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Comm. NT: 4.
Bhāvanāvidhānavaṇṇanā

Said in the Old Commentary.
‘One who is learning the earth kasiṇa’: one who is apprehending, grasping, an earth kasiṇa as a ‘learning sign’. The meaning is, one who is producing an earth kasiṇa that has become the sign of learning;
and here ‘arousing’ should be regarded as the establishing of the sign in that way.
‘In earth’: in an earth disk of the kind about to be described.
‘Apprehends the sign’: he apprehends in that, with knowledge connected with meditative development, the sign of earth of the kind about to be described, as one does with the eye the sign of the face in a looking-glass.
‘Made up’: prepared in the manner about to be described.
‘Not made up’: in a disk of earth consisting of an ordinary threshing-floor disk, and so on.
‘Bounded’: only in one that has bounds.
As regard the words ‘the size of a bushel’, etc., it would be desirable that a bushel and a saucer were of equal size,
but some say that ‘the size of a saucer’ is a span and four fingers, and the ‘the size of a bushel’ is larger than that.
‘He sees to it that that sign is well apprehended’: that meditator makes that disk of earth a well-apprehended sign.
When, after apprehending the sign in it by opening the eyes, and looking and then closing them again, it appears to him as he adverts to it just as it did at the moment of looking with open eyes, then he has made it well apprehended.
Having thoroughly established his mindfulness there, observing it again and again with his mind not straying outside, he sees that it is ‘well attended to’.
When it is well attended to thus by adverting and attending again and again by producing much repetition and development instigated by that, he sees that it is ‘well defined’.
‘To that object’: to that object called earth kasiṇa, which has appeared rightly owing to its having been well apprehended.
‘He anchors his mind’: by bringing his own mind to access jhāna he anchors it, keeps it from other objects.

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Nyanamoli thera	22. For this is said:4