Things as They’ve Come to Be
August 29, 2005
Sometimes at the end of suttas, when the Buddha has been teaching the monks, he concludes by telling them to go meditate. Actually, what he says is to go do jhana, because that’s the kind of meditation he taught. Some people think that jhana is only one of two types of meditation he taught, that he also taught vipassana, but there’s never any passage where he tells anybody to go do vipassana. It’s always, “Go do jhana.” This is because he saw jhana as a practice where you develop both tranquility and insight together. In other words, you need to develop tranquility and insight just to get into jhana to begin with, to get into good states of concentration. Then when you’ve developed that concentration, you can use it to develop qualities of tranquility and insight even further.