Mindfulness Yoga

by Frank Jude Boccio

  The word upanishad means “sitting near” (as one does to one’s teacher) and refers to the fact that Upanishadic teachings were delivered directly from teacher to disciple by word of mouth. While they are quite diverse in their teachings, as Georg Feuerstein notes in his wonderful text, The Yoga Tradition, we can see the prominence of four closely related themes: (1) that the transcendental core of one’s being, the Atman, is identical with the transcendent ground of being itself, Brahman; (2) the doctrine of reincarnation, sometimes called “repeated embodiment” (punar-janman) or, in the earlier Upanishads, “repeated death” (punar-mrityu); (3) the doctrine of karma, which means “action” and refers to the moral force of one’s acts, intentions, and words; it is a doctrine of moral causality that sees causal retribution as akin to what modern science would call a law of nature; and (4) the idea that the law of karma is not fatalistic: karma can be transcended, and reincarnation ended, through spiritual practices such as renunciation and meditation. By the time of the Yoga-Upanishads, written after Patanjali, many of them as late as the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries of the common era, the practical approach to liberation became synonymous with yoga.

  By the time of the Buddha’s birth, most often given as 563 B.C.E., the Brahmin priesthood had become a rigid, often quite corrupt, and exclusivist society. For example, while the original castes were not hereditary, by the time of the Buddha’s birth they had acquired a sacred significance and justification. They were seen to mirror the order of the cosmos, and thus had become immutable. No longer was there the possibility of social mobility. Those at the bottom of the social ladder, who no doubt yearned for a spiritual teaching that would speak to them, were denied instruction in Brahmanism and kept apart from the higher castes, and in this way the Brahmanic faith was entirely removed from their lived experience. At the same time, the ideas expressed in the Upanishads were filtering out into the wider intellectual community. A movement of wandering ascetics arose as an alternative to the strict ritualism of the Brahmanas. Some of these wanderers were even of Brahmin origin and were called paribbajakas, meaning “wanderers” whether or not their practice was orthodox (based upon the Vedas). But an even larger group, the shramanas (samanas in Pali) meaning “strivers,” made up of members from the other castes, followed a wide variety of heterodox practices.

  Living ascetic lives, these shramanas moved from town to town, village to village, subsisting on alms and free from family ties, in order to practice contemplation, expound their theories, and investigate through questioning and debate among themselves and others. The Jains, a still extant religion in India, originated as a shramana group. Another, even larger and more popular religion worldwide also had its start as a shramana group: Buddhism.

  Siddhartha Gautama was born into the Kshatriya class, the son of a raja, a king, and as such, he enjoyed a privileged position. Despite his luxurious lifestyle, the young Siddhartha felt discontented. Knowing that life was ephemeral, that he was subject to old age, sickness, and death, he could not rest easy in his mind. Finally, it was the sight of a shramana one day that inspired Siddhartha to pursue the spiritual path. Seeing how calm, quiet, and peaceful the shramana seemed, the young prince thought to himself, “Maybe he knows. Maybe this is the way. Maybe in this way I shall find an answer to the problems that are tormenting me.”

  Spurred on by this insight, Siddhartha made what has come to be called the Great Renunciation, leaving behind his family and the luxuries of the palace to enter upon the homeless life. The Bodhisattva (as the Buddha is referred to before his enlightenment), eager to seek liberation, first went to study with the shramana sage Alara Kalama. An eager student, Siddhartha quickly grasped the intellectual doctrine espoused by Alara Kalama, but he was not content with this and so inquired after the meditational state on which the teachings were based. He was told that this was the “sphere of nothingness,” a deep state attained through yogic concentration in which the mind goes beyond any apparent object and dwells in the “thought” of nothingness. Soon enough, Siddhartha learned how to enter into this state, and Alara Kalama offered him joint leadership of his community; but he turned down the offer, feeling that, while he had attained a refined inner calmness, he had not reached the enlightenment he sought, he had not yet brought an end to suffering:

  “I thought: ‘This teaching does not lead to dispassion, to fading of lust, to cessation, to peace, to direct knowledge, to enlightenment, to nibbana, but only to the base consisting of nothingness. I was not satisfied with that teaching. I left to pursue my search.’”

  Gautama sought out another teacher, Uddaka Ramaputta, but his experience with this teacher was similarly disappointing, except that from Uddaka he learned the still higher yogic attainment of the “sphere of neither perception nor nonperception.” Of this state, he later said:Even when one has reached the level of neither perception nor nonperception, although there is then liberation from form and from formlessness, there is still something left over—the thing that has been liberated from them, a watcher of “neither perception nor nonperception.” As long as such a watcher, which some call a soul, remains, though one may momentarily be secluded from the cycle of suffering, the watcher remains as a seed of rebirth. As soon as the situation changes, rebirth easily takes place again. This is just what happens now when I get up from meditating. No matter how profound my absorption, after a short time I get caught up again in the world of the senses. The basic causes and conditions for rebirth have not been extinguished! Complete liberation has not been achieved. Enlightenment must still be sought!

  However elevated and subtle the state of consciousness became as a result of these meditations, these states could not be nirvana for at least two reasons. In coming out of the meditations, Siddhartha found himself still subject to craving, aversion, and delusion. He had not been permanently transformed by the meditative experience and had attained no lasting peace. Nirvana, by definition, was not temporary, but eternal.

  He also questioned how any such altered state of consciousness could be equated with nirvana, “the unborn, the unconditioned, the uncreated,” when he was well aware that he had in fact created this experience, this altered state of consciousness, through his yogic prowess.

  Reading these words of the Buddha, many have come to the conclusion that as a result of his experiences with these two teachers of what apparently was Samkhya yoga and Upanishadic thought, the Buddha rejected yoga and its means. Yet, in fact, he would incorporate these meditational states as well as other yogic methods into his own teachings, and he would use these yogic techniques for the rest of his life. As we see from the above passage, however, he could not accept his teachers’ metaphysical interpretation of his meditative experience. His integrity and honesty, as well as the skepticism about metaphysical doctrines that characterizes his teaching throughout his life, would not allow him to accept an interpretation not supported by his experience. So while we see that the Buddha may have rejected traditional yogic metaphysics, he can be seen as having been one of India’s greatest yoga practitioners in his unwavering commitment to direct realization.

  When I first read about the Buddha’s dissatisfaction with the teachings he received, I instantly recognized the similarity to my own experience—how wonderfully calm and peaceful I felt after “yoga practice,” and yet how all too soon I fell back into the suffering of craving and aversion—lust and anger. And when I became a yoga teacher, I saw how many students seemed to have similar experiences. They would leave a class blissed out, but as soon as they got “caught up in the world of their senses,” they found themselves back amid their anxious lives—from blissed out to stressed out. So the question arises, How do we stop this apparently ceaseless cycle, this endless emotional and psychological roller coaster? In our very lives generally, and in our own practice of yoga specifically, we can see the process of samsara, the cyclic process of “birth and death” occur over and over, moment by moment! What to do about it?

  Upon leaving Ud
daka Ramaputta, Siddhartha set out upon the path of austerities, which some of the forest-dwelling mendicants believed could burn up all negative karma and lead to liberation. After practicing extreme forms of austerities for nearly six years, he found himself close to death but no closer to the liberation he sought. Also, despite the austerities and the mortification he practiced, his body clamored for attention, and he found himself still plagued by craving and aversion. In fact, such austerities seemed to fuel his obsession with the body, much as an anorexic is obsessed with the very body she is seeking to deny.

  He began to ask himself if there might not be some other way. And in his pondering, he recalled an incident from his childhood when, as a nine-year-old, he spontaneously entered into meditation. It was during the ritual spring plowing festival, and the young Siddhartha watched how the oxen strained to pull the plow under the hot sun, how the plow, turning the soil, sliced up worms that squirmed and writhed, and how birds swooped down and took the worms in their beaks. With the seed of compassion watered in his heart, the young boy sat in the cool shade of a rose-apple tree, and “secluded from sensual desires and from unwholesome things,” entered upon and abode in the first meditation that is accompanied by thinking and exploring, “with the happiness and pleasure born of seclusion.”

  All this, years later, Siddhartha recalled, and he thought to himself, “Might this be the way to enlightenment?” And then immediately an answer swelled up from deep inside that said “Yes! This is surely the way to enlightenment!”

  This is good news for all of us: we needn’t torture ourselves into liberation, but nirvana is in fact natural to human beings. It is built into the very fabric of our humanity. As a child, untutored in meditation, Siddhartha was able to have intimations of nirvana spontaneously.

  Take a moment now to close your eyes and recall the religion you practiced as a child. Not the religion you were tutored in, but the religion before religion, when the vast Heaven and the wondrous Earth were truly one. Perhaps it was while lying on your back looking up at the clouds, perhaps it was being enraptured by the waves rushing in and out from the shore, or perhaps it was looking deeply into the veins of a leaf. I can remember times when it rained, and I’d become absorbed in the wonder of a raindrop making its way down the windowpane. Or another time I observed a beetle make its way around a strawberry plant so intently that the beetle’s perspective became my own.

  Can you remember what it was like to walk in the midst of a world of miracles? Can you remember ever traveling within a world of pure delight with a joy untainted by craving or aversion? What happened to that world? All yoga, including the Buddha’s yoga, is often called “the path of return”—a return to our true home, which we eventually come to see was never really lost.

  What the Buddha saw in remembering his childhood experience is that by practicing a yoga of compassion and understanding we can cultivate the innate capacities we all share already, capacities that can lead us to ceto-vimutti, a term from the Pali canon meaning the “release of the mind” that is often used as a synonym for enlightenment. We can practice a yoga that leads to the release of the mind from its conditioning and its reactivity, from its leaning away from the moment-to-moment lived experience of our lives.

  And furthermore we can and must do this by working with our human nature and not by fighting against it or by attempting to suppress it. The practice of the Buddha became one that would cultivate and foster wholesome states of mind such as the equanimous compassion he experienced during his spontaneous meditation under the rose-apple tree. He saw that he needn’t be wary of cultivating the pure joy he had experienced as a child, as it had been untainted by any craving, any grasping. He was already beginning to see the necessity for what he would, after his awakening, call the Middle Way between indulgence and asceticism.

  The particular technology that he evolved in order to work with his human nature was the cultivation of “mindfulness” (Pali: sati; Sanskrit: smriti), which required the disinterested, nonjudgmental, moment-to-moment observation of behavior, both physical and mental. With mindful awareness, he simply observed his body—its positions, its movements, its various parts, its sensations, and its impermanence; he observed his feelings and emotions, the constant fluctuations of his consciousness, and the way his senses, perceptions, and thoughts related to the external world.

  Siddhartha integrated the concentration he had developed with his yoga teachers and applied it to the observation of his body and mind, in order to develop a full awareness of how they worked and how they were conditioned. He did this both to make the fullest positive use of his body and his mind and to free himself entirely from his preconceived notions of how his body and mind worked and, more importantly, from his unawareness of how their workings conditioned his relationship to the world. He had become convinced that the solutions to the problem of suffering which had propelled him onto his quest lay within himself, or as he said, “within this fathom-long body.” Interestingly, right here at the beginning of the Buddha’s yoga is the seed of the pan-Indic tantric flowering 1,000 years later: for in the interim many practitioners of both Buddhist and Hindu Yoga would become trapped by the perception that the body, rather than being the vehicle of liberation, was in fact an obstacle to freedom.

  The practice of mindfulness also allowed him to become ever more acutely aware of the pervasiveness of suffering (Sanskrit: duhkha, Pali: dukkha) and how the actions of craving, aversion, and ignorance feed suffering. In observing his mental states without identifying with them, without giving into the urgently felt need to express them, but also, just as important, without repressing them—and instead merely getting to know them as they are—it became clear to him that everything was impermanent. All was in flux, constantly changing. Nothing lasted—neither the craving for whatever it might be that he craved nor the bliss of meditation itself.

  From this description we see that the Buddha’s mindfulness meditation is more “analytic” than some other forms of meditation with which we may be more familiar like mantra or visualization. However, the process the Buddha taught is by no means mere ratiocination. Mindfulness meditation is not discursive thinking but rather, as I will emphasize repeatedly, a form of yoga that allows for a more vivid, immediate lived understanding than one would achieve through rational processes.

  Along with the practice of mindfulness, the Buddha cultivated the more skillful states of mind as embodied in what he called the Four Immeasurable Minds, which was his reworking of an old yogic teaching called the four Brahma Viharas (dwellings of Brahma, or divine abodes). The first is a practice encouraging the cultivation of the expansive feeling of love (Pali: metta; Sanskrit: maitri) that knows no hatred, and then directing it to all the beings in this world and throughout all worlds, seen and unseen, large and small. The second is the nourishment of a compassion (karuna) that contains no sense of separation between the meditator and all who suffer. The third is the cultivation of a joy (mudita) that rejoices in the good fortune of others with no thought of oneself. And finally, the fourth is the state of equanimity (Pali: upekkha; Sanskrit: upeksha) that requires the letting go of the self-centeredness that looks to other things and people as objects that either benefit or disadvantage oneself. This quality of equanimity is not disinterest or indifference, but instead it is the quality of looking upon all beings equally, favoring none over another.

  The enlightenment of the Buddha is described in various discourses and from many different perspectives. The oldest accounts all describe the awakening in fairly sober psychological terms. They most often speak of four meditation states called jhanas (Sanskrit: dhyanas), culminating in the knowledge of suffering, its cause, its cessation, and the way leading to its cessation.

  In the Buddha’s words, as recorded in the Pali canon, he “directed, and inclined his mind” to various objects of meditation including the recollection of past lives, the workings of karma, and the understanding of suffering, its causes and how to bring it to an end. T
he Pali account has his awakening spread out over three “night-watches” (about nine hours), but this could be a more condensed mythic time, and it was more likely spread out over a matter of days or even weeks from the time he gave up his austerities.

  And yet, despite the Buddha’s own succinct account given to us in the Pali sutras, his awakening has come to be presented as something else altogether, and it has become obfuscated as a mystical experience of transcendent revelation of the truth. Unfortunately, many modern writers have described this enlightenment as like a lightning flash. Such flashes of insight happen, but they are not the full awakening described by the Buddha.

  The Buddha’s awakening took at least nine hours. He himself warned that the “progress is gradual and there is no sudden, spontaneous understanding.” Also, the process of awakening was obviously guided by reason, as appears from the literary formula, repeated three times: “I directed my mind to the understanding of…” Siddhartha directed his mind to a deeper understanding of the Upanishadic teachings of reincarnation (which the Buddha would reframe as “rebirth”—not the same thing as the traditional Brahmanistic view) and karma. His Four Noble Truths (which I’ll address in the next chapter) were based upon the Vedic model of Ayurveda, the medical system of ancient India, still practiced today and growing ever more popular in the West.