BrokenBones wrote: ↑Mon May 03, 2021 3:11 am
Perhaps 'hard jhana' is not the actual way the Buddha taught and that they are wrong, not bad people or bad monks... just wrong about this aspect that has altered the teachings since the Visuddhimagga and probably before. At least the Vimuttimagga (500 years before the Vism.) dismissed the fairy lights nonsense out of hand but even though it concurs with what I'm saying, I don't look to it for authority; I take the Suttas... has any of this ever occurred to you?
An appeal to commentarial authority from a subset of the Buddha's original teachings is hardly convincing. Sidetracking the conversation is a common tactic with the jhana argument. You can take the 'body of mind' with its concomitant toes as making absolute sense to you but I'll just smile and shake my head.
I'm of the opinion that "Hard Jhana" is a bit of a misnomer. The vism. and vimk. don't appear to describe what people call "hard jhana" either. The teachers of "hard jhana" or not wrong though and neither are the teachers of "jhana lite". The Vism. does appear to corroborate the views of both "camps" in this debate.
What I'm more interested in here is the Non-percipient devas.
It's not conclusive from the evidence that the fourth jhana is without perception. Rather, it appears to the contrary, as evidenced by the simile of the cloth wrap. Awareness is enveloping "the body" (whatever you take that to mean) rather than being in a state of non-perception.
Rather, it would appear that a state of non-perception is one of the modes of being accessible via the fourth jhana but is placed lower than the formless attainments in terms of value. SN 22:47
"The five faculties, monks, continue as they were. And with regard to them the well-instructed disciple of the noble ones abandons ignorance and gives rise to clear knowing. Owing to the fading of ignorance and the arising of clear knowing, (the thoughts) — 'I am,' 'I am this,' 'I shall be,' 'I shall not be,' 'I shall be possessed of form,' 'I shall be formless,' 'I shall be percipient (conscious),' 'I shall be non-percipient,' and 'I shall be neither percipient nor non-percipient' — do not occur to him."
Although a non-percipient being willed by means of self is indeed rather refined, it is not the goal and resides on the side of annihilationism. However, it does NOT mean that the fourth jhana is without perception. If that were true, then then there would be no perceptions of form would be surmounted to gain singularity of perception in the formless.