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by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
The Pali term for meditation is bhavana: development. It's
a shorthand
word for the development of skillful qualities in the
mind. Bhavana is a type of karma — the intentional activity
ultimately leading to the end of karma — but karma nonetheless.
This point is underlined by another Pali term for meditation: kammatthana,
the work at hand; and by a Thai idiom for meditation: "to make
an effort." These terms are worth keeping in mind, to
counterbalance the common assumption that meditation is an exercise
in inaction or in passive, all-encompassing acceptance. Actually, as
described in the Pali texts, meditation is a very pro-active
process. It has an agenda and works actively to bring it about. This
can be seen in the Pali description of how right mindfulness is
fostered through satipatthana.
Satipatthana is often translated as "foundation of
mindfulness," which gives the impression that it refers to an
object of meditation. This impression is reinforced when you see the
four satipatthanas listed as body, feelings, mind, and mental
qualities. But if you look at the texts, you find that they teach
satipatthana as a process, a way of establishing (upatthana)
mindfulness (sati): hence the compound term. When the texts
define the compound, they give, not a list of objects, but four
formulas describing an activity.
Here's the first formula:
A meditator remains focused on the body in and of itself —
ardent, alert, and mindful — putting aside greed and distress
with reference to the world.
Each of the terms in this formula is important. "Remaining
focused" can also be translated as "keeping track."
This refers to the element of concentration in the practice, as you
hold to one particular theme or frame of reference amid the
conflicting currents of experience. "Ardent" refers to the
effort you put into the practice, trying to abandon unskillful
states of mind and develop skillful ones in their stead, all the
while trying to discern the difference between the two.
"Alert" means being clearly aware of what's happening in
the present. "Mindful" means being able to remember or
recollect. Sometimes mindfulness is translated as non-reactive
awareness, free from agendas, simply present with whatever arises,
but the formula for satipatthana doesn't support that translation.
Non-reactive awareness is actually part of equanimity, one of many
qualities fostered in the course of satipatthana, but the ardency
involved in satipatthana definitely has an agenda, a task to be
done, while the role of mindfulness is to keep your task in mind.
The task here is twofold: staying focused on your frame of
reference, and putting aside any greed and distress that would
result from shifting your frame of reference back to the world. This
is the meaning of "the body in and of itself." In other
words, you try to stay with the experience of the body as it's
immediately felt, without referring it to the narratives and views
that make up your sense of the world. You stay away from stories of
how you have related to your body in the past and how you hope to
relate to it in the future. You drop any concern for how your body
fits into the world in terms of its beauty, agility, or strength.
You simply tune into the body on its own terms — the direct
experience of its breathing, its movements, its postures, its
elementary properties, and its inevitable decay. In this way you
learn how to strip away your assumptions about what does or doesn't
lie behind your experience of the body, and gain practice in
referring everything to the experience itself.
The same approach applies to the remaining types of satipatthana:
focusing on feelings, on mind states, and on mental qualities in and
of themselves. At first glance, these may look like new and
different meditation exercises, but the Buddha makes clear that they
can all center on a single practice: keeping the breath in mind.
When the mind is with the breath, all four frames of reference are
right there. The difference lies simply in the subtlety of your
focus. So when you've developed your skills with the first, most
blatant type of satipatthana, you don't have to move far to take up
the more subtle ones. Simply stay with the breath and shift your
focus to the feelings and mind states that arise from being mindful
of the breath, and the mental qualities that either get in the way
of your focus or strengthen it. Once you've chosen your frame of
reference, you treat it the same way you've been treating the body:
taking it as your frame of reference in and of itself, without
referring it to stories about yourself or views about the world. You
separate feelings — of pleasure, pain, and
neither-pleasure-nor-pain — from the stories you normally create
around them. You separate states of greed, anger, and delusion from
their focal points in the world. In this way you can see them for
what they are.
Still, though, you have an agenda, based on the desire for
Awakening — a desire that the Buddha classed, not as a cause of
suffering, but as part of the path leading to its end. This becomes
clearest in the satipatthana focused on mental qualities in and of
themselves. You acquaint yourself with the unskillful qualities that
obstruct concentration — such as sensual desire, ill will, and
restlessness — not simply to experience them, but also to
understand them so that you can cut them away. Similarly, you
acquaint yourself with the skillful qualities that foster
discernment so that you can develop them all the way to release.
The texts call these skillful qualities the seven factors of
Awakening and show that satipatthana practice is aimed at developing
them all in order. The first factor is mindfulness. The second is
called "analysis of qualities": the ability to distinguish
skillful from unskillful qualities in the mind, seeing what can be
accepted and what needs to be changed. The third factor is
persistence — persistence in abandoning unskillful qualities and
fostering skillful ones in their place. The texts describe a wide
variety of methods to use in this endeavor, but they all come down
to two sorts. In some cases, an unskillful quality will disappear
simply when you watch it steadily. In other cases, you have to make
a concerted effort, actively doing what you can to counteract an
unskillful quality and replace it with a more skillful one.
As skillful qualities take charge within you, you see that while
skillful thinking leads to no harmful actions, long bouts of it can
tire the mind. So you bring your thoughts to stillness, which
develops three more of the factors of Awakening: rapture, serenity,
and concentration. These provide the mind with a foundation of
well-being.
The final factor is equanimity, and its place in the list is
significant. Its
non-reactivity is fully appropriate only when the
more active factors have done what they can. This is true of all the
lists in which equanimity is included. It's never listed on its own,
as sufficient for Awakening; and it always comes last, after the
pro-active factors in the list. This doesn't mean that it supplants
them, simply that it joins in their interaction. Instead of
replacing them, it counterbalances them, enabling you to step back
and see subtle levels of stress and craving that the more pro-active
factors may have obscured. Then it makes room for the pro-active
factors to act on the newly discovered levels. Only when all levels
of stress and craving are gone is the work of both the pro-active
and non-reactive sides of meditation done. That's when the mind can
be truly agenda-free.
It's like learning to play the piano. As you get more pro-active
in playing proficiently, you also become sensitive in listening
non-reactively, to discern ever more subtle levels in the music.
This allows you to play even more skillfully. In the same way, as
you get more skilled in establishing mindfulness on your chosen
frame of reference, you gain greater sensitivity in peeling away
ever more subtle layers of the present moment until nothing is left
standing in the way of total release.
| Source: Copyright
© 2002 Thanissaro Bhikkhu. Reproduced and reformatted from
Access to Insight edition © 2002 For free distribution. This
work may be republished, reformatted, reprinted, and
redistributed in any medium. It is the author's wish, however,
that any such republication and redistribution be made available
to the public on a free and unrestricted basis and that
translations and other derivative works be clearly marked as
such. |
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