Ajahn Brahm - Mindfulness, Bliss, and Beyond: A Meditators Handbook

Table of Contents

Mindfulness, Bliss, and BeyondMindfulness, Bliss, and BeyondMindfulness, Bliss, and Beyond

Most Buddhist writers are not often lighthearted or zesty, but the British-born Ajahn Brahm is a delightful exception. Even though meditators are taught not to expect anything, since that represents an attachment, meditation should bring you joy and bliss, according to Brahm. The bliss states of meditation (jhnas) are little-taught, so this book is an addition with value in a crowded niche. Trained in the Thai forest tradition by the Buddhist master Ajahn Chah, Brahm is a clear communicator of the ineffable. He is able to write about a variety of mental states and visualizations with precision and discrimination, drawing on his own experience. He is step-by-step systematic, which helps demystify what happens in meditation. Also useful is the specificity with which he describes the kinds of problems meditators encounter and what to do to resolve them. Meditation is difficult to teach on the page, but Brahm, who began his life as an academic at Cambridge, fulfills his calling as a teacher. He projects both energetic conviction and calm equanimity. [] An excellent manual.

One of the best spiritual books of 2005.

Ajahn Brahm spins a good yarn108 of them heredrawing on teaching stories he heard as a student of Ajahn Chah, one of the great masters of the Thai forest tradition, and on personal anecdotes. Between the classical Buddhist stories and the homespun advice, youll get a good sense of who this teacher is, and why so many people are drawn to hear him speak about Theravada Buddhism.

More than statistics and theories, we really trust anecdotes and narratives. Our brains and beings are wired to learn deeply and easily via stories, and this splendid collection of 108 Buddhist-based tales proves the point with lasting, gentle, pervasive teachings. [] Especially resonant if slowly savored, this is a wonderful collection that can be enjoyed by a broad audience.

Masterly storytelling and Dharma teaching, beautifully and effectively combined. The tales are at times hilarious, at times poignant; often both.

Larry Rosenberg, author of Breath by Breath

This is a book that is destined to become dog-eared and cherished and read aloud to ones friends and family. It will fall apart from your attention, I promise you!

Ajahn Brahm is the Seinfeld of Buddhism.

Sumi Loundon, editor of
Blue Jean Buddha: Voices of Young Buddhists

YOU HOLD IN YOUR HANDS a truly helpful and sophisticated manual of meditation written by a monk with deep and wide-ranging experience. Ajahn Brahm is one of a new generation of Westerners who have studied, practiced, and mastered an important range of Buddhist teachings and now offer them to sincere practitioners across the modern world.

In Mindfulness, Bliss, and Beyond you will find a thorough set of teachings for developing and deepening meditation, aimed particularly at attaining absorption, or jhna samdhi, and opening to the insights that can follow from it. Ajahn Brahm offers a careful and subtle understanding of how to transform initial difficulties and how to incline the mind toward rapture, happiness, light, and the profound steadiness of jhna. Then he turns this concentrated attention to illuminate the emptiness of self that brings liberating understanding. These are beautiful teachings.

While I acknowledge with pleasure the fruit of Ajahn Brahms rich experience as a guide for meditators, Ajahn Brahm presents this way of developing jhna and insight as the real true way the Buddha taught and therefore the best way. It is an excellent way. But the Buddha also taught many other equally good ways to meditate and employed many skillful means to help students awaken. The teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh, the Dalai Lama, Ajahn Buddhadasa, and Sunlun Sayadaw are among a wide spectrum of masters who offer different and equally liberating perspectives. Together they comprise a rich mandala of living Dharma, of which Ajahn Brahm reveals one important facet.

So, those of you interested in the practice of jhna and the depths of the Buddhist path: read this book carefully. And try its practices. Much will be gained from its rich and wise words and even more from the experiences it points to. And as the Buddha and Ajahn Brahm both advise, test them out, use them, and learn from them, but do not cling to them. Let them lead you to the liberation beyond all clinging, the sure hearts release. May these teachings bring understanding, benefit, and blessings to all.

With metta,

Jack Kornfield
Spirit Rock Center
Woodacre, California 2006

FIRST, I WISH TO ACKNOWLEDGE Claka Bhikkhu (Dr. Jacob Meddin) who turned his tiny monks hut into something resembling a third-world sweatshop, working long hours over many months, even though in poor health, to produce the first versions of these instructions for the Buddhist Society of Western Australias in-house Dhamma Journal. My thanks also go to Ron Storey, who typed out the manuscript so many times that he must now know these teachings by heart, and to Nissarano Bhikkhu, who organized the index. Next, I convey long overdue appreciation to my first meditation teacher, Nai Boon-man of the Samatha Society in U.K., who revealed the beauty and importance of jhna to me while I was till a long-haired student at Cambridge University in 1970. But most of all, I express my infinite gratitude to the teacher under whose instructions I happily lived for nine years in Northeast Thailand, Venerable Ajahn Chah, who not only explained the path to liberation so clearly, but who also lived the path so totally, to the very end.

Last but not least, my thanks go to all at Wisdom Publications, including David, Rod, and my copyeditor John LeRoy, for all their hard work bringing this volume to completion. May their good karma give them good health so that they will be able to work even harder on my next book.