U Pandita, one of the greatest modern masters of meditation in the Burmese Theravada tradition (see his work In This Very Life) doesn't quite agree with Bill and I about how the ñanas and jhanas line up, and so I thought that in the interest of fairness I would present his model. In his model, as in Bill's model, the first three stages of Mind and Body, Cause and Effect, and The Three Characteristics all fall within the first vipassana jhana. However, he divides the Arising and Passing Away into two jhanas, with the immature phase (when the meditator is still in the grip of the Ten Corruptions of Insight) corresponding to the second jhana and the mature phase (when the meditator sees the true nature of the Ten Corruptions of Insight and crosses the A&P Event) as the third jhana. Everything from Dissolution to Equanimity then falls into the fourth jhana in his model. This does accommodate the vague formless experiences that can happen in Dissolution, as the formless realms come out of the fourth jhana.

The problem with this map is similar to the problem with the other maps, namely that some of the stages of insight tend to suck and the samatha or pure concentration jhanas are always a good time or peaceful. Thus, to say that the Dark Night stages such as Disgust are part of the fourth jhana just rubs the wrong way somehow, as does saying that Three Characteristics (which also tends to suck a bit) is part of the enjoyable first jhana. The point is that no matter how you slice it, the correlations are not quite perfect, and insight practice is rarely as pleasant as good old concentration practices. That said, there is something to these models anyway, and if you master insight and concentration practices and know a bit of theory, you will see for yourself what they were trying to get at, so get to it!

MCTB Inklings of One More Model