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Dhyana in Buddhism

Dhyāna in Buddhism
Chinese name
Traditional Chinese 禪
Simplified Chinese 禅
Tibetan name
Tibetan བསམ་གཏན
Vietnamese name
Vietnamese alphabet Thiền
Korean name
Hangul 선
Hanja 禪
Japanese name
Kanji 禅
Sanskrit name
Sanskrit ध्यान (in Devanagari)
Dhyāna (Romanised)
Pāli name
Pāli झान (in Devanagari)
ඣාන (in Sinhala)
ဈာန် (in Burmese)
ဇျာန် (in Mon)
Jhāna (Romanised)

Dhyāna (Sanskrit) or Jhāna (Pali), commonly translated as meditation, is a state of no mind. It is used in Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism. In Buddhism, it is a series of cultivated states of mind, which lead to "state of perfect equanimity and awareness (upekkhii-sati-piirisuddhl)."

Dhyana may have been the core practice of pre-sectarian Buddhism, but became appended with other forms of meditation throughout its development.

The time of the Buddha saw the rise of the śramaṇa movement, ascetic practitioners with a body of shared teachings and practices. The strict delineation of this movement into Jainism, Buddhism and brahmanical/Upanishadic traditions is a later development.

According to Bronkhorst, the practice of the four dhyanas may have been an original contribution by Gautama Buddha to the religious practices of ancient India in response to the ascetic practices of the Jains. According to Wynne, the attainment of the formless meditative absorption was incorporated from Brahmanical practices, These practices were paired to mindfulness and insight, and given a new interpretation. The stratification of particular samādhi experiences into the four jhānas seems to be a Buddhist innovation. It was then borrowed and presented in an incomplete form in the Mokṣadharma, a part of the Mahābhārata. Kalupahana argues that the Buddha "reverted to the meditational practices" he had learned from Ārāḍa Kālāma and Uddaka Rāmaputta.

Thomas William Rhys Davids and Maurice Walshe agreed that the term samadhi is not found in any pre-buddhist text. Samadhi was first found in the Tipiṭaka and not in any pre-Buddhist text. It was later incorporated into later texts such as the Maitrayaniya Upanishad. But according to Matsumoto, "the terms dhyana and samahita (entering samadhi) appear already in Upanishadic texts that predate the origins of Buddhism".


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