gives him more freedom to deliberately monitor what else is
happening in his mind without getting lost in thought.
Open Monitoring is a tolerant and welcoming practice.
In theory, nothing is excluded. In theory at least, nothing is
a distraction if it can be appropriately held in mind. With-
out good grounding in the body, however, an OM meditation
can easily degenerate into little more than randomly think-
ing about whatever comes to mind. If the body is not genu-
inely still, the mind can easily wander everywhere. Trying to
“watch the stream of consciousness” without mental calm can
actually increase the amount of time that meditators spend
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thinking about themselves each day. It can amplify rather than reduce their tendency to ruminate.
TO FOCUS AND EVALUATE
Satipatthana can be regarded as an Open Monitoring practice,
but one that is more sharp edged. Sati, the word we translate
as “mindfulness,” literally means “to focus on and evaluate”
something. Whenever we pay attention to anything at all,
we do so for extra clarity of vision and a clearer understand-
ing. We want to know more about it to inform our response.
This dynamic of perception + evaluation + response applies
equally to the hundreds of stimuli that we notice coming and
going in an OM meditation.
To be mindful means: to hold a thought or idea in mind;
to hold it still, without elaboration; and to hold it as a “clear
and distinct image” (or “mental representation”). This feeling
of holding something in the spotlight, and holding it separate
from everything else, is quite unmistakable once you get it.
It’s a feeling that something has “clicked” into place. You feel
face-to-face with the object. This feeling is often accompanied
by a remarkable sense of stillness, lightness, and space in the
body.
Here are other ways of describing this experience. The
body is calm and still; the mind feels like a clear, open space
in front of you; and the object being held in mind hangs in
the center of that space. (Alternatively, your body itself can
seem like that open space.) This state of mind is often called
“emptiness,” and it certainly feels empty. Emptiness is a good
metaphor, but in the Mahayana it is reified into a spiritual
absolute. I think it is best to regard emptiness as simply a
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figure of speech that helps describe a particular uncluttered quality of mind.
Compared to Open Monitoring, the full practice of sati-
patthana means being able to see all the contents of con-
sciousness with this kind of clarity. In the Satipatthana Sutta,
the Buddha suggested we approach this task systematically.
Once body-mind stillness has been established, he said we
should train ourselves to notice individual thoughts; states
of mind; valences (the positive or negative affective charges
of stimuli); emotions; and the continuous flux of body sen-
sations.
On my long retreat, I started by investigating the infinity
of inner and outer sensations. I then naturally moved on to
explore finer and finer gradations of feeling and mood—the
background weather of the body-mind. Some of these were
anchored to memories or images, while others arrived for no
apparent reason at all. I also spent hours exploring the hypna-
gogic dream world between waking and sleep. Time became
elastic, both contracting and expanding. Most of this inner
drama was quiet, delicate, and miniaturized. It was in water
colors not oils. It was like Beethoven played on a clavichord
rather than a concert grand.
Although I often lost the plot, fell asleep, and fell down
rabbit holes of thought, the feeling of being truly mindful—
fully focused and aware of something—was quite unmistak-
able. No matter how peculiar, subtle, gross, fleeting, massive,
or minute a particular mental object might be, the feeling of
clear perception was always much the same. It seemed to be
grounded in a particularly stable physiological state. This
sense of lucid perception, of having a mind-state as clear and
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accurate as possible, was perhaps the most valuable discovery I made on that retreat.
But where do you stop? I could easily have accumulated
terabytes of information about my inner world, but to what
purpose? The amassing of information is endless. A scientist
can easily spend a lifetime investigating aquatic snails or arc-
tic lichen. Charles Darwin spent eight years studying barna-
cles, but like any scientist he did so in a highly discriminating
fashion.
We have been saying that to be mindful means to con-
sciously perceive and evaluate something. When we are
mindful, we are able to see and evaluate the true worth of
anything in relation to our larger goals. We always have to
make judgments, and we do this so automatically that we
rarely notice it happening. Attention is the currency, the hard
cash of the brain. When we become mindful of something, we
automatically evaluate it: How much longer shall I stay with
this? How much attention does this deserve? This attribution
of value is even quantifiable and fungible. You may give one
object five seconds and another ten seconds. This means that
you intuitively see one object as being twice as important as
the other.
In an Open Monitoring meditation, we notice one stim-
ulus after another, and we have to decide how long to stay
with each one. If we are mentally dull, we will just drift.
We get bored with one thing and somehow drift toward
something else. This is our normal state of automatic, low-
quality, impulse-led judgment: not this, not that, maybe this,
try out that—until it is time to finish. This incoherent drifting
is always a danger with Open Monitoring.
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The satipatthana method calls for a brighter and more purposeful mental quality. When something arises, we orient toward it until it clicks into place ( sati). We see it in more detail, with clarity and understanding ( sampajjana). At this
point the judgment is usually clear: let it go (low value) or
give it a few more seconds (higher value). Even if we abandon
it in an instant, it has still been slightly “processed,” as cogni-
tive psychologists would say. We have understood it a little
more clearly, and it goes back into the cerebral database more
differentiated than before.
This is how I understood the process on my long retreat.
I had reduced the st
imuli from the outer world to an abso-
lute minimum for those seven months. This enabled my inner
activity to emerge in all its ragged glory. My brain slowed
down so much that I could stop, hold, and come to know tens
of thousands of individual stimuli, one by one. It was like an
exceptionally detailed spring cleaning, room by room, shelf
by shelf, corner by corner, of a mansion the size of Gormeng-
hast.
Learning how to usefully direct my attention at the micro-
scopic level was very valuable, but it wasn’t quite enough in
itself. I still had to make the macroscopic decisions: How
would I make a living? Should I become a monk? Was I going
to stay with my girlfriend or not? These higher-order delib-
erations are also part of the satipatthana method, but they
go beyond Open Monitoring. I’ll explain how that kind of
advanced thought works in chapter 20, “Embodied Thought.”
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P a r t T w o
The Satipatthana Sutta
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11
An Overview of the
Satipatthana Sutta
It is now time to become more familiar with the Satipatthana
Sutta itself. In the Pali Canon, we have more than three
thousand of the Buddha’s sermons, ranging in size from brief
poems to multipage narratives. We probably have more words
directly attributed to the Buddha himself than are found in
the entire Judeo-Christian Bible. Most of these sermons are
exhortations to abandon sensual pleasures and worldly pur-
suits and to lead a pure, ascetic life. Other sermons are phil-
osophic, argumentative, or autobiographical. Only a handful
of the sutta in the Pali Canon give particular prominence to
meditation, and the Satipatthana Sutta— The Foundations of
Mindfulness—is the most important of these. It presents the
first, and still the most inclusive, description of mindfulness
as a practice.
The Satipatthana Sutta has four sections, addressing
(1) mindfulness of the body, (2) mindfulness of emotion,
(3) mindfulness of states of mind, and (4) mindfulness of
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thought. These are the four foundations of mindfulness—or
“training disciplines” or “contemplations” or “applications”
or satipatthanas—that make up the Sutta.
The first of these, mindfulness of the body, is essentially
what we think of as “meditation”—covered extensively in the
first ten chapters of this book. Being able to meditate well
is so valuable that many people may not want or need to go
beyond this substantial first stage.
My explanation of meditation in those first ten chap-
ters, and the way I teach it in class, differs hardly at all from
the way the Buddha described it twenty-five hundred years
ago. Meditation is clearly an organic, transcultural practice,
almost as natural as breathing, which explains why so many
people (including me) have managed to teach themselves to
meditate with virtually no instruction at all.
Mindfulness, however, is more than just meditation. The
three other foundations of the Sutta make it a truly compre-
hensive mind-training discipline. These are the graduate lev-
els. In the next chapter I will present my translation of the
Sutta. It is not difficult to understand, but to help with this
first reading, I will give you a rough outline of its historical
setting and its argument. Some aspects are bound to remain
mystifying, but I will unravel them in coming chapters.
THE ARGUMENT OF THE SUTTA
The Sutta opens with a bold statement: “The systematic four-
stage training of attention is the only way to enlightenment.”
The Buddha addressed this sermon to a group of “wanderers”
or “homeless ones.” They weren’t really what we think of as
monks. They were itinerant and usually solitary holy men.
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There may have been no established monasteries at this time.
Nonetheless these men had already renounced what they
saw as the evils of sensuality and worldly life, and they were
committed to the complete extinction of suffering in this and
future lives.
The first foundation, mindfulness of the body, starts with
seated meditation, but it doesn’t stay there. Its purpose is to
help the monk develop a continuous, refined, detailed attune-
ment to his body throughout the entire day. This ever-present
body awareness would keep the monk stable and calm and
give him the platform for what follows. Included in this sec-
tion are three “memento mori” contemplations to help the
monk overcome his attachment to his body and the world.
They are hardly ever practiced by Western meditators today.
What we would call “emotion” is examined in both the
second and third sections of the Sutta. The actual mindful-
ness of emotion section confines itself to one small but per-
vasive aspect of emotion: the “valence”—the emotional charge
or feeling tone—that accompanies every perception. To be
mindful of valence means being able to verbally identify the
“pleasant” or “unpleasant” tone, however subtle, of any sensa-
tion, thought, emotion, or action.
Other aspects of emotion are found in the third section:
mindfulness of states of mind. This section presents the
“five hindrances”—the Buddha’s short list of “bad” emotions:
desire, anger, lethargy, anxiety, and despair. He gives instruc-
tions on how to hold, identify, and eventually extinguish
these emotions, in the present and in the future.
Once the negative states of mind are tranquilized, the
monk can freely develop the positive states of mind, called
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“the seven factors of enlightenment.” These seven factors shouldn’t be confused with good emotions or moral virtues.
They have a more specific focus. They are the ideal meditative
qualities of mind necessary for the breakthrough to enlight-
enment. These are most easily cultivated in deep meditative
states ( jhana) and in the seated posture.
These seven ideal qualities of mind all need to be pres-
ent for the purpose of attaining enlightenment, but they can
also be regarded as a sequence culminating in the last. We
have already discussed most of them, but here is a quick run-
through: The first is sati, or mindfulness itself. The second is
dhamma-vicaya—the quality of active, sustained investiga-
tion (such as occurs in a body scan meditation). The third is
viriya: energy and will (which we’ll talk about in later chap-
<
br /> ters). The fourth is piti, the bliss described in chapter 7. The
fifth is passaddhi (body-mind stillness). The sixth is samadhi (uninterrupted, blissful concentration).
The final culminating quality of mind is upekkha, which
is usually translated as equanimity. It implies a state of
extreme philosophic detachment and the extinguishing of
all emotional responses to the world. The monk first achieves
this in deep meditation, but he eventually consolidates it as
an enduring state of mind that never leaves him. Equanimity
is frequently regarded as the ultimate achievement, the final
escape from suffering.
For the Buddha, however, equanimity was only the pen-
ultimate state. The purpose of all the training presented in
the Satipatthana Sutta becomes obvious in the fourth sec-
tion, which discusses mindfulness of thought. The monk now
has the mental stability to engage in profound, intuitive,
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directed, penetrating thought ( vipassana) into the nature of life—or into any question that he sets himself.
The fourth section includes three contemplations. The
first presents the Buddha’s “bundle theory” of the self as
being composed of transient, unstable elements. This under-
pins his key idea of anatta, or “ no-soul.” The second maps out
his idea that all suffering starts with attachment to sensory
things. The third is the famous Eightfold Path. This is the full
package of Buddhist philosophy, morality, and practice.
In the West, “the Enlightenment” is a term applied to an
era when scientists and scholars were determined to think
and figure out the truth about the physical world and human
existence for themselves, based on hard evidence, without
reliance on political or religious authorities. The Sutta is a
comprehensive mind-training discipline that aims at just this
kind of self-reliance and mental vigor, and we can easily tar-
get it toward our own personal goals.
The Buddha, however, had a narrower purpose. In climb-
ing his own Mount Olympus he leaves nearly all of us behind.
He said that the only subject worth thinking about was his
own doctrine about the nature of existence. The monk finally
awakens only through profound insight into the Buddha’s
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