn the historical buddhas actual teachings into “pith instructions” that don’t get talked about in public. bodhicitta isn’t arahantship or sottapanna or any of it. it is always present. obscurations or lack thereof are what defines buddha from samsarin.
