| Chapter 1: | The Pāli Nikāyas |
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Here, friend, by completely transcending the base of neither-perception-nor-non-perception, I entered and dwelt in the cessation of cognition and feeling. Yet, friend, it did not occur to me, “I am attaining the cessation of cognition and feeling,” or “I have attained the cessation of cognition and feeling,” or “I have emerged from the cessation of thought and feeling.”
[Ānanda replies,] “It must be because I-making [ahaṁkāra], mine-making [mamaṁkāra] and the underlying tendency to conceit [mānānusaya] have been thoroughly uprooted in the Venerable Sāriputta for a long time that such thoughts do not occur to him.”
The Pāsādika Sutta of the DN describes the Buddha telling a disciple that there are four ways of life that are absolutely (ekanta) conducive not only to joy but also to renunciation, dispassion, cessation, tranquility, higher knowledge, enlightenment, and nibbāna. The four ways are the four jhānas. When the disciple asks what are the fruits of these four conduits to joy, the Buddha replies that they are the fruits of stream-entry, once-returning, non-returning, and arahantship (DN III.131). So here one finds not only that the jhānas conducive to knowledge, which is usually said to come from vipassanā practice, but also that the four jhānas are seen as nothing less than the final goal of enlightenment (bodhi)/nibbāna.
Most frequently, mindfulness and insight are said to come from immersion in the fourth jhāna. The stock Nikāyan formula says, “When the mind is concentrated thus, purified, cleansed, clear, free of impure influences [āsavas], flexible, supple, firm and motionless, then [the meditator] applies and turns his mind to knowledge and insight.” There are other reasons why the fourth jhāna is a likely state within which an arahant might attain nibbāna, given phenomenological descriptions of this state. Not only is the fourth jhāna characterized by the qualities just given, but above all it is said to a “purification of mindfulness and equanimity” (upekkhā-sati-parisuddhi). Given Buddhist definitions of nibbāna, a state of nonjudgmental even-mindedness with fully