Jhāna and Samādhi — The Path of Letting Go, Not Deepening

The harder you try to concentrate, the further away it gets

Reference: Ven. Dr. Madawela Punnaji, ‘Ariya Magga Bhavana Level I’

If you’ve been wanting to “enter jhāna,” that very wanting may be what’s keeping you from it.

That might sound strange.

When meditators try to go deeper, the instinct is usually to concentrate harder. Fix your attention on the breath. Push away distractions. Hold the mind steady on a single object. This, many of us assume, is what “deepening” means.

But Ven. Dr. Madawela Punnaji challenges this assumption at its root.

“There is no concentration in this meditation. Concentration requires great effort. Our purpose is to stop concentrating, to keep the mind empty and calm, and to relax the body.”

The effort to concentrate creates tension in the mind. And that tension, the teacher suggests, may be precisely what closes the door to jhāna.

1 | What is samādhi, really?

“Samādhi” and “jhāna” — every meditator meets these two words eventually, and they are often used interchangeably. They shouldn’t be. Let’s untangle them.

The Pāli word samādhi comes from sammā (rightly) and ādhi (to place) — the sense of placing the mind rightly onto something, settling it there. It is commonly translated as “concentration” or “unification of mind.”

But Ven. Punnaji’s reading is somewhat different.

For him, samādhi is not a measure of how strong your concentration is. It is a state of psychological health — a condition in which the mind is no longer dependent on external stimulation for its sense of ease, and in which stillness arises from within.

Consider where you normally go looking for peace.

You need a particular playlist to unwind. A good meal lifts your mood. A few minutes without your phone and something feels vaguely wrong. There’s nothing inherently harmful in any of that. But if the source of your ease is always outside — it disappears the moment the stimulation does.

Samādhi points in the opposite direction. A stillness that doesn’t depend on anything outside. Not boredom in the absence of stimulation, but sufficiency — the sense that nothing needs to be added.

2 | Jhāna is not something you build. It’s something that falls away.

Jhāna — dhyāna in Sanskrit, chan in Chinese, the root of the word Zen — refers, in the Theravāda tradition, to four distinct stages of meditative absorption.

Here is where a common misunderstanding takes hold.

The four jhānas are not a process of accumulation — adding more focus, more depth, more stillness with each stage. They are a process of falling away. Coarser elements of mental activity drop off, one by one, as the mind becomes less and less involved in its own workings.

This reframes everything. “I need to go deeper” becomes the wrong question. The right question is: what am I holding onto that I could let go of?

The first jhāna contains five factors: vitakka (directing attention), vicāra (sustaining attention), pīti (a quality of rapture or joy), sukha (a quiet sense of ease), and ekaggatā (one-pointedness of mind).

Notice that vitakka and vicāra — the mental acts of directing and sustaining attention — are still present. But here is the key point: at this stage, they are no longer deliberate effort. They are operating automatically. The meditator has moved away from sensory craving, and pīti and sukha have arisen naturally from within. That is the threshold of the first jhāna.

In the second jhāna, vitakka and vicāra fall silent.

The acts of directing and sustaining drop away entirely. The mind rests in the object without needing to be steered there. Concentration is happening — but without anyone concentrating.

In the third jhāna, pīti fades.

That quality of rapture — the upwelling, almost excited quality of joy — subsides. What remains is sukha, held within upekkhā (equanimity) and sati (mindfulness). The high is gone; what’s left is a quieter, more stable contentment.

In the fourth jhāna, sukha too falls away.

The very capacity to evaluate experience as pleasant or unpleasant disappears. What remains is pure upekkhā and ekaggatā — a complete neutrality, an extraordinarily even quality of awareness.

To put it plainly:

• First → Second jhāna: directing and sustaining drop away
• Second → Third jhāna: rapture drops away
• Third → Fourth jhāna: pleasant feeling drops away

Nothing is added at any stage. Only the coarser falls away, leaving the subtler.

Which means the one thing a practitioner can do is not deepen — but get out of the way.

3 | How samādhi and jhāna relate

A brief map.

Samādhi is the wider term — an umbrella covering all states in which the mind is stable and unified, including jhāna.

Jhāna is the more specific territory within that umbrella. It begins where a particular threshold is crossed: the point at which mental effort becomes unnecessary, where the mind sustains itself without being steered.

All jhāna is samādhi, but not all samādhi is jhāna.

And in Ven. Punnaji’s reading, neither word should be understood primarily in terms of concentration. Both point toward the same thing: freedom from sensory dependency — a stillness that no longer needs the outside world to supply it.

4 | The wanting itself is the obstacle

Let’s return to where we started.

“I want to enter jhāna.” “I want to go deeper.” — Where does that wanting come from?

A desire for a special experience. A wish to reach a profound state. Or perhaps just the need to feel like the practice is working. Is some version of that present?

Ven. Punnaji describes jhāna as “the joy that arises from the withdrawal from sensual pleasure.” The desire for a jhāna experience may itself be a form of sensory craving — just more refined, more spiritually dressed.

The logic runs like this: the effort to concentrate generates tension, and tension obstructs samādhi. The intention to “deepen” tries to manufacture the very vitakka and vicāra that the second jhāna naturally releases — which means that intention is pulling in the opposite direction.

The paradox is that the only useful intention is the intention to let go.

Does your practice ever touch that? Not reaching for something, not holding anything together — just quietly being present with what is already here.

You may already know what that feels like.

In summary

Samādhi is not the strength of your concentration. It is a state of psychological health — an inner stillness that no longer depends on external stimulation.

Jhāna is what unfolds within that stillness, as coarser elements of mental activity fall away one by one. From the first to the fourth, the mind becomes progressively less involved in its own operation.

Both point not toward effort, but toward release.

Having mapped the words, the most useful thing may be to set the map down — and sit.

This article draws on the teachings of Ven. Dr. Madawela Punnaji. Other articles in this series are also available.

Reference: Ven. Dr. Madawela Punnaji, Ariya Magga Bhavana: The Sublime Eightfold Way, Level I. Buddhist Maha Vihara, Kuala Lumpur (2018). ISBN 978–983–3896–06–6