How a Medieval Commentary Reshaped Buddhist Meditation
Guest essay by David Braun, longtime meditator and Jhourney retreat alumnus.
David's piece traces why jhana—once central to Buddhist meditation—was redefined and narrowed over centuries. It's thorough, carefully sourced, and especially useful if you've encountered conflicting claims about jhana online. For the peer-reviewed academic treatment of this debate, see Sparby & Sacchet's 2024 paper.
For a structural argument about why depth practices were lost across all contemplative traditions, not just Buddhism, see Stephen's Substack essay "What Happened to Jhana?" For why these states aren't exclusive to any single tradition, see "Jhanas Are Human, Not Buddhist."
—Stephen, Jhourney co-founder and CEO
Twenty-five years ago I fell in love with the idea of meditation and the benefits it could offer me. After decades of difficult practice using "dry insight" techniques, the benefits I received were real but modest compared to my original hopes. A recent exposure to the jhanas has awakened the kind of nuanced intimacy with myself I had dreamed of, re-igniting my hopes. My curiosity about the history of the jhanas prompted the following investigation. I hope you find it as illuminating as I did.
—David Braun
If you've practiced Buddhist meditation in the West, you almost certainly learned some form of "vipassana" or "insight meditation." You were probably taught to note your experience, observe impermanence, and develop "bare awareness." You may have been told that concentration practices like jhana are optional: pleasant diversions at best, dangerous attachments at worst.
But what if this story is backwards? What if the meditation system taught to millions of Western practitioners is missing its essential core—and what if this omission traces back to an historical accident in colonial Burma?
A growing body of scholarship suggests exactly this. The “dry insight” approach that dominates modern vipassana is a 20th-century innovation with deep roots in commentarial tradition—but the earliest texts consistently present jhana (meditative absorption) as central to the Buddha's path, not peripheral to it.
What the Suttas Say
The Pali suttas—the earliest recorded teachings of the Buddha—present a striking picture that contradicts what most Western vipassana teachers have taught. As Thanissaro Bhikkhu observes in his essay "One Tool Among Many":
Only rarely do [the suttas] make use of the word vipassana—a sharp contrast to their frequent use of the word jhana. When they depict the Buddha telling his disciples to go meditate, they never quote him as saying 'go do vipassana,' but always 'go do jhana.' And they never equate the word vipassana with any mindfulness techniques.
This reading is supported by academics. Richard Gombrich, former Boden Professor of Sanskrit at Oxford, argues that "the distinction between vipassana and samatha did not originate in the suttas, but in the interpretation of the suttas." Keren Arbel, in her monograph Early Buddhist Meditation, contends that samatha and vipassana are "not specific practices, but qualities of the mind," and that the fundamental distinction between "practice of serenity" and "practice of insight" is "not applicable to early Buddhist understanding of the meditative path."
This is not a minor discrepancy. The Noble Eightfold Path—the Buddha's core teaching on the way to liberation—includes Right Concentration (samma samadhi) as its eighth factor. In the standard formula repeated throughout the Pali Canon, Right Concentration is defined as the four jhanas. Not 'momentary concentration.' Not 'access concentration.' The four jhanas.
Perhaps most striking is MN 14, the Cūḷadukkhakkhandha Sutta, where the Buddha explains why even understanding the drawbacks of sensual pleasure isn't enough to abandon it:
So long as I did not attain to the rapture and pleasure that are apart from sensual pleasures, apart from unwholesome states, or to something more peaceful than that, I recognized that I could still be attracted to sensual pleasures.
—MN 14, trans. Bhikkhu Bodhi
The Buddha is describing jhana. Bhikkhu Bodhi confirms in his footnotes: "The 'rapture and pleasure that are apart from sensual pleasures' are the rapture and pleasure pertaining to the first and second jhāna." The Buddha is saying that without accessing the pleasure of jhana, even he could not abandon sensual craving. This is not an optional practice for advanced meditators—it's presented as essential to the path itself.
The Visuddhimagga's Redefinition
So how did we get from "go do jhana" to "jhana is optional"? The turning point came in the 5th century CE with Buddhaghosa's Visuddhimagga ("Path of Purification"), which became the authoritative meditation manual of Theravada Buddhism.
The Visuddhimagga departed from the suttas in several key ways. First, it redefined jhana as an extraordinarily difficult attainment requiring elaborate preparatory practices (kasina meditation, development of the 'counterpart sign' or nimitta) that appear nowhere in the suttas as prerequisites for jhana. As Thanissaro Bhikkhu notes in The Wings to Awakening, even breath meditation—the Buddha's most frequently recommended path to jhana—doesn't fit Buddhaghosa's framework:
The text tries to fit all other meditation methods into the mold of kasina practice, so that they too give rise to countersigns, but even by its own admission, breath meditation does not fit well into the mold ... What jhana means in the commentaries is something quite different from what it means in the Canon.
Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, himself trained in the Visuddhimagga-based system, acknowledges: "What the suttas say is not the same as what the Visuddhimagga says ... they are actually different." Gunaratana notes that Buddhaghosa invented several key meditation terms not found in the suttas, including "access concentration" (upacara samadhi) and "momentary concentration" (khanika samadhi)—the very concepts that would later justify bypassing jhana entirely.
First, the Visuddhimagga positioned access concentration as a prerequisite to jhana, and claimed that only 'one in a million' serious meditators could attain even this preliminary stage (XII.8)—strikingly at odds with the suttas' presentation of jhana as routine training for monastics.
Second, the Visuddhimagga separated samatha (tranquility/concentration) and vipassana (insight) into distinct paths, with the possibility of a "dry insight" (sukkha-vipassaka) practitioner who could attain liberation without jhana. This move, as Bhikkhu Sujato argues, represents "a distortion of the Suttas" since it "denies the necessity of jhana."
Scholar Grzegorz Polak, in his book Reexamining Jhana, concludes that "the orthodox theory of meditation presented in the Visuddhimagga can be seen as a final stage of the process that led to the fundamental reinterpretation of early Buddhist jhana meditation."
The Loss and Reinvention of Meditation
By the 19th century, meditation practice had largely disappeared from Theravada Buddhism. As Robert Sharf, professor of Buddhist Studies at UC Berkeley, argues, 'the actual practice of what we would call meditation rarely played a major role in Buddhist monastic life' during this period. When meditation was revived in Burma in the late 19th and early 20th centuries—a history Erik Braun documents in The Birth of Insight—it was reinvented in a new form: the dry insight practices (noting mental states, observing the rising and falling of the abdomen, body scanning) that now dominate Western vipassana.
An important caveat: this doesn't mean all meditation was lost. Kate Crosby's work Esoteric Theravada documents a different tradition called boran kammatthana ('the old practice') that persisted in Southeast Asia—'embodied, esoteric, and culturally regional.' This tradition involved visualization, mantra, and tantric-influenced practices that didn't fit the rationalist Buddhism that colonial-era reformers were constructing. It was actively suppressed as 'superstitious' in favor of text-based, 'pure' Buddhism. The current scholarly consensus, reflected in work by Braun, Sharf, and others, is that the specific vipassana methods now taught were developed or revived in the 18th-20th centuries, even if other contemplative traditions continued.
However, the Burmese reconstruction is well-documented. Braun's The Birth of Insight—described by Robert Sharf as 'the most authoritative study to date'—shows that Ledi Sayadaw (1846-1923) was a scholar steeped in the Abhidhamma and commentarial literature, but 'did not get his understanding of meditation from a particular teacher.' He developed his own practical method based on the theoretical framework the Visuddhimagga provided—particularly its allowance for a 'dry insight' path. Braun notes that while meditation was 'present in the curriculum,' it existed 'only as another topic of study ... Few monks meditated.'
David Chapman, who writes on Buddhist history at his blog Vividness, summarizes the broader picture in his essay "Theravada Reinvents Meditation":
Vipassana was completely lost for several hundred years, and then reinvented in the late 1800s and early 1900s by four people who may have had no contact with a living meditation tradition.
For the Mahasi lineage specifically, oral history cited in Jake Davis's Strong Roots states that The-Lon Sayadaw "put this textual guidance [the Visuddhimagga] into practice without a personal teacher to guide [him] in mindfulness practice."
These teachers inherited the Visuddhimagga's redefined, impossibly-difficult jhana. And they inherited its loophole: the "dry insight" path that allowed practitioners to bypass jhana using "momentary concentration."
The Burmese Innovation: Dry Insight Goes Mainstream
Mahasi Sayadaw (1904-1982) made several innovations that would shape global meditation practice. The most important, as Chapman notes:
Mahasi made several innovations. The most important was skipping samatha and the development of the jhanas (concentration states) and going directly to vipassana. He thought that samatha would take care of itself, if you practice [sic] vipassana correctly.
The result was a meditation system built on the Visuddhimagga's commentarial concepts rather than the suttas themselves. Bhikkhu Sujato coined the term "vipassanavada" to describe this doctrinal development, writing on SuttaCentral:
Vipassanavada is the doctrine that was developed in 20th century Burma, which divided meditation into the 'lesser' samatha practices, and the more 'advanced' vipassana, and then dismissed samatha, arguing that it is unnecessary or even dangerous. This is the theoretical foundation of many of the most influential modern meditation movements, especially Mahasi and Goenka ... I think historically this was a result of an attempt to rationalize meditation in the wake of the colonial challenge. In other words, the vipassanavada is a modern western-influenced idea, not an authentic tradition at all.
A note on fairness: Defenders of the dry insight approach aren't inventing things—they're following the Visuddhimagga and later commentaries, texts with genuine authority in Theravada Buddhism. As Nyanaponika Thera wrote in his preface to Mahasi Sayadaw's Thoughts on the Dhamma, Mahasi "was fully aware of the great significance of full concentration of mind in the jhanas, and he neither discouraged their cultivation nor belittled their value." The dry insight path was presented as an alternative entry point, not a rejection of jhana. But when jhana is described as nearly impossible, an “alternative” easily becomes a replacement.
This isn't original Buddhism. It's a 20th-century modernist reconstruction that claimed ancient authority.
The Practical Consequences
Does this historical detour matter practically? The evidence suggests it does—profoundly.
On the Dharma Overground forum, a practitioner shares his experience with dry insight practice:
I practiced 'dry insight' for several years (about 8) with very limited results. I'm now working to develop the jhanas ... I feel like I've given dry insight a good chance. I'm left feeling pretty frustrated ...
Daniel Ingram, author of Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha and a major figure in the pragmatic dharma movement, admits in his book:
I spent the first five years of my practice giving only a moderate amount of attention to the samatha jhanas and I now realize that this was probably in error.
On Dhamma Wheel forum, a practitioner describes the problem with pure noting practice:
This is exactly what was happening to me: I was seeing anicca in everything and the dhamma made sense, but this never changed anything. I was still getting lost in some perverted sexual fantasy, still having anger and ill will, irritability, etc ... Noting feels like I'm putting out the smoke, not the fire.
David Johnson, a TWIM practitioner who spent years in the Mahasi system, writes in The Path to Nibbana:
I tried that path for many years, experiencing most of the 'Insight Knowledges' or ñāṇas that are said to indicate progress in that method ... but the experiences I had with this method did not produce the personality change that the suttas indicate one should expect from meditation.
These accounts echo the Buddha's own statement in MN 14: without the pleasure of jhana, practitioners cannot find an alternative to sensual craving. They see impermanence intellectually but remain emotionally unchanged.
Bhikkhu Sujato reflects on patterns he's observed among students coming from different traditions:
Say, for example, Goenka technique. You know, like all of these things, obviously many people benefit from it. But where those people who don't benefit from it come, you'll typically get something like: 'I've been doing this practice for 10 years and my mind is like an emotional desert. I feel like my heart is completely void of love and compassion and I'm desperate that I need to find these things again which I used to feel, and after all these years of meditation they're gone. And so here I am looking to practice metta or practice something which will give me some juice and some life in my heart.'
These practitioners sense that something is missing. This essay argues that it's the absence of jhana, which provides the stable, pleasurable ground that makes practice sustainable.
Meanwhile, those who have found jhana describe a different experience. Leigh Brasington, who has taught jhana retreats for over two decades, notes: 'I have had a number of people come on retreat and tell me they felt their practice has stagnated. And suddenly here was something that opened it up.' Maija Haavisto, a longtime TWIM practitioner, writes: 'Entering the first jhāna for the first time permanently transformed some aspects of my inner emotional landscape and worldview.'
The Correction Underway
A growing number of teachers and scholars are now working to restore jhana to its central place in Buddhist practice.
Leigh Brasington, who studied with Ayya Khema, distinguishes between the impossibly-difficult "Visuddhimagga-style jhanas" and the more accessible "Sutta-style jhanas" that the early texts actually describe. His book Right Concentration has introduced thousands of Western practitioners to jhana practice.
Bhikkhu Sujato's scholarly work, particularly A History of Mindfulness and A Swift Pair of Messengers, provides detailed textual analysis showing how samatha and vipassana were meant to work together, not as separate paths.
Bhikkhu Analayo, in Early Buddhist Meditation Studies, offers perhaps the clearest scholarly summary: "Tranquillity and insight are closely interrelated in the early discourses, and it is only in later tradition that these came to be seen as two distinct paths of meditative practice ... Neither dry insight on its own nor absorption by itself can do justice to what the early discourses have to offer."
Rob Burbea, in Seeing That Frees, developed approaches that integrate concentration and insight, explicitly pushing back against the dry insight orthodoxy.
Even teachers trained in systems that de-emphasized jhana are now incorporating it. Michael Taft, influenced by Shinzen Young's noting-based system, now explicitly teaches jhana:
Jhanas are special states of deep absorption that make a wonderful setup for doing awakening practices ... Learning to do jhana is an excellent way to supercharge your vipassana practice.
The Tricycle article "The Jhanas: Perfect States of Concentration" documents this shift:
In early twentieth-century Burma, political and ideological wars were waged over the best route to nibbana: the monastic hierarchy sought a 'true' vipassana, or insight, path; concentration practices, including jhana, were relegated to the margins. A dry insight tradition, known as Mahasi Vipassana after the prominent Burmese teacher Mahasi Sayadaw, won out and has been transmitted to thousands of Westerners since the late 1960s. Teachers in the Thai Forest tradition spearheaded a jhana revival in the twentieth century, affirming that sincere and dedicated practitioners could most certainly attain these states.
The Thai Forest tradition deserves particular credit. Beginning with Ajahn Mun Bhuridatta in the early twentieth century, forest monks in Thailand rejected the scholarly, text-focused Buddhism that had come to dominate the monasteries and returned to the wilderness to practice meditation seriously. Ajahn Mun taught his students—including Ajahn Chah, Ajahn Maha Bua, and Ajahn Lee—that the jhanas were real, attainable, and central to the path. When Western seekers arrived in Thailand in the 1960s and 70s, they found living teachers who could guide them into these states. Ajahn Brahm, a student of Ajahn Chah, has become one of the most prominent voices insisting that jhana is accessible to dedicated lay practitioners—not just monastic virtuosos.
Jhourney offers meditation retreats focused on jhanas, claiming high success rates for novice meditators. As Asterisk magazine reported, their results "suggest that, as modern practitioners have claimed, self-inducing blissful states may be much easier than previously thought."
The broad pattern is clear: when teachers prioritize jhana and teach it directly, students tend to get it—challenging the Visuddhimagga's "one in a million" claim.
What This Means for Practitioners
If this historical analysis is correct, several implications follow:
1. The "jhana is optional" teaching has no basis in the suttas. The Buddha consistently presented jhana as integral to the path, not as an advanced optional technique. The loophole of "dry insight" was created by commentators over a thousand years after the Buddha's death.
2. The difficulty of jhana has been exaggerated. The Visuddhimagga's "one in a million" claim and its elaborate preparatory requirements don't match the suttas' presentation of jhana as standard monastic training. Teachers like Leigh Brasington report that many practitioners can access jhana states on retreat.
3. Concentration and insight are not separate paths. As Thanissaro Bhikkhu writes: "Samatha and vipassana were used together to master jhana and then—based on jhana—were developed even further to give rise to the end of mental defilement." The separation into distinct "paths" is a later development.
4. "Momentary concentration" is a workaround, not an original teaching. The concept was invented by Buddhaghosa, not the Buddha. Using it to justify skipping jhana entirely is building practice on commentarial foundations rather than the suttas themselves.
There's also a more speculative possibility worth considering: the 'Dark Night' may be partly iatrogenic. The difficult stages of insight (dukkha ñanas) that plague many dry insight practitioners may be exacerbated—or even partly caused—by practicing insight without the stabilizing and pleasurable foundation of jhana. The Buddha said jhana pleasure was necessary to replace sensual pleasure; without it, practitioners may be trying to deconstruct the self without a safe alternative to inhabit.
Conclusion: Recovering What Was Lost
The meditation system most Western practitioners have inherited is the product of a complex historical process: the Buddha's original teachings were reinterpreted by Buddhaghosa, lost for centuries, and then reconstructed by Burmese teachers working from texts without living guidance. What emerged was a "dry insight" approach that treats concentration as optional—precisely backwards from what the suttas actually teach.
This doesn't mean that noting practice or other vipassana techniques are worthless. Many practitioners have benefited from them. But it does suggest that these practices may work better as part of a complete system that includes jhana, rather than as standalone techniques.
The Buddha's original prescription was balance: samatha and vipassana as "a swift pair of messengers," concentration and insight working together. As he said in the Dhammapada:
There's no jhana for one with no discernment,
no discernment for one with no jhana.
But one with both jhana & discernment:
he's on the verge of Unbinding.
—Dhammapada 372
Concentration developed fully becomes jhana: the stable ground from which insight can do its work. This is the heart of Buddhist meditation: not a technique but the recognition that concentration enables stability, and stability enables liberation.
It's time to restore it.
Sources and Further Reading
Primary Scholarly Sources:
- Thanissaro Bhikkhu, "One Tool Among Many: The Place of Vipassana in Buddhist Practice" (Access to Insight, 1997)
- Bhikkhu Sujato, A History of Mindfulness (Santipada, 2012) — free PDF
- Bhikkhu Sujato, A Swift Pair of Messengers (Santipada, 2010) — free PDF
- Grzegorz Polak, Reexamining Jhana: Towards a Critical Reconstruction of Early Buddhist Soteriology (UMCS, 2011) — free PDF
- Erik Braun, The Birth of Insight: Meditation, Modern Buddhism, and the Burmese Monk Ledi Sayadaw (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
- Keren Arbel, Early Buddhist Meditation: The Four Jhanas as the Actualization of Insight (Routledge, 2017)
- Bhikkhu Analayo, Early Buddhist Meditation Studies (Barre Center for Buddhist Studies, 2017) — free PDF
- Kate Crosby, Esoteric Theravada: The Story of the Forgotten Meditation Tradition of Southeast Asia (Shambhala, 2020)
Accessible Overviews:
- David Chapman, "Theravada Reinvents Meditation" (Vividness, 2011)
- Bhikkhu Sujato, "How is 'Vipassanavada' defined?" (SuttaCentral discussion forum, 2020)
- Bhikkhu Sujato, YouTube — includes observations on Goenka technique practitioners
- "The Jhanas: Perfect States of Concentration" Tricycle (2024)
- Nadia Asparouhova, "Manufacturing Bliss" Asterisk (2024)
Practitioner Resources:
- Leigh Brasington, Right Concentration: A Practical Guide to the Jhanas (Shambhala, 2015)
- Rob Burbea, Seeing That Frees (Hermes Amara, 2014)
- Michael Taft, "How to Jhana" (Deconstructing Yourself, 2020)
- Jhourney — secular jhana retreats
Key Suttas:
- MN 14 Cūḷadukkhakkhandha Sutta — Buddha says jhana pleasure is necessary to abandon sensual craving (Sujato trans.; Bodhi trans. quoted in article)
- MN 36 Mahāsaccaka Sutta — Buddha's own path to awakening through jhana
- AN 9.36 Jhāna Sutta — "The first jhana is the path to enlightenment"
Footnotes
[1] In the Visuddhimagga's system, meditation proceeds through stages of mental imagery. When concentrating on a kasina (a physical meditation device like a colored disk), the meditator first sees the object itself, then a mental image of it (the 'acquired sign'), and finally a purified, luminous mental image called the 'counterpart sign' (patibhaga-nimitta). Absorption into this counterpart sign is what Buddhaghosa defines as entering jhana. He attempted to apply this same framework to all meditation methods, including breath meditation—but the suttas describe no such system.
[2] 'Access concentration' (upacara samadhi) refers to a level of concentration just short of full jhana—the mind is settled but not yet absorbed. 'Momentary concentration' (khanika samadhi) is even lighter, arising moment-to-moment during insight practice. Neither term appears in the suttas. But once these categories existed, teachers could argue that practitioners only needed momentary concentration to do insight practice—bypassing jhana entirely. This became the theoretical foundation for the 'dry insight' (sukkha-vipassana) approach that dominates modern vipassana.
