essentials.’ Mindfulness sticks to the business at hand.”4
Reaching back further in time, Buddhaghosa describes
sati as having the characteristic of “non-distraction,” of “not
floating” or “not wobbling”5 (that is, not drifting or spacing
out or fantasizing). To be mindful is to focus on an object and
stay with it against all the temptations to wander.
Buddhaghosa, and many teachers since, describe training
the mind as like tying a wild elephant (or an ox or a calf or
a puppy!) to a stake in order to tame it. At first the elephant
will try to break free and return to the forest. Eventually it
will lie down by the stake and become a docile and obedient
servant. In a similar metaphor, Buddhaghosa says, “When a
monk wants to tame his own mind which has long been spoilt
by being reared on visible data,” he should “tie it up . . . to the
post of in-breaths and out-breaths with the rope of mindful-
ness.”6
Buddhaghosa also describes mindfulness as “seeing the
object face to face.” U Pandita glosses this as “walking straight
towards someone who is walking towards you.”7 The Buddha
uses a similar full-frontal metaphor in the Sutta: The monk
focuses on the breath in front of himself. In our Western tra-
dition, the French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650)
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likewise described meditation as holding a “clear and distinct idea” on what he thought of as “the stage of the mind.”
Because this mental space is invariably imagined as being in
front of the body, it implies a sense of objectivity and clarity
of vision.
The Pali texts contain many other metaphors, all of which
imply judgment and discrimination. Sati is the mental qual-
ity of a shepherd watching over his flock. It is like a soldier on
a watchtower, “looking for the glint of armour.” It is the guard
at the city gate who decides who can enter and who can’t,
and who directs the right visitor to the king. It is the skillful
charioteer who can steer attention and control the passions.
It is even compared to “a waggoner who ties the oxen to the
waggon’s yoke, greases the axle, and drives the waggon, mak-
ing the oxen go gently.”8 These examples show that sati is
always mindful for a purpose. It is certainly not a disengaged,
mirrorlike state of nonjudgmental acceptance.
Despite the mental effort involved, we can still distinguish
sati from the one-pointed concentration called samadhi.
With sati we typically retain a sense of the body and self,
and a subject-object relationship. We still see and evaluate
the object within the larger context of our long-term goals.
Sati is characterized by discrimination, evaluation, and self-
monitoring. Samadhi, on the other hand, is a more extreme
quality of focus. It results in total absorption and a tunnel
vision that loses sight of everything else. This trancelike state
is a valuable experience, but it is different from sati.
To summarize, to be mindful is to pay attention to some-
thing, to hold it in mind, to hold it “in front of you,” and
even “to hold it down.” The Pali texts use words like “grasp,”
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“apprehend,” “lock on to,” and “penetrate into.” This is sati as selective, sustained attention.
EVALUATION AND JUDGMENT
In the Pali Canon, the word sati is frequently combined with
the term sampajjana into the phrase sati-sampajjana. The
word sampajjana literally means “accurate understanding.”
In practice it means “evaluation” or “good judgment,” since
this is its purpose. I’ve translated sati-sampajjana in the Sutta as “clearly understanding and mindful of.” It is more usually
translated as “clearly comprehending and mindful of.” This
phrase is so important that it occurs as a refrain throughout
the Sutta.
Buddhaghosa said that well-established mindfulness
is as immovable as “the king of mountains.” This metaphor
refers to the importance of body-mind stillness ( passaddhi)
for good attentional control. “Whatever subject the monk
adverts to, consciously reacts to, gives attention to or reviews,
he will be able to enter deeply into it and understand its
essence.”9 This deep understanding (of a thought, emotion,
state of mind, or behavior) is sampajjana. But why would a
monk want to achieve this?
Attention is never pure or disinterested. Whenever we pay
attention to anything ( sati), we do so in order to consciously
or implicitly evaluate it prior to a response. This evaluation is
sampajjana. At an absolute minimum we have to decide “Is
this useful or useless? Is this worth giving more attention to
or not?” We have to make these judgment calls hundreds of
times a day. Everything that grabs our attention demands a
yes-or-no response.
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Where our attention goes, our actions follow. As the
bestselling author Joseph Goldstein puts it, “With clear com-
prehension [ sampajjana], we know the purpose and appropri-
ateness of what we’re doing; we understand the motivations
behind our actions.”10 If we don’t make conscious decisions at
critical points, our automatic impulses will decide for us.
The Pali word pajjana means “to know something.” The
prefix sam- acts as a reinforcer. Sampajjana therefore means the right or true or accurate knowledge of something. For
the monk, sampajjana meant recognizing what was good
and bad, useful or useless, in even the smallest matters, so he
could control his behavior and achieve his goals.
Sampajjana is also used in the sense of “seeing in depth”
or “seeing the essence” of something. It has connotations
of brightness and alertness (that is, full consciousness). It
implies accuracy in judgment. Sampajjana fully developed
is thus the capacity for the discriminating thought that is
the precondition for enlightenment. Analayo points out that
sampajjana “can range from basic forms of knowing to deep
discriminative understanding.”11
Ultimately, sampajjana is associated with the import-
ant Sanskrit word prajna, which means “wisdom” or “direct
knowing” or even “enlightenment” itself. In particular, sam-
pajjana means seeing things “as they really are.” A monk
would see everything as suffering, impermanent, and devoid
of self. This important insight is said to result in profound dis-
gust and a resolution to abandon the world.
In The Way of Mindfulness, Soma Thera says sati acts
like “the Chief Adviser of a King, who is instrumental in
distinguishing the good from the bad, the worthy from the
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unworthy.”12 The word sati implies this aspect of discriminating judgment even more strongly than does our English word
“attention.” This is why I usually translate sati as “the con-
scious perception and evaluation of something.” The English
word “attention” on its own is not strong enough to carry the
sense of discrimination and purpose inherent in sati.
Even when sati appears alone in the texts, sampajjana is
always implied. Recalling a discussion he had in the 1990s
with the elderly Nyanaponika, Bhikkhu Bodhi said they were
in full agreement that sati and sampajjana are both necessary for “right mindfulness” ( samma-sati).13 The functional unity
of sati and sampajjana is always taken for granted by commentators. Sati-sampajjana thus means “to hold an object in
mind in order to accurately evaluate it prior to a response.”
This is what is implied by the frequently repeated phrase in
the Sutta: “clearly understanding and mindful of it.”
In Nyanaponika’s seminal book from 1962, he describes
sati as the “stop, look and see clearly” function that preceded
intelligent action. Sati allows the shift from the automatic
judgment that accompanies any perception to a more con-
scious and accurate judgment. Nyanaponika says, “By paus-
ing before action . . . one will be able to seize that decisive but
brief moment when mind has not yet settled upon a definite
course of action, but is still open to receive skilful directions.”
Nyanaponika goes on to say, “Mind has to choose, to decide
and to judge. It is Clear Comprehension ( sampajjana) . . .
which is concerned with that greater part of our life, the
active one. It is one of the aims of the practice of Satipatthana
that Clear Comprehension should gradually become the reg-
ulative force of all our activities, bodily, verbal and mental.”14
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Soma Thera likewise described sati-sampajjana as “the analysis, reflection, vision, sagacity, the discernment that
leads to right, penetrative insight and clear comprehension.”15
He adds, “Mindfulness . . . produces lucidity of thought, sound
judgment and definiteness of outlook.” Notice that the word
“mindfulness” ( sati) in the sentence above includes the meaning of “sound judgment” ( sampajjana). Soma Thera doesn’t try to
make any distinction between sati and sampajjana and doesn’t need to. They are traditionally seen as a functional unity.
PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER
Let’s summarize where we are up to. Sati means sustained
attention. Sampajjana means evaluation or judgment.
Sati-sampajjana means attention combined with evaluation,
or “to focus on and evaluate” something. The word sati, just
like the English word “attention,” always implies an evaluative
purpose, but sati-sampajjana spells it out unequivocally.
We can apply sati-sampajjana to anything. We could
focus on a body sensation such as fatigue or pain or pleasure,
a behavior such as eating or watching TV, a decision to stop or
start some activity, a sense perception such as seeing a beau-
tiful woman or feeling a gust of wind, an emotional impulse,
a mood such as sadness or frustration or elation. It could
even be a thought or problem or a philosophic concept that
deserves deeper analysis.
The Buddha suggested that we systematically contemplate
our body sensations, emotions, states of mind, and thoughts
until we can do those contemplations consciously and under
all conditions. These four contemplations are goal-directed
training disciplines, the four so-called satipatthanas. This
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is a huge task, and no one would undertake it out of disinterested curiosity. We become mindful because it is useful to
do so.
Few of us are now trying to extinguish all our passions
and attain nirvana, but sati has many other more tangible
benefits. For example, focusing on the body helps us to relax
at will (as discussed in chapters 1–8). Focusing on our actions
will improve the outcomes (see chapter 9). Focusing on emo-
tions helps us modulate them up or down, and understand
our deepest values (see chapters 16, 17, and 19). Focusing on
states of mind helps us boost the good states and dissolve the
bad ones (see chapter 18). Focusing on thought and reflecting
on how we think leads to the goal-directed, insightful thought
that the Buddha valued so highly (see chapters 20–22).
MEMORY
It is obvious from its use in the Sutta that sati correlates almost perfectly to our English word “attention.” Nonetheless, its etymological root is actually “memory.” Not surprisingly, this has
confused many modern writers. The way we currently use the
word “memory” in English is apparently quite different from
its use in the Buddha’s time. Nonetheless, I’ll try to unravel
this. We can say that sati relates to memory in four ways.
First, sati refers to the cluster of associations that uncon-
sciously supports every one of our perceptions. Without this,
we wouldn’t be able to identify what a thing was or what it
meant to us.
Second, sati refers to what cognitive psychologists call
“working memory.” We noted earlier that to be mindful
means “to hold something in mind” (working memory) in
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order to evaluate it. If we hold it there long enough, it will get a foothold in short-term memory, and we will be able
to recall it later. If we do this repeatedly, it will eventually
move from short-term memory (in the hippocampus) into
long-term memory (in the cerebral cortex). Sati is the goal-
directed, discriminating attention—“don’t forget this!”—that is
essential for all learning, and the Sutta is nothing if not a mind-training manual.
Third, sati means remembering our good and bad experi-
ences in order to learn from them. Sati was regarded as essen-
tial for moral training and sense restraint. It was described
as being the monk’s gatekeeper, or like a sentinel on a watch-
tower. Sati’s role was to guard the monk’s five sense-doors—as
Buddhaghosa says, “so that states of desire do not invade, pur-
sue and threaten his virtue.”16
The monk is expected to be mindful of his bad states of
mind when they occur, but he should also notice and remem-
ber what leads up to them. He eventually controls his lust or
anger not through heroic acts of will but by remembering
their antecedent causes. (“There are too many pretty girls
down that street. Remember what happened last time!”)
Finally, sati means memory in the sense of “keeping in
<
br /> mind” one’s goals and intentions in the face of contrary temp-
tations. This is a very ordinary cognitive skill. It involves
remembering what you are doing so that you don’t get side-
tracked en route. It suggests staying focused and completing
whatever you plan to do. For a monk, this meant remember-
ing his goal of enlightenment. For modern-day meditators, it
means remembering what we are trying to achieve in both
the short term and the long term.
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Sati as a memory function was far more crucial in the Buddha’s time. The first monks didn’t have books or monastic routines to remind them what to do. They had to literally
memorize the teaching to carry it with them as they roamed.
Even the most junior monks would be able to recite certain
texts such as the Sutta, while some monks were famous for
developing phenomenal mental libraries. In the commentar-
ies, this was regarded as an integral aspect of sati.
To summarize, sati implies memory in several ways. It
means holding something in working memory or focusing on
it; it means remembering what is important so we can learn
from our experience; and it means remembering our values
and goals to guide our actions. These uses of sati are all spelled out in other texts and in the extensive commentarial literature.
They are all the natural consequences of deliberate attention.
PURPOSEFUL EFFORT
Sati has another dimension that is definitely missing from the
modern understanding of mindfulness. It has a driving, pur-
poseful energy to it. A monk is mindful because he is aspir-
ing to nothing less than total awakening. This means that sati
is frequently linked with words that mean “intense, vigilant,
ardent.” The word atapi, meaning a strong intention, or a
goal-directed effort, relates to tapas, the sacrificial fire of Vedic rituals. Metaphorically it refers to the inner heat, energy, and
ecstasy that the dedicated yogi generates to burn out his spiri-
tual impurities. The persistent effort of atapi also leads to the blissful sensations ( piti) that can occur in longer meditations.
The Burmese monk U Pandita (1921–2016) was perhaps
the most important modern authority on Vipassana. In his
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