The First Dhyāna Concentration and Seeing the True Mind to Realize the Fruit

Question: Is the first dhyāna attained before or after seeing one's true mind? In your lecture notes, it seems that the first dhyāna is attained in a specific state after seeing the true mind. But non-Buddhists have not seen the true mind and have not eliminated the self-view—how is it that they have also attained the first dhyāna?

Answer: There is no necessary connection between the first dhyāna and seeing the true mind. Even without seeing the true mind or realizing the fruits, one may still cultivate the first dhyāna concentration. This is exactly how it was with non-Buddhists; some of them even attained the formless concentrations, such as the concentration of neither perception nor non-perception, which far surpasses the first dhyāna. This is because the non-Buddhists of past eras had very pure minds; they were able to distance themselves from the secular world and cultivate meditative concentration deep in the mountains, without greed for worldly things, so it was easy for them to bring forth dhyāna. Moreover, at that time people in society as a whole were rather simple and unsophisticated; material goods and information were underdeveloped, and the environmental conditioning was not so severe, so people had very few thoughts in their minds, and naturally they attained concentration quickly.

Under the environmental conditions of modern society, cultivating concentration is not so easy, and the first dhyāna is even harder. Therefore, only after eliminating the self-view does it become somewhat easier to cultivate the first dhyāna; before realizing the fruits and seeing the true mind, it is very difficult to attain the first dhyāna—but this does not preclude exceptions and special cases. In the samādhi newly obtained upon realizing the fruit, if one can strike while the iron is hot and keep stoking the fire, the first dhyāna may perhaps appear not long after. Once this stage of samādhi has passed, the mind becomes somewhat lax, meditative concentration becomes harder to cultivate, and the first dhyāna is less likely to arise. Therefore, seizing the right timing and degree of intensity is crucial and important.