Is Meditative Concentration Ascetic Practice or Pleasurable Practice?

Question: Is meditative concentration (samādhi) a practice of suffering or a practice of joy?

Answer: Anyone who has personally cultivated meditative concentration knows whether cultivating concentration is painful or joyful, whether it is painful or joyful within the meditation of walking, standing, sitting, and lying down, and whether the mind is painful or joyful after emerging from meditation. One will also know that when sitting cross-legged, even when the legs ache unbearably, whether the mind is painful or joyful. This question is very simple: as long as one has cultivated concentration, one will know just how joyful, how comfortable, how delightful, and how blissful cultivating concentration really is—so much so that many people give up other worldly pleasures and devote themselves exclusively to pursuing the joy of meditative concentration. The joy of meditative concentration cannot be compared with any of the pleasant feelings in the world. Especially when one cultivates to the first dhyāna, that joy cannot be clearly or thoroughly expressed in words; only those who have experienced and enjoyed it can know it firsthand. Because of this special, unique pleasant feeling, one subdues and eradicates the desires of the human world and no longer craves worldly dharmas. When one cultivates to the third dhyāna, the joy of body and mind is simply too hard to let go of, and this therefore obstructs the arising of the fourth dhyāna. Just how joyful cultivating concentration really is—those who actually practice concentration have all experienced and felt it; there is no need for me to say more. 

Those who say meditative concentration is an ascetic practice are people who have never cultivated it; they rely on imagination and assume that cultivating concentration must be painful, that one must forcibly suppress afflictions, and therefore the mind feels distressed. In fact, subduing afflictions does not mean deliberately suppressing them so they do not arise; rather, afflictions naturally cease to arise, because body and mind are tranquil, joyful, and at ease, the mind becomes open and bright, and afflictions no longer manifest. Everything one sees appears pleasing and agreeable, one no longer wishes to quibble over things, the mind grows ever more expansive, and one's mental state rises ever higher. 

If meditative concentration were painful, those non-Buddhist practitioners of the past would not have abandoned everything in the world to devote themselves to cultivating concentration, even cultivating all the way to the four dhyānas, the eight samādhis, and the samādhi of neither perception nor non-perception. Only pleasant feelings can make people cling and refuse to let go. The ancient immortals likewise single-mindedly practiced meditative concentration deep in the mountains, pursuing immortality and eternal life without death; even the various cultivation methods of modern times are all methods of cultivating concentration, and all of them contain pleasant feelings that make people unwilling to give them up. Therefore, meditative concentration is not an ascetic practice of suffering, but absolutely a practice of joy.