[simile for] 4th jhana: ... just as if a man were

> > sitting wrapped from head to foot with a white
> cloth
> > so that there would be no part of his body to
> which
> > the white cloth did not extend.

[lars:]

> I don't know about the commentaries, but Hellmuth
> Hecker, one of Germany's
> oldest Buddhists and supposedly somebody with
> experience in this field,
> explains the white cloth as being the manomaya-kaaya
> which completely covers the
> physical body. He explains that all this suffusing
> and permating in the Jhanas
> is for the purpose of "meditating" sense-desire out
> of the body, so that one
> looses all ability to ever look for happyness by way
> of the flesh-body.
>

[fk:]
manomaya-kaaya = mind-illusion-body?

I don't completely disagree with Hecker, but my
opinion is that [coarser] sense-desires have to be let
go of before one can even begin to feel or hope to
achieve the [more refined and subtle] mental and
physical happiness that suffuses the entire volume of
the body in the first jhana, because otherwise the
mental agitation that accompanies craving for coarser
sense pleasures would preclude the deep relaxation
that seems necessary for the pleasant side effects of
jhanic absorption to arise . It's not only buddhist
meditation, but from doing taiji, qigong, yoga, when
the mind and body become completely relaxed, breathing
becomes slow, subtle, deep, relaxed, it feels like the
breath itself is suffusing the entire volume of the
body, unimpeded, and sometimes accompanied with
pleasant physical body happiness.

That's why the details of the first two jhana similes
seem to correspond to physical experience of the
jhana, and this is why I'm puzzled by the lack of
detail of the 4th jhana simile. For one thing, a mummy
would feel the white cloth only on the surface of the
body, unlike the complete suffusion through the entire
volume of the body as with the first 3 jhanas.

-fk


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