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nirvana in thirteen stages.
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The Buddha seems to have called a spade a spade when-
ever he could. He was talking to a preliterate people in a
language that had no written form. I’ve tried to restore that
directness in my own translation. To translate the Sutta using
archaisms, spiritual words, and neologisms obscures its emi-
nently practical character and gives undue authority to its
monastic interpreters.
I regard it as a failure on the part of a translator if he or
she uses terms that appear mystifying or esoteric to a reader.
I know this is occasionally unavoidable, but jargon words are
certainly not necessary in the case of the Sutta. I was deter-
mined to offer a translation of the Sutta in vernacular English
that could be at least roughly understood on a first reading
without the use of a glossary or a commentary.
I first encountered Soma Thera’s The Way of Mindfulness
in 1975. I had a degree in English literature, so I was used to
interpreting strange old texts in ways that made sense. I was
so impressed with the underlying value of the Sutta that I
converted Soma Thera’s translation into modern English and
memorized it. Over the years, I continued to refine my own
working version of the Sutta, and now, more than forty years
on, it has emerged in this book. I think this is also the first
English translation and commentary on the Sutta in book
form that is not written by a monk. I am sure this will help to
make it more useful and readable.
Perhaps the most striking difference is that my transla-
tion is very short. It is less than one-fourth as long as Bhikkhu
Bodhi’s authoritative 1995 version. People who have com-
pared the two have asked me, “Have you left something out?”
and I have. The original contains thirteen liturgical refrains
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of about one hundred words each. Bodhi omits or abbreviates a few of these. I omit nearly all of them, and I omit many other
numerous but shorter repetitions as well.
Likewise, Bhikkhu Bodhi gives nearly eight hundred
words to three practices that I cover in eighty words. I think
that meditating on corpses and the repulsiveness of the body
have only antiquarian interest nowadays. Rather than pro-
vide the full details of these practices for the sake of com-
pleteness, I chose to bring out the clean functional lines of the
training itself, which can easily get lost in the detail. For those
who are keen to know more about meditating on corpses,
Bodhi’s translation is readily available.
The Sutta consists of an introduction and four training
disciplines, or “foundations.” Years ago, to help myself under-
stand the text, I made an internal change to this structure.
Despite its immense authority, the Sutta looks like it was
shaped into its present, final form by a committee, which it
probably was. All the Pali texts were originally held only in
the memory of monks. The Sutta was only put into written
form about three hundred years after the Buddha composed
it. The individual components and subsections of the Sutta
are almost certainly accurate representations of the Buddha’s
words. We find them repeatedly elsewhere in the Pali Canon.
However, the organization of the Sutta itself seems awkward.
Its last two categories are confused and illogical. I don’t know
for sure, but my guess is that this confusion is probably due to
an error of judgment in the final editing.
For example, two subsections called “the five hindrances”
(gross emotions) and “the seven factors of enlightenment”
(refined states of mind) are usually found in the fourth
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section, on “thought.” Because we more naturally think of these as “states of mind,” I have transposed them down to that
third section where they seem to belong. In fact, the five hin-
drances are very similar to many of the states of mind already
described in that section. It is obvious that the third section is
the natural home for the hindrances.
Since the Sutta is modular in structure, nothing is lost
by relocating those two subsections. I’ve just made the
categories more logical. This shift also makes what remains
in the fourth section much more coherent, and it makes the
word “thought” a more exact title for it. This section now
contains the Buddha’s “five aggregates” theory of identity, his
theory of perception, and the Four Noble Truths. These are
all concepts that the monk is being asked to think about in
a rational fashion.
I’ve also re-labeled the usual translations of the four foun-
dations of mindfulness. The objects of these four are usually
translated in the following ways: kaya as “body”; vedana
as “feeling” or “sensation”; citta as “mind”; and dhamma as
“mind-objects.” I’ve tried to make sense of these category
names for years, but I’ve finally given up. The science and
philosophy I’ve been reading in recent years has made me
even more intolerant of semantic obscurity. I now regard the
last three of these four category names as wrong, vague, and
meaningless respectively.
Vedana does not mean “feeling” or “sensation.” It means
“valence” or “emotional charge,” which is something quite
different. Likewise, “mind” is far too vague and protean a
term for citta. Even Nyanaponika (and other commentators)
realized that the term “states of mind” is more appropriate.
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He changed other terms in the standard translation created by Rhys Davids, but he was too respectful to change this one.
Dhamma has multiple meanings in Pali, and previous
translators and commentators have understandably failed
to find any one English equivalent: For the most part, they
simply leave it untranslated and unexplained. Nonetheless,
it seems fairly obvious that whatever dhamma means else-
where in the Pali texts, in the Sutta it refers to conscious, goal-directed thought. The Buddha is asking the monk to inquire
deeply into both his own teaching (called Buddhadhamma)
and into the nature of life itself. This is why I translate it as
“thought.”
As far as I know, my interpretation of dhamma as “thought”
is unique to me, and I doubt if it will be favorably regarded by
monks and scholars. Similarly, my transposition of the two
subsections from the fourth foundation to the third will be
regarded as sacrilegious by many. The Buddhist texts includ-
ing the Sutta are almost
exclusively used in the East as mag-
ical and ceremonial chants. Many people would regard my
change to the structure as tantamount to rewriting a spell.
Despite these changes, I have not tried to rewrite the
Sutta from scratch. Rhys Davids did a good original job on it,
and I have retained those elements of style, voice, and struc-
ture that still work perfectly well in the twenty-first century.
I’m not a Pali scholar, so my translation, like all the others
just mentioned, is still a grateful descendent of Rhys
Davids’ original.
My slim and economical version of the Sutta is intended
to make it comprehensible to a nonspecialist. Very few peo-
ple, apart from Buddhists and devotees, are able to use the
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PTS text in any practical way. The PTS translation remains stranded on the shoals of its late-Victorian, semi-biblical
idiom and its monastic orientation. It hasn’t quite made it
over into serviceable English. The PTS text doesn’t serve the
Buddha well in the twenty-first century. It doesn’t allow his
voice to be heard by the ordinary Westerner. It is a magnifi-
cent and indispensible resource for scholarship, but it is too
unwieldy to be used as the practical manual that it is.
My translation of the Sutta is not orthodox, but I believe
it is readable, accurate, and structurally clear. It can also be
used immediately as a manual, both within and outside its
Buddhist context. I also hope that this translation can be of
practical use to meditators, particularly those who do Vipas-
sana retreats that claim to be based on the Sutta, and for psy-
chologists and popular writers who would like to understand
more about the long-neglected sources of mindfulness.
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14
Sati: The Analysis of a Word
For a text that is twenty-five hundred years old, the Sutta is
remarkably easy to understand, so why is it so neglected?
Part of the reason is the mistranslation and consequent misuse
of its key term. In this chapter, I’ll try to answer just one ques-
tion: What did the Buddha actually mean by sati, the word we
now translate as “mindfulness”? As a result, this chapter is full
of technical details and quotes from the traditional author-
ities. If you are new to the field, you don’t need to totally
understand this pedantic analysis. It is quite sufficient to get
the general drift. In particular, you will find that the original
meaning of sati differs remarkably from the way modern writ-
ers describe mindfulness.
My principal sources for this analysis are Buddha-
ghosa’s monumental fourth-century Theravadin commen-
tary on the Sutta, translated by Bhikkhu Nanamoli as The
Path of Purification (1991); Soma Thera’s 1949 book, The Way
of Mindfulness; Nyanaponika Thera’s 1962 book, The Heart
of Buddhist Meditation; Analayo’s 2004 book, Satipatthana:
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The Direct Path to Realization; Thanissaro Bhikkhu’s 2008
article, “Mindfulness Defined,” from the Buddhist website
Access to Insight; and a 1992 guide to Vipassana meditation,
In This Very Life, by Sayadaw U Pandita, the successor to the
great Burmese Vipassana theorist Mahasi Sayadaw.
It is obvious that the word sati is used in the Sutta in a way that corresponds very well to the English word “attention.”
Sati is also intimately linked to words that mean evaluation
( sampajjana), goal-directed effort ( atapi), and memory. These words are all found in the same sentence of the Sutta and are
traditionally analyzed together. This cluster of functions
matches what we understand from the field of cognitive psy-
chology. Attention never occurs as an autonomous function.
Attention, judgment, memory, and purpose all work together
as the key executive skills of any rational adult.
Although sati clearly means “attention” in the Sutta, T. W.
Rhys Davids thought he could improve upon it. Rhys Davids
was by far the most important translator of early Buddhist
texts. In 1881 he decided to translate sati not as “attention”
but as “mindfulness.” As an adjective, “mindful” has been in
the English language since the fourteenth century, but Rhys
Davids chose to revise the archaic noun form “mindfulness” as
a translation for sati. It could even be argued that Rhys Davids
is the inadvertent inventor of the modern word “mindfulness.”
Choosing “mindfulness” as the translation has had the
unfortunate effect of changing the way we think about sati. It
shifts it from a cognitive function (that is, something we do)
into a thing (that is, a state of mind, or a meditation practice, or a philosophy). The ambiguities around the modern conception of “mindfulness” start right there.
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The choice of the word “mindfulness” was a poor decision, but we are now stuck with it. It is a workable term but awkward
in so many ways. Bhikkhu Bodhi is the most authoritative
modern translator, and he has no fondness for “mindfulness.”
He was the editor of the Pali Text Society for many years, and
was therefore the custodian of Rhys Davids’ legacy. Despite
his undoubted loyalty, he still describes mindfulness as “a
makeshift term.”
The Western monk Thanissaro Bhikkhu also dislikes the
word “mindfulness.” In his essay “Mindfulness Defined,” he
speculates that Rhys Davids chose the term because “being
mindful” would have associations with Anglican prayer for
his late Victorian audience. As a Buddhist proselytizer, Rhys
Davids tailored his language to that audience.
As a result of Rhys Davids’ efforts, “mindfulness” gradu-
ally came to mean not “attention” but a narrower subset. He
presented mindfulness as being good in a moral sense—as
referring to “right attention” ( samma-sati) rather than just
“attention” ( sati). Rhys Davids saw mindfulness only as the
kind of attention that is directed to a moral or spiritual goal.
A sniper, in other words, would be seen as exercising “wrong
attention” ( miccha-sati).
Likewise, modern writers and psychologists invariably
talk about mindfulness as a “special kind of attention,” or as
“paying attention in a particular way,” and they frequently
qualify it with adjectives. Buddhist writers also like to retain
the Buddhist moral associations of “mindfulness” rather than
let it revert to its true meaning,
I think this is a mistake that confuses and cripples the
concept. It tangles up the universal cognitive function of
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attention with particular Buddhist or psychological goals.
Let me emphasize this point: Sati just means “attention,” and,
as the Buddha’s original terminology recognizes ( samma-sati
versus miccha-sati), attention can be used for good or bad
purposes.
SUSTAINED ATTENTION
The German monk Nyanaponika was also uncomfortable with
Rhys Davids’ term “mindfulness.” He affirmed the primary
meaning of sati as “attention” in his influential 1962 book, The Heart of Buddhist Meditation: “Mindfulness is not a mystical
state. It is on the contrary something quite simple and com-
mon, and very familiar to all of us. Under the term ‘attention’
it is one of the cardinal functions of consciousness without
which there cannot be perception of any object at all.”1
Since sati suggests a cognitive function, not a state of
being, it more accurately means “to pay attention to” or “to
focus on” something. For example, sati is used in the title
of another meditation text called the Anapanasati Sutta.
This title translates in an uncomplicated fashion as “paying
attention ( sati) to the breath ( anapana).” In other words, “to be mindful” is “to hold something in mind” or “to focus on
something.”
The traditional commentators usually describe sati as
what we would call sustained attention. For example, the
Standard Meditation Practice as described in chapter 1
involves paying sustained attention to the body. In “Mindful-
ness Defined,” Thanissaro Bhikkhu says, “Continuous atten-
tion is what mindfulness is for. It keeps the object of your
attention and the purpose of your attention in mind.”2 In his
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1992 guide to Vipassana, the Burmese monk U Pandita said,
“The function of mindfulness is to keep the object always in
view, neither forgetting it nor allowing it to disappear.”3
Soma Thera articulated the same concept in his book
The Way of Mindfulness: “When one is strongly mindful of
an object, one plants one’s consciousness deep into it, like a
post sunk into the ground, and withstands the tempestuous
clamour of the extraneous by a ‘sublime ignoring of non-