Part One · Pāli Roots · Calm, Insight, and the Four Jhānas

This book is going to walk a long road—from the concentration the Buddha personally realized and personally taught while He was in the world, all the way to the silent illumination and the huatou of the Chan school. Along the way it will pass through the perfection of dhyāna; through prajñā's taking-apart of concentration-states; through the great samādhi of the Śūraṅgama. But the starting point is in none of those places. The starting point lies somewhere earlier, and plainer.

Today, when most people hear "concentration," what comes to mind is sitting cross-legged, entering trance and leaving the body behind—as if concentration were a craft in which the deeper, the better. There is something true in these impressions, and something that needs telling apart. Before any of it was systematized, the Buddha Himself walked a road with concentration: He personally realized the deepest concentration the world of His day possessed, and then set it down with His own hands.

What Part One does is return to the starting point of that road.

Five chapters, laid out in order. Chapter one: get three words clear that are constantly mixed together—samādhi, samatha, jhāna. Chapter two: the Buddha's own story—the boy's first jhāna under the rose-apple tree, and the deepest formless concentrations under two teachers. Chapter three: set up the paired tracks of calm and insight—two tracks, one vehicle. Chapter four: take apart the inner scale of the calm track—the four jhānas and the four formless, set down layer by layer. Chapter five: look at the entrances onto this scale—forty doors.

Read these five chapters through, and beneath the twenty-six chapters that follow—from the perfection of dhyāna to silent illumination and huatou—the grain of one same track will show: concentration is gathering in, and the deepest samādhi is one in which even the samādhi-state cannot be grasped.

The foundation must first be nailed down. We begin with three words.