Pāli RootsThe Āgama ViewAbhidharma and the Path of PurificationThe Mahāyāna TurnPrajñā and ConcentrationThe ŚūraṅgamaChanLotus and HuayanThe Modern Return
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Part 2 · The Āgama View
Stillness · 3 papers
Part One took concentration apart to look at it: what it is, how deep it goes, where one enters. Part Two sets this wheel back onto the cart—to see what position concentration hold[ from the book's part intro ]
論Study the papersfootnotes · abstracts
06Right Concentration as a Path-FactorWhat is "right concentration" (sammā-samādhi), the eighth factor of the noble eightfold path? Three readings are common today — taking it for any kind of focus at all, taking it for the four jhānas and nothing less, or taking it for a technique one can cultivate in isolation from the other seven factors — and this chapter argues that all three miss. Working from the Discourse on the Noble Path of the Madhyama Āgama (the parallel of the Pāli Mahācattārīsaka), a single discourse that carries both halves of the thesis, and using the Sarvāstivāda's device of one-thing-two-functions — its pairing of "right concentration with outflows / right concentration outflow-free" in the Abhidharmakośa and the Mahāvibhāṣā — as the analytic hook, the chapter contends: the content of right concentration is indeed the four jhānas (their vertical axis having been set firm in the previous chapter), but what makes a sitting of concentration a right concentration is not its depth, but its integrating direction — held up by the seven foregoing factors and turned, in its turn, toward wisdom. The same vertical axis of the four jhānas, cultivated alone, is an attainment deep yet unliberating; brought onto the path, it is the path-factor of right concentration. With this, both "the deeper the concentration, the nearer to liberation" and "right concentration can be cultivated in isolation" fall at once, and this volume's sequence — entering concentration from virtue, turning from concentration toward wisdom — finds its warrant in the Āgama's own text.07The Concentration Factor among the Seven Awakening-FactorsIs the "concentration awakening-factor" (samādhisambojjhaṅga) among the seven awakening-factors the same concentration as the "right concentration" of the noble eightfold path, or a second and different thing? Contemporary meditation circles argue endlessly over whether concentration is to be forced out by effort or let to come of itself, and this chapter holds that the dispute asks in the wrong direction. The concentration awakening-factor is not a deeper focus willed directly into being; it is the fruit of a sixth factor that arises of itself once mindfulness, investigation, energy, rapture, and tranquillity have ripened in sequence and the mind has come to ease. Working from the causal sequence of the Saṃyukta Āgama's discourses on the awakening-factors (713, 810, 714, 729), from the precept-rooted chain of the Madhyama Āgama's Discourse on What Is the Purpose, and from the grammatical witness of the Pāli — its "arising of itself by natural law, in due sequence" (dhammatā) and the medio-passive voice of samādhiyati — the chapter argues that concentration is undergone, not manufactured. Folding together three statements of the treatises — the awakening-factors are exclusively supramundane (Kośa), the prior-or-posterior determining criterion of the path-factors (Vibhāṣā), concentration is a single entity under five names (Kośa) — it reaches, by synthesis, the conclusion: one and the same concentration, serving as right concentration, spans the mundane and the supramundane; serving as the concentration awakening-factor, it is purely supramundane — the coordinate decides the function. The load-bearing image accordingly turns from the previous chapter's static "place" to a dynamic "sequence": the channel forms once the water has arrived.08The Five Hindrances and What Jhāna ClearsOpen almost any modern meditation manual and the "five hindrances" appear under a single heading: how to overcome them — what to do about drowsiness, how to handle distraction, how to dissolve ill-will. This chapter does not ask that question. It asks a prior one: when the canon says one "secludes oneself from" the five hindrances and thereby "enters the first jhāna," what is this seclusion? Drawing on the Dīrgha Āgama's Poṭṭhapāda Sutta, the Madhyama Āgama's Assapura discourse, and the awakening-factor saṃyukta of the Saṃyukta Āgama, the chapter argues that the five hindrances (pañca nīvaraṇā) are not a set of "difficult emotions to be managed" but a concentration-relative category: they obtain only in the relation of being-secluded-from, and strip away the reference to concentration and to the path, and the category dissolves. Concentration, in other words, is defined not by what it accumulates but by what it sheds — what remains once the hindrances are stilled simply is concentration. The chapter then sets side by side two later models of "what jhāna clears" — the Southern per-factor pairing (Vimuttimagga) and the Northern sequential-block scheme (Abhidharmakośa) — noting that both are commentators' instruments, not the surface of the sūtras. It closes on a seam that runs through the whole volume: concentration can only suppress the hindrances (temporarily, vikkhambhana), while only wisdom can sever them (by the root, samuccheda) — and so concentration must, in the end, return to wisdom.Same part, two ways in — papers keep the scholarly apparatus; the book is continuous prose for reading. Same source.