Vipassana Thai-Eng

10 7 Vipassānā Meditation
tranquility meditation or calmness meditation. Siddhattha,
after he renounced the world, became an ascetic, became a
samana. He learned how to practice samatha-bhāvāna, calmness
meditation, from these two ascetics, and he achieved the
outcome of the practice. I mean, because Siddhattha learned
very fast, he attained the highest state of the samatha practice,
that is, he attained the jhāna state, absorption or the trance. I
like to say trance. He attained or realized the highest state of
the trance.
What does this state of trance, jhāna, mean? I would like
to tell you that the term jhāna in Pāli becomes the word zen in
Japanese Buddhism. Zen is nothing but jhāna. That is why I
have to mention samatha-bhāvāna, so that you can understand
the outcome of this tradition of the Buddhist meditation practice:
the jhāna state, which in the Japanese tradition is Zen.
The word jhāna becomes zen in Japanese Buddhism. Jhāna
in the Pāli tradition is nothing but the outcome, the result, of
samatha meditation.
But it is curious that in Zen Buddhism the concern is not
just samatha. Zen Buddhists claim that they have the essence