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Will_Newsome comments on A Novice Buddhist's Humble Experiences - Less Wrong Discussion
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The whole thing is really confused, seemingly. You have this modern vipassana movement, but the types of meditation endorsed by the vipassana movement are sometimes anapanasati and sometimes vipassana.
There are 16 core instructions of anapanasati, only 4 to 8 of which are actually directly related to breath. And they seem to imply that you should enter the first or second jhanas, but normally you are told to stop focusing on breathing when in jhana and instead focus on the feeling of physical or emotional bliss (at least in the first two/three jhanas); why then such instructions would appear under the title of anapanasati is thus beyond me.
Then in the realm of jhanas there are apparently these weird vipassana jhanas that I've never seen anywhere besides Wikipedia, and are perhaps particular to Burma. These 8 jhanas are a lot more popular and agree more with my limited experience. The vipassana jhanas seem to be describing the results of successful vipassana meditation, whereas normal jhanas are the results of successful anapanasati meditation. But the definitions and meaningfulness of the vipassana jhanas are controversial: Buddhaghosa held that the jhanas were for anapanasati, not vipassana.
Vipassana itself is unrelated to the jhanas, and I do not understand it, having kept thus far within the domain of anapanasati. Only in your posts on mindspace do they seem to share a common theme. But where you focus your perception on different parts of your body, moving your concentration along, it is elsewhere suggested that in vipassana one should consider loftier things, like the 40 canonical objects of meditation. Apparently it is because the aim of vipassana is to investigate the four satipatthana in order to see the three marks of existence, in the process reaching new states of knowledge and then attaining nirvana (bodhi).
I think I'm going to order Buddhaghosa's famous book and try to see where my understanding is shaky.
ETA: Actually, I'm a little saddened that Mindfulness In Plain English was so apparently misleading. Anapanasati is a form of samatha meditation, and thus the jhanas seem to be mostly anapanasati/samatha but with a touch of vipassana (at least that is my naive interpretation). Interestingly, the following is from Wikipedia:
ETA 2: Actually, I think what tripped me up is that it's more subtle than that. Anapanasati in the sense of concentrating on one's breath might be samatha, where anapanasati in the sense of being mindful of one's consciousness as one concentrates on one's breath is a form of vipassana. I am not sure of this, but if true, then there is needless confusion going on that is hard to untangle. But it would be neat if this were true, as it means that anapanasati is both vipassana and samatha at once, which matches the bikkhu's description in ETA 1 as well as my own subjective experience of attaining the second jhana: mindfulness of breath is what let me focus my mind and concentrate, but it was the insights into my breath and the mindfulness of my consciousness of breathing that actually led me to experience jhana. I think. But this is guesswork.
To add to this confusion vipassana is sometimes called a jhana:
O_O
Yeah. Note how I said I was going to write a post on anapanasati and then wrote one on vipassana. I was trying to reconcile the distinction between the two while I was thinking about the post.
In the end I think it comes down to this: you need to develop concentration and you need to apply it in non-judgmental observation of your own mental processes. Some traditions encourage practicing these separately while some indicate that you should practice them in the same sitting. It seems natural to just think of them as a single technique, and this is the perspective I tried to take in my post.
ETA: It may be useful to alternate focusing on concentration vs observation, seeing as you may only be able to make certain observations after developing your concentration to some threshold.
This is the kind of vipassana taught at the dhamma.org courses. Here's how I mentally unified this and anapanasati: I think of the mental procedure of systematically observing the parts of your body as your anchor, which you return to in between observing what's naturally arising in your mind.
As for the jhanas, I've never really thought much about them. I'm certainly interested though.
It seems as if there's a few standard approaches here:
I definitely can't enter the fourth jhana at whim, nor do I feel at all prepared for vipassana meditation. But I think this confirms your reasoning that there are many potentially successful approaches to balancing concentration and mindfulness, which might be good to keep in mind.
Sorry, I kept on editing and editing my comment! But anyway.
Yeah, I think the whole concentration/mindfulness dichotomy hadn't really clicked with me yet; I understood the distinction, but couldn't identify their qualia. Thinking back on my meditation experiences now, though, I understand their difference.
That seems very natural and clever.
I had only a vague idea of what they were until I experienced that incredible body high / uncontainable bliss and checked Wikipedia and the like for what that possibly could have been. Some texts said 'they are distracting, practice vipassana instead' but reading this and just generally looking at how Buddha attained enlightenment via the jhanas made me think that my efforts should be aimed at mastering as many jhanas as quickly as I can. As much as I love meditation, the penultimate goal is awesomeness, and the jhanas are awesome.
Hence I'm a tad wary of the various vipassana practices and will probably keep to anapanasati till I get strong diminishing marginal returns on jhana achievement. (Various texts talk about how desiring jhana makes you less likely to attain jhana. I think what they mean though is thinking about jhana during meditation, not when planning meditative styles beforehand. Hence the Buddha telling people to do jhana, obviously implying that they could achieve jhana despite deciding to aim for it beforehand.)
This rings true to me. It's the most clear description of their relationship I've come across.