Defining Jhāna as Meditation

In this in-depth teaching dialogue, Vince Fakhoury Horn and Brian Newman explore the full spectrum of jhāna practice, from deep Pa-Auk style absorption to lighter Sutta-based jhānic factors. Drawing on their own training and decades of practice, they unpack how different Buddhist and contemplative traditions—such as Zen, Dzogchen, Mahamudra, Vipassanā, and Advaita Vedanta—each express unique “flavors” of jhāna, while pointing to the same underlying meditative pattern.

🔗 Key Links

* Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha by Daniel M. Ingram

* Leigh Brasington (teacher)

* Kenneth Folk (teacher)

* Sayalay Susīlā of Appamāda Vihārī (teacher)

* Pa‑Auk Sayadaw Monastery (tradition)

* The Jhāna Community

💬 Transcript

Vince: The Flavors of Jhāna… I can’t remember where I first heard this term. I think it was from you or from Kenneth [Folk].

Brian: Maybe we should start with that. Yeah—so, Vince, you came to me and said… actually, no, I said to you, “What should we call the retreat?” And you were like, “Hey man, you’re the one who wanted to do it in Portugal—what should we call it?” And you put it back on me. And I said, “Can we call it the name of my half-written book?” So folks, this is all coming from a story that’s part of a lineage, and I promised we’d tell some of those today. This is a Kenneth Folk story, and it’s his way of demonstrating jhāna on a spectrum.

Kenneth says this: imagine you’ve got a bunch of strawberries, and you crush them into a pure strawberry smoothie. If you drink that smoothie, what would it taste like? The answer is: it would taste 100% like strawberries—because that’s all that went into it. Now imagine a glass of clear water and a really strong strawberry extract. If you drop one single concentrated drop into the water, what would that taste like? And the answer is: it would taste like strawberries, even with just that tiny drop.

And Kenneth’s punchline is: “It all tastes like strawberry, motherfucker.” I believe that’s the punchline. His point is: it doesn’t matter where you are on the spectrum of Jhāna. On one end you have the Pa-Auk tradition, which would have you so absorbed that a gun could go off by your head. On the lighter end, you have Leigh Brasington, who teaches Jhānic factors, a very Sutta-based approach, or even less-absorbed types of Jhāna. Kenneth’s point is: it all tastes like Jhāna. It’s just different flavors. How much of the flavor do you need to recognize it?

His point is: even one tiny part in a million parts of water would still taste like strawberries, so to speak. And if I’m misrepresenting this, let me know. But that’s how I took the story when Kenneth told it to me.

Vince: Yeah, I have a similar take on what he was teaching—that he was pointing to this sort of depth dimension of jhāna, using the strawberry analogy to show that these states are patterns of mind. Even if you experience them at great depth of absorption or at lighter focus, it’s still the same pattern. You can still recognize it. And that’s what we’re calling “jhāna,” essentially.

Brian: Yeah. So that’s the flavors part. Let me raise a question to you then, Vince: What is jhāna? We’ve got this interesting word with the weird diacritic over the A, and my understanding has changed over the years. How do you view jhāna these days, Vince?

Vince: Yeah, it’s changed for me too—and maybe the change itself is interesting. I imagine that’s the case for you as well, Brian. Maybe for everyone who takes up jhāna practice.

At first you experience jhāna in the very specific way you’re practicing it: you’ve got whatever tradition you’re working in, the meditation object you’re working with, the instructions you’ve been given, and a bunch of ideas about what’s supposed to happen—what constitutes jhāna. And you’re using all of that to try to get into the states being described in that system.

For me, when I first started jhāna practice, it was with Leigh Brasington. He was the first Jhāna teacher I worked with. This was 20 years ago. I went on retreat… sadly, I left my sick wife at home in our apartment because I didn’t want to get sick at the beginning of a Jhāna retreat. That’s how self-absorbed I was at the time: I left her there suffering so I could go—

Brian: So you could go get concentrated.

Vince: Yeah. So that should explain the emphasis on wishing all beings to be concentrated. That’s what I needed more of.

But yeah, for me it was working within Leigh’s system. Like you said, the emphasis there is on the breath and the jhānic factors, and noticing when they get strong enough that you can turn toward them and get absorbed in them—like getting absorbed in the strawberry.

Long story short, as I expanded to other practices—doing more vipassanā, noting style (which I now call vipassanā jhāna)—and as I worked more deeply with other techniques, I started to notice there’s a deep pattern or structure that’s the same regardless of the practice, the object, or the conceptual definitions of the state. Something consistent still happens.

For me now, I consider jhāna to just be meditation—which is literally what the word means. It comes from dhyāna in Sanskrit, which is also translated as “Zen.”

Brian: So it goes Dhyāna → Chán → Zen in China. And the Zen guys diss Jhāna all day long, but the name “Zen” literally means Jhāna, which is hilarious.

Vince: They just don’t talk about it because they’re being it, I think.

So yeah—that’s how I understand jhāna now. It’s just… this is what we’re doing: meditation. Whatever you meditate on changes the contours of the state and the experience. Whatever ideals you have change your relationship to what’s arising. For some people a state seems inadequate—a warm-up to something deeper. For others, that same state is the whole thing, and they rest or abide in it. So for me, the world of jhāna has opened up and expanded a lot over time.

Brian: You said there’s some similar quality across states. Could you say more about what that quality is?

Vince: Yeah—let’s explore that. It gets tricky. I learned it first through the noting maps, so I tend to describe things that way, even though that doesn’t capture the universal quality. But the stuff you’ve done with eye posture—pointing to that—there’s something there. Regardless of which state I’m in, the eyes seem to move through this sort of progression.

Brian: Yeah.

Vince: That seems universal.

Brian: Yeah.

Vince: The aperture of attention—how broad or open attention is, how much it includes the field of experience—that also seems to be a chief characteristic across states and objects.

Brian: Totally. The aperture, the width of the jhāna. I think Ingram also uses that phrase. It’s a weird term, like, “Width? How do I measure the width?”—but it’s basically the width of the visual field, what’s happening in that space when the eyes are closed.

Vince: Yeah. What else is similar?

I was going to say the body, but the experience of the body changes a lot depending on where one is in the depth dimension. Maybe you could talk about that, having experienced those really deep, exclusive states where the body is described as dropping off or dissolving.

Brian: Sure. So, I’ve been doing jhāna for 15 years—probably a little less than you, Vince—and I think we’ve come to a similar conclusion: we’re really just talking about meditation. “Jhāna” might sound like a specific technique, but it’s really more than that.

Like you, I’ve come to feel that jhāna just means meditation. From that perspective, when we call a retreat The Flavors of Jhāna, it’s the flavors of meditation. Our meditation community is called The Meditation Community. “Jhāna” just meaning meditation feels totally appropriate.

The more I teach, the more I see that while there are eight discrete jhānic states pitched as a linear progression—starting with the first and going to the eighth—the practitioner’s actual experience may differ. On any given day, depending on emotional state, a different jhāna might be more accessible. For those of us waking up in a lot of suffering or dukka-ñāṇa, a blissful third jhāna can be surprisingly available. You don’t necessarily have to start at the first to get to the third. You can drop right into it. Many practitioners can do a cold start into the fifth Jjhāna.

Follow that to its logical conclusion, and we can ask: Is it possible whole meditation traditions have been built around a single Jhānic state? And my answer is: “Absolutely Yes.”

You and I were talking about this the other day—what if someone reified the sixth Jhāna as the best state? Many meditation teachers teach “the best thing”—so imagine a teacher who thinks sixth Jhāna is the maximum, the only, the ultimate. What would that look like? I think we agreed it would look a lot like Ramana Maharshi—Advaita. “I am the world-creator, I am the world-destroyer, I am pure, infinite, boundless consciousness.”

So my current thinking is: the fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth Jhānas could all be reified into entire traditions. And if you really love sixth Jhāna—yeah, go do Advaita. That’s your cup of tea. And similar things could be said for the fifth, seventh, and eighth.

Vince: Yeah, that’s really interesting. So you’re describing how entire practice traditions might center around specific states as starting points, then explore those states or the surrounding domains.

Brian: Exactly.

And we’re going to teach eye postures, folks. Briefly put: it’s all about aperture. A tight aperture is a first-Jhāna eye posture; a little bigger for second; a little bigger for third; and a really big, expansive aperture for fourth.

For the formless realms, this sparks curiosity. You start noticing eye postures in other traditions—Six Yogas, Dzogchen, Mahamudra. Where do the eyes go in Dzogchen? If you look at monks practicing Dzogchen, they often have eyes open, darting around subtlely. That maps to a distinct eye posture.

Each practice seems to have a discrete eye posture, most of which correlate to a Jhānic state. That’s how I think about non-jhānic practices these days: what’s the closest Jhānic feel, and what’s the eye posture doing? I know this sounds esoteric—did that sound esoteric?

Vince: Yeah—but for me, it also brings up something very practical. In the Dzogchen tradition, when I worked with Lama Lena, her basic instructions were to take a pebble or rock and, in Shiné (calm abiding), you focus on the rock. Then there’s another phase where you remove the pebble and continue focusing.

To me, that gets at the Dzogchen eye posture. Previously there was something to focus on; now you focus without the object. That’s a practical example of an open, spacious, but stable and focused posture.

Brian: And I love that. What would that be called? Samadhi without object.

Vince: Yeah—shamatha without a sign.

Brian: Right. And we don’t really talk about that in the Theravada lineage—we always have a sign. So this is fascinating. It’s deeply aligned with yogic traditions where they have objectless samadhi, which feels totally different. Looking at something, then taking it away and continuing to look—what is that other than eye posture?

My story on eye posture comes from a deep lineage practitioner. One of my main teachers, Sayalay Susila, was the chief attendant for Pa-Auk Sayadaw for a couple decades. She cooked his food and was extremely close to him and his teachings.

I learned eye postures from Kenneth Folk. I never felt the need to bring that up with my Pa-Auk teacher—she’s very traditional, and I didn’t want to introduce something that might make her uncomfortable. But one day I accidentally mentioned using eye postures and said something about “looking toward something.” She said in shock, “You’re looking with your eyes?” Eyes closed, but still “looking.” She repeated, “With your actual eyes? Not some internal, drifty thing?” And I said, “Yeah. I’m taking a gaze.”

And she said, “If you’re doing it already, keep doing it.”

I thought she’d chastise me. But she essentially blessed the practice. So even in the Pa-Auk tradition, I got a little wink.

Vince: Nice. I had a similar experience, although it turned out differently, with Daniel Ingram. I think I’ve shared this with you.

I wanted to explore the kasina object using a circular orb as a visual focus point. Daniel wrote the Fire Kasina book and talked about fire kasina a lot, but I wasn’t into the flame. I wanted to do it on my computer or something.

His instructions were: take the kasina object, close your eyes, see the after-image or eidetic image, focus on that—the internal nimitta—and eventually you get absorbed.

I understood that, but for some reason I wanted to keep my eyes open. Maybe it was rebellion. But what I found was fascinating: moving through the third Jhāna—what he calls “the murk”—I experienced the kasina breaking apart and dissolving. Eventually, my eyes settled so much that they were barely open—just a tiny slit.

At some point it shifted into fourth Jhāna, where all I saw was the color. Where I was looking and how my eyes were positioned mattered. I wasn’t engineering it—I was just moving through the state. Suddenly my eyes were closed the perfect amount and aimed in just the right spot so that all I saw was the color from the kasina. And I was completely absorbed.

Brian: That’s exactly what’s supposed to happen.

Vince: Yeah.

Brian: That’s full absorption. Beautiful. With eyes open! Amazing.

Vince: And I realized: “Ah, my teacher’s wrong. You don’t only have to do this with eyes closed using the internal image. You can work with the external image the entire time.”

Brian: Yes. Absolutely. Maybe that’s a good transition.

Vince: Sorry, Daniel.

Brian: No—we all love Daniel and have great respect for what he’s done. It’s good to have people trying things and reporting what works.

Vince: Yeah.

Brian: Maybe we could talk a bit about the many concentration objects, and what we’ll be offering on the retreat.

Vince: Yeah, that’s cool.

Brian: So folks—there are traditionally 40 concentration objects. The breath is one. The brahmavihārās—like loving-kindness—are included. Contemplating the foulness of the body—pus, urine, feces—is included. Then you have all the kasinas, which are really traditional. Contemplating the dharmas is another.

There’s this premise that the list stops at 40, but in Buddhism there’s always a sutta that contradicts the list. There’s one where the Buddha meets a person and sees—through past-life vision—that the man had been a jeweler. So when the man asked for a concentration object, the Buddha gave him a beautiful red ruby, knowing he’d love it. So we could say the ruby is the 41st object.

Really, I think the takeaway is: you can choose anything as a concentration object.

Vince, maybe later you can share your story about taking the number “1” as a concentration object for a whole retreat. What’s the sign of the number “1”? That’s fascinating.

The breath is wonderful because you always have it. The breath produces a nimitta—this visual sign—that allows full absorption. Some objects don’t produce a nimitta at that level.

For our retreat on January 2nd, Vince and I are very non-dogmatic. We like openness and exploration. We’ll invite participants to choose their object. I’ll teach from the breath, because that’s my preference, but you’re welcome to choose a kasina, flame, water, whatever.

Vince, anything to add about keeping it open for people?

Vince: Yeah—this is an interesting experiment. Most concentration retreats—both of ours included—usually have everyone working with one object. Here, we’re all focusing on one thing, but that thing can differ person to person. It’s a balance: diverse possible objects, and the universal experience of deepening with your object.

We’ll focus on the universal patterns and challenges that arise with concentration, regardless of the object—jewel, number, breath. My hope is that the deepening people feel on retreat—the extra support—doesn’t get lost just because people are working with diverse objects. Instead, it might create a more complex field of concentration. Like the complexity of wine.

Brian: Yeah—complex harmonics.

Vince: Exactly. There’s complexity because of the differences coming together. In the Jhāna community, with Shamatha-Jhāna, Vipassanā-Jhāna, and Metta-Jhāna, I’ve noticed people dipping into multiple groups get more of the flavor of practice by exploring different objects.

Brian: That’s fascinating. And the wine metaphor is lovely. Complex harmonics make interesting music.

Should we talk about breadth and depth? Some teachers have strong ideas about what Jhāna is—and I respect classical traditions—but you and I take a more open approach. What do we want to say about breadth and depth?

Vince: Yeah. I’ve struggled with this over the years. As a layperson, I didn’t go the monastic route because of my girlfriend—now wife. I didn’t want to lose that relationship. So I was always doing this oscillation of daily practice and retreat life. An hour or two a day, then a month on retreat, then back. Plunging into the depths, coming back, plunging again.

It was fruitful, but also confusing. “How do I bridge these two realities?” It could feel schizophrenic shifting back and forth.

Working with Kenneth’s Social Noting helped me see: I need to connect these states across relationships. I need to be present in relationship, not just alone in silence. I needed to bring practice to everything—and be more okay with not being in deeply concentrated states all the time.

I’ve laughed thinking about your experience—going from hardcore Pa-Auk retreat to being in Tokyo with your wife, trying to maintain depth in an environment not designed for that. Maybe you could talk about trying to maintain depth in that context.

Brian: Just a general comment: if your partner is mad at you because of how you meditate, you’re probably not doing it right. Something’s out of sync.

For a while I tried to live like this: I needed to be the best Western Jhāna practitioner ever. That meant meditating four or five hours a day while having a full-time job and a marriage. You can sustain that for a while. But practically it means: when your wife goes to the bathroom at dinner, you drop into the ānāpāna spot. And if you’re thinking about that during dinner, you’re actually thinking about meditating while eating. You might even touch the spot for a moment during the meal.

Your wife notices. She says, “Stop meditating.” She knows your moods—she knows when you’re meditating even if you think you’re hiding it. That’s failure mode. Not a good move.

So yes, full absorption takes time on the cushion. But we also have lives. So what’s the happy medium for laypeople?

One of my dear teachers is Tina Rasmussen, my first Jhāna teacher. Tina wouldn’t think what you and I teach is “Jhāna,” and some of the practices in the community she wouldn’t call Jhāna—they’re too far off the Pa-Auk rails. I understand and respect that. Leigh would probably have his own views.

All these teachers have opinions. What you and I want to offer is: we hold all of it. We agree with all of it, disagree with all of it, accept all of it. It all fits somewhere on the spectrum. And we hope to have teachers in the community who can orient students anywhere on the spectrum.

Did a month at Forest Refuge? Go for full absorption and nimitta—why not? Beautiful. Living as a layperson with 20 minutes in the morning? Maybe get some nice pīti going, per Leigh’s instructions. Very accessible in 15 minutes.

What’s going to make you feel good? Jhāna is an episodic intervention into suffering. That’s how the Buddha taught it. In the suttas, he entered Jhāna at the end of his life because he was sick. That’s how it was taught—and how we still practice it.

Vince: You mentioned the spectrum. We’ve talked about the depth dimension—visually I imagine depth as vertical. As you go down, you get deeper.

But I’ve also been thinking about another axis: breadth. If depth is vertical and breadth is horizontal, you get a kind of grid.

Pa-Auk sits in the lower-left quadrant: very exclusive and very deep. Hyperfocused on the object.

What I’ve been doing for the last decade is moving toward the opposite side: the more inclusive dimension of Jhāna. I find you can go very deep there too. Maybe the Zen tradition emphasizes this best—practice and life integrated into one, with no preference for posture or context. Your whole life is the meditation.

If everything you do becomes the meditation, then you can have an inclusive awareness that doesn’t get knocked off by changing content.

Brian: Say more about inclusive vs. exclusive. In your guided sit today, you talked about “may concentration arise for all,” and even did some visualization. Was that inclusive or exclusive?

Vince: Yeah—that was toward inclusiveness. Including imaginal capacity—working off the breath rails you’d already set. Also including a sense of others. And from Ken Wilber, the integral philosopher, we can include core perspectives: first-person (which is always included), second-person (others), and third-person (the external world).

In the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, mindfulness is instructed to be established “internally and externally.” That’s already pointing to inclusiveness.

For the last while, I’ve been sitting 24 minutes a day outside on my back porch. It’s very inclusive—eyes open, ears open, body open. Sitting with Emily and the neighborhood sounds. That’s inclusive practice.

Brian: Beautiful. And the proximate cause of concentration is… concentration. We say that jokingly. People sometimes say they feel more concentrated around me—I think that’s because I’m including them. I’m inviting them into my space, and they’re giving some back, and we’re building it together.

My natural resting place on the spectrum, and Vince’s resting place, are at totally opposite ends. That’s actually great for students—you have teachers at both ends who can cover the middle.

I’m 100% exclusive—that’s how I was taught. One of the main corrections I give to Pa-Auk students is that they’ve been influenced by you, Vince—or by The Mind Illuminated—and they’re leaving 10% awareness in the room to note things. No. You don’t leave awareness in the room. You put 100% here. That’s revelatory to people.

There’s a renunciate vibe to absorption. I have that. Vince, on the other hand, took Kenneth’s social meditation and ran with it. I took Kenneth’s eye postures and ran with them. We each took something from Kenneth and expanded it in different directions.

Our natural resting places make us strong teaching partners—we cover the entire spectrum from opposite ends.

Vince: Yeah. But we can meet in the middle, which is important. We both have experience on the other side.

We’ll do Social Meditation on the retreat too—playing with extending attention to include more.

The core difference between exclusive and inclusive practice often comes down to: are you saying “no” to experience outside the object, or are you saying “yes”? Or is the object defined broadly enough to include everything?

In that sense, all practice works with the spectrum. Even in Pa-Auk, I imagine there are times when something arises that keeps you from 100% focus here, and at some point you have to turn toward it and deal with it so you can come back. Is that accurate?

Brian: The most radical Pa-Auk teacher would say you don’t even do that. They won’t acknowledge the hindrance—that would be an admission of defeat or like feeding it. You simply focus here.

That said, the more modern Pa-Auk teachers talk about transformation vs. transcendence. With Jhāna, we aim for transcendence—intensely ecstatic states beyond normal human experience. But sometimes that doesn’t work—maybe we’re hungry or hate our boss. Hindrances pull us away.

When that happens, we can’t focus here. So the modern teachers say: shift from transcendence into transformation—personality transformation. Work with the hindrances to free up energy to return to ānāpāna. Any hindrance takes energy that could be used to focus here. “Focus here always and forever, even when you don’t feel like it,” is the message of the tradition.

Vince: So this is cool. I think what will happen on retreat is you and I will offer perspectives from opposite sides of the spectrum, and the exploration will be around figuring out how to work with more inclusive versus more exclusive focus—and finding your sweet spot.

I’ve never done a Jhāna retreat that wasn’t full noble silence, so it’s novel for me to go deep while also having space to be more inclusive. I think it’ll be fruitful for us.

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