I've practiced in a Tibetan lineage for a few years now, ritual preliminaries with extensive mantra recitations & visualizations etc.. While I admit that I haven't made my practice as regular and serious as I should (work / school / doubts), I've recently renewed my conviction and interest. I've resolved to attain those "pleasurable abidings" or absorptive concentration states talked about in the Suttas... because my mind is quite untamed if I'm being honest.

Anyway, I'm reading Practicing the Jhanas by Stephen Snyder & Tina Rasmussen - who are writing from the lineage of the Venerable Pa Auk Sayadaw. I've also read and listened to quite a bit of Daniel Ingram on the Fire Kasina.

This book is talking about Anapanasati or Breath Meditation from a Theravada perspective. They recommend total silence during a dedicated retreat, both on the cushion and between sessions. But I've also heard Daniel recommend (mental?) mantra recitation...

Regarding my practice, I wonder if I should be reading and chanting my usual preface of Tibetan prayers during a retreat focused on cultivating the Jhanas... maybe not before each sit-down session... but perhaps in the morning? I have an inkling that such an effort before each sit (mantra recitations being 15-30 minutes, if not an hour or so) will take away from my concentration object. I just don't have the content memorized and I do quite enjoy the feeling of chant generally... 

I'm open to complete silence for this, but I'm more than a bit of a ritualist; I'm wont to make lighting the candle a whole ceremony in and of itself... I'm not really sure if that is really the most helpful, but that's just how I'd hope to operate. And there are precedences, like, for instance, the Suttas are replete with references to the Buddha washing his feet before discouses and meditations... Sure, he walked around a lot, but parallels with ritual ablution are easy to make there. So, beside the question, but if anyone would like to give rough outline of how they go about a formal Kasina practice, it'd be really helpful!

My understanding is mantra's are can be spoken externally or internally, and so on a silent retreat I'd imagine people would be doing the latter.

Mantra meditation is not a bad way to do jhanas at all (this is basically what TM is). The trick for doing what you want to be able to do is to relax the mind, let the matra just appear by itself effortlessless in consciousness, and just watch as it does it's thing. To that end, it might be easier to cut down from a whole half hour or hour recitation, try a single word or short phrase that seems to reasonate with you.

"Practicing the Jhanas" is aimed at practitioners with many years of strong practice of mindfulness of the breath meditation, including multiple residential retreats in that tradition. It is the most difficult jhana guidebook out there. I would guess that the off-retreat success rate for that book would be less than 1%.

If you are relatively new to mindfulness of the breath, you will do better with The Mind Illuminated or possibly the TWIM technique. (I'm going to guess 20% and 40% respectively). In either case, I don't think how much ritual you do before and after practice makes much of a difference, as long as your practice is good. I would say, as a gross simplification, you want to be able to sit for at least 40 minutes to 1 hour without losing track of the breath (without gross distractions like daydreaming or planning conversations) before trying to practice the jhanas. Being able to do 2 hours without gross distraction would be recommended. If you have that down, you could also try to book, Right Concentration, which is relatively easy for people who have a very solid mindfulness of the breath practice (probably around 20 to 30%). 

I do plenty of ritual, both with and without jhana states, but I generally find it easier to enter those states without ritual.


Unless you made a commitment to do the jhanas one way or the other, it's probably worth experimenting with and without ritual to see how it plays out for you!

If you do the rituals as a kind of meditation they can be helpful. If you do them because you attribute superstitious and supernatural powers to them then ... I don't know.

Particularly to quiet the mind before doing sitting meditation after a busy and stressful day. When I would go to the zen center for group meditation and retreats we would do bowing practice and chanting before silent sitting meditation.

To learn to do the jhanas properly it is helpful to sit silently, but to prepare (quiet the mind) for sitting, other types of practices are fine. Moving meditation or chanting are easier to stay focused on when the mind is turbulent than silent sitting, so they are good to do as preparation for sitting meditation.

And at the Zen center, when we would do very long sits, they would do 5-10 minutes of walking meditation every 30-40 minutes of sitting meditation. They would light a stick of incense at the start of a sit and when it burned out they would have a short period of walking meditation, and then light another stick of incense and start another sit.

(I describe how I prepare for sitting meditation by doing relaxing forms of meditation here: https://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/p/meditation.html )

After many years of dry insight practice, I finally learned the jhanas from Leigh Brasington's book "Right Concentration" (link). The jhanas completely changed my practice from half-hearted irregular practice which only came together on retreat, to a stable daily 1h/day practice.

Were you able to get jhanas in your daily sits via Right Concentration?