first jhana was designed to be doable and integrated into lifestyle, not "one in a million" frozen trance like Vism. claims.

 From a private conversation with a friend who teaches jhana (according to EBT):

(asking about kasinas in agamas)

The Chinese Agamas make no reference to the eight kasinas as far as I know, but they do talk about the eight liberations.

I would go as far as saying that the Buddha never teaches jhanas as involving focusing on a neutral object (e.g. mantra, body location, internalized image...). The objects of jhanas are always teleogical, containing an ethical dimension, and/or intended for ethical behavioral transformation (e.g. preserving ease in the body, maintaining a revulsion-inducing impression of the body, preventing the mind from being assaulted by worries, ensuring that the body is well fed and continuously fed by pleasure, moderating one's level of zeal...)

...

(on jhanas being doable)

I've worked with numerous students who had difficulties with formal sitting meditation. A few of them had done Theravada retreats for decades but now feel burned out. 

I asked them to first develop a "jhanic lifestyle"--develop contentment, steep in Dhammic thoughts, manage stress, learn to enjoy simplicity such as nature, beef up one's resolve about renunciation, train in relaxation...this is so that their body/mind is primed for the more subtle work that comes after. 

When a person already lives a "jhanic" lifestyle, all it takes is for that person to find leisure, be willing to put aside distractions temporarily so that he can drink even more deeply the ease and fulfillment and peace their lives are already steeped in.

By "drinking more deeply" I mean apply mindfulness, clear comprehension, and ardency/keen interest in that leisurely moment, so the vague sense of ease and fulfillment and peace now comes into greater resolution, becomes enveloping, and can be enjoyed with abandon!

Voila! Literally hundreds told me, via Zoom or letters, that they've now overcome their meditation hindrances, and delight in jhanic practice now.

Friend later added:

Thanks for sharing that, Frank.

For years, one of the things that mystified me was not just that the suttas testify to how jhanas are doable, but how quickly doable they can become. I knew that if I merely benefited from meditation in some vague ways, I was still missing some crucial pieces of the puzzle. I needed to duplicate the easy accessibility of jhanas in myself and other earnest people--so accessible that even when stream-entrants are born into a world without Dhamma and never ended up learning about these complex Theravada meditation procedures, they would still come to intuit that general mindset that is conducive to dispassion and wholesome bliss. So accessible that a 7-year-old Bodhisatta, with his mind filled with disenchantment, would just spontaneously stumble into it.

What is that state that can be intuited by virtually anyone who is diligently inclined toward renunciation and higher peace? What is that state that the suttas tell us would incline the mind toward non-fashioning and a deeper conviction that the Eightfold Path is the life to live? What is that state that is simultaneously the embodiment of the Seven Factors of Awakening, the Satipatthanas, the Four Noble Truths...and virtually all the Dhammic categories?

Such a state cannot be the nimitta-induced, hedonically-neutral, frozen-still  trance people talk about. Yes, jhanas as they progress further tend towards unwavering peace and imperturbability. But that unwaveringness is not the result of attentional fixity on a kasina, but a result of abated craving/sensuality, ferreting out mental/cognitive/emotional defects, purified mindfulness (which is not mental receptivity, but well-remembered Dhammic purpose)...

If you'd like, you can mention me by name.

This is just so that when earnest people want to find out more about how to practice in a certain way, they'd have recourse.

Friend answers some questions from discussion that followed

(article updated here 11/6/20)

With regards to the first question:

A couple Chinese websites were created by friends/students and maintained by them. They recorded and transcribed my talks and posted them there. No such an attempt has been made in English, though my grad courses are frequently recorded by students and circulated among a small group.

With regards to the second question:

"Eight liberations" and jhanas are really two categories. 

The notion and practice of the "eight liberations" were mentioned in contemporaneous non-Buddhist texts and the non-Buddhist samana traditions, and were either criticized, qualified, or utilized by the Buddha (for example, many of the Buddha's disciples, before they went forth, were already familiar with doing impurity contemplations while going into a state that removed perceptual/corporeal boundaries--the second of the eight liberations). 

To the extent that those states were helpful in weaning off primordial habits like sensuality, the Buddha utilized and prescribed them. But unlike the non-Buddhists and Mahayanists, the Buddha didn't interject ontological implications into those states, and treated them as modes of activities instead (thereby focusing on their origination/putting together that mode, disappearance/exit/dissolution, allure/positive effects, drawbacks/limitations, and escape/tweaking/pacification/transcendence).

Jhanas in the oldest layers of early Buddhist texts are really just a synonym for the practice in its entirety (e.g. "don't neglect jhana..."; the notion "jhana in itself leads to full liberation"...).

There are many ways to conceive of this "synonym for the practice in its entirety," and here are just a couple:

--craving/passion is the root of suffering; the bulk of craving/passion is sensuality; the bulk of sensuality in turn is hankering, worrying, household resolves, lust--things you actively put aside to experience seclusion pleasure; Therefore, jhanas are states where you experience happiness/fulfillness/confidence/inspiration/contentment/pleasure/ease/peace/equanimity as a result of having abated/pacified the bulk of craving (and not the result of attentional fixity/fixing attention on a stationary object). In this way, jhanas is the implementation of the Four Noble Truths, and not some "stillness samadhi preceding insights concerning the Four Truths."

--jhanas are the steadying of one's views/resolves/effort/mindfulness with regards to seclusion/disenchantment/dispassion/cessation/relinquishment; The results are that the more you steady/make progress on jhanic states, the greater the resolution in your directionality (e.g. sensuality is redundant/tiresome/costly/stressful, and seclusion/disenchantment/dispassion/cessation/relinquishment leads to ever more effortless satisfaction; mental thirst should be removed, can be removed, and can be removed by, for example, pacifying/tweaking the way you feed on jhanic pleasure).

--jhanas are about a psycho-physical environment where you are not sensually hungry, and are Dhammically inspired, and sustained by useful energies (e.g. skillful Dhammic thinking, devotional/uplifting sentiments, sublimated sexual energies, tapping into skillful sources of pleasure), and therefore render you ready to better understand, renounce, and rein in driven-ness/passion/agitation/clinging.

Jhanas in the oldest layers are not so much about manufacturing certain psycho-physical symptoms for their own sake or arriving at some arbitrary degree of one-pointedness as they are about the aforementioned themes. As such, the formless bases and the eight liberations can and should be practiced within a jhanic context (e.g. without creating a prime, well-sustained bodily condition first, your foulness contemplation is going to be compromised/warped by unrelenting hunger/horniness).

Jhanas are not "samatha" practice to be followed by some insight exercises or the eight-liberation practice. Jhanas is about sustainably dedicating yourself to any of these behaviorally transforming practices (such as reining in and sublimating sexual urges; such as the 16 steps of anapanasati...), and therefore necessarily contain both samatha and insight.

When you do the "eight liberation" practices in a condition where you're meticulously shielded from worry, hankering, lust, and other mental defects, you are in a jhanic state. The traditional commentarial compartmentalization of "jhanas vs formless vs insights" is not in accord with what the suttas teach.

From a comment of his on one of my blog articles:

Posted comment: "Many people who buy into this interpretation that vitakka is "directed application of attention" come from a certain assumption--the assumption that jhanas are about opening up to a pre-verbal/non-conceptual present moment. Therefore these people cannot conceive that one can "meditate with thoughts."

But jhanas in early Buddhist texts are teleological--they are guided and framed by Buddhist values and goals, and are not non-judgmental acceptance of whatever there is. These Buddhist values and goals (e.g. dispassion) are first internalized (hence "sutava/well-learned"), internally recited (hence vitakka/directed thinking), internally reviewed (hence vicara/evaluative thinking), and then steadily implemented (hence mindfulness) so that mental defilements are de-conditioned from the mind. All these Buddhist ideas--well-learnedness, mindfulness, vitakka, vicara, etc.--serve a consistent and concerted purpose.

Yes, the de-conditioning process may eventually take on a non-thinking turn (second jhana and above), but that is, only after the verbal instructions are already so internalized and familiar to the meditator, that Buddhist values and goals are guiding him in a non-verbal, intuitive way (hence, first jhana CAN be a basis for full liberation, but higher jhanas serve as even more effective tools)."

Discussion thread

https://www.reddit.com/r/EarlyBuddhismMeditati/comments/jmrkmw/first_jhana_was_designed_to_be_doable_and/