Establishing Awareness

The Two Acrobats

Today I want to talk about the Satipaṭṭhāna. Sati is usually translated as mindfulness or awareness. The way I like to explain it is the right use of memory: being able to call up the appropriate thing at the appropriate time. Upaṭṭhāna is often explained as establishing, or setting up. So this is the establishing of awareness.

It is one of the Buddha's most complete teachings on how to meditate. It appears twice in the Canon: as the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta (MN 10), and in a longer form as the Mahāsatipaṭṭhāna Sutta (DN 22), which adds a fuller treatment of the four noble truths. Each step has many branches. I won't go through all of them. I want to give you the overall structure: how you meditate, what you attend to, what gets in the way, and how you work with it.

Before the technique, an orientation. The Buddha tells a story of two acrobats, a teacher and his apprentice, who earn their living by climbing a bamboo pole, one on top of the other. The teacher says, "You look after me, and I'll look after you. That way we'll do our act, earn our fee and come down safely."

The apprentice corrects him. "No, teacher. You look after yourself, and I'll look after myself. Each of us guarding ourselves, we'll do our act and come down safely."

The Buddha says the apprentice has the right method. You can only truly be aware of what is happening within you. What happens outside you, you can hope to be aware of, but you cannot control it.

And he completes the thought. You look after yourself by developing these foundations of awareness. You look after others through patience, harmlessness, goodwill and kindly concern. Without being able to stand on your own, you cannot hold anyone else up. If something goes wrong for the person beside you, it is because you are established in yourself that you can be patient with them and meet them with goodwill.

What You Bring to the Cushion

The whole teaching rests on two components, the body and the mind. Before we go into them, the sutta describes the qualities the practitioner brings. One line repeats through every section of the sutta, at the end of almost every paragraph: ātāpī sampajāno satimā.

These have to be balanced, and that is a skill learned over time. Sometimes there is too much curiosity and not enough understanding. Sometimes not enough attention. The sutta uses the image of a skilled turner at a lathe, who knows exactly how long a turn he is making. How much pressure, how close you hold the tool, when to go deeper: that comes with practice.

The same line continues: vineyya loke abhijjhā-domanassaṃ, having put aside longing and distress with regard to the world. Abhijjhā is wanting, going towards. Domanassa is distress or discontent, going against. So the second orientation is this: whatever comes up, I'm not going to run towards it and I'm not going to run away from it. I'm going to sit here and observe.

The Body, Beginning with the Breath

The sutta describes four ways of establishing awareness: the body (kāya), feeling tone (vedanā), the mind (citta) and what are called dhammas. Within the body, the first thing is the breath.

The Buddha was speaking to monks, so he says go to the root of a tree or an empty hut, somewhere you won't be disturbed. Sit with your back straight and start observing your breathing. When I keep saying in class, "observe your inhale, observe your exhale", that instruction comes directly from here.

The sutta uses two verbs, and the difference matters. The first is pajānāti, to know. Breathing in long, you know you are breathing in long. Breathing in short, you know it is short. Just the knowing. In my own practice I extend this to the other qualities you can notice: is the breath deep or shallow, smooth or choppy? The inhale is usually a little cooler, the exhale a little warmer. You don't say these things to yourself. You simply come to know your breath.

The second verb is sikkhati, to train. "He trains: I shall breathe in calming the bodily formation." This doesn't just happen. With awareness of the breath, you learn to let the breath relax, and through it the body calms.

Knowing that you are inhaling and exhaling settles you within your body. Most of the time we are concerned with what is happening outside. The breath brings you back in.

Mindfulness of breathing on its own is a complete practice. In the Ānāpānasati Sutta (MN 118), the Buddha shows how it fulfils all four foundations of awareness.

The Body Itself

A distinction will help here. In yoga you will have heard the word proprioception. When someone in class answered, they said it's the awareness of where your joints are and how they move. That's right. When I say "move your hip forward" or "straighten your knee", you don't have to look at it. You know where it is.

Interoception is different. It is the felt sense of what is happening inside the body: a little heat, agitation, your heartbeat, heaviness or lightness. Like proprioception, it can be trained. The more you develop it, the more precisely you can notice what is going on.

This is my way of framing it, not the sutta's language, but it points to something important. This practice is enquiry into what is actually there, not imagination. I'll describe a few things you may not have felt yet. Don't start imagining them.

Take the heart. It is beating all the time. After a run you can hear it. But sitting in meditation, it's rare that you can find it. Once your interoception is trained, ten minutes of sitting and calming is often enough. You'll feel the pumping. As you go deeper, you'll notice areas that feel hollow and areas that feel heavy, and in the abdomen a pull downward: the skeleton holding you up and the organs drawn towards the ground. Not the diagram from your tenth-standard science book. What is actually happening, in you.

The sutta gives several ways of looking at the body:

The sutta also includes awareness of posture (walking, standing, sitting, lying down) and clear knowing in everyday activity. Through all of it, the orientation holds: no desire, no aversion, just observation.

Feeling Tone

Now we come to the edge between body and mind. I place it here, though some teachers place it with the mind. This is vedanā, which we met earlier in the year in the talk on dependent origination. It is usually translated as feeling, or feeling tone: the underlying pleasant or unpleasant quality of a moment.

An example. You've had a good day. You were appreciated at work. You come home, there's no salt in the food. "No problem, I'll add it." Another day you've been berated in the office. You come home, no salt. "I do all the work, and now I have to put my own salt?" The missing salt hasn't changed. The feeling tone you bring to it has.

Feeling tone runs the whole system. In dependent origination, this is the link where feeling gives rise to craving (vedanā paccayā taṇhā). As the feeling changes, the thirst changes, and what you want changes.

Think of eating sweets. After a few sweets, something mildly spicy tastes very spicy, and a less sweet sweet tastes bland. This is conditioned existence. Your response to this moment depends less on the moment than on what came before it.

The Buddha divides feeling into three: pleasant, unpleasant, and neither-pleasant-nor-unpleasant. Pleasant, we run towards. Unpleasant, we run away from. These are easy to see. The neutral is the subtle one. Often nothing much is happening, and because we can't sit with that, we go looking for the next pleasant or unpleasant thing. Just observe it: this is neutral. There's nothing to do.

The sutta also distinguishes worldly feelings, which come through the senses, including a thought or memory, from unworldly ones, which arise in the practice itself. Sometimes you are just breathing and it feels so pleasant, with no particular thought behind it. Sometimes, with no input, an irritation comes and you can't even label it. Both are to be observed.

The ten-day Vipassana course in the tradition of S.N. Goenka, which is the one I attend, builds almost the entire practice on this one piece: observing sensations and not reacting to them.

Two Lenses Throughout

For every object, whether body, feeling, mind or dhammas, the sutta gives a framework that repeats in each section. Two parts of it I want you to carry.

Arising and passing (samudaya and vaya). Observe how something comes into being and how it passes. A breath comes, passes, another comes. A pain comes, passes. Something you felt as solid in one scan feels less solid in the next. When you begin to see this, the meditation gets calmer: something pleasant has arisen, it will pass; something unpleasant has arisen, it will pass.

A student asked whether this is the same as anicca, impermanence. Not quite. This is the direct observation of things forming and leaving. Seeing both, again and again, is what leads you to understand impermanence.

Internal and external (ajjhatta and bahiddhā). In the commentaries this is often explained as observing in oneself and in others. I find it useful to also look at it as the difference between what reaches you and what you do with it. Someone starts speaking, and because you know them, the judgment is done before they finish the sentence. You haven't given yourself the time to see where it hit you and what happened inside you because it hit you.

And once you see this clearly in yourself, the other side becomes available: this is probably what is happening in the other person too.

Going deeper: Ajjhattaṃ · Bahiddhā →

The Mind and Its Contents

The third foundation is the mind, citta. Here you are noting the state of the mind at this moment. The sutta goes through it in pairs: a mind with desire or without, with aversion or without, with confusion or without, contracted or scattered, exalted or not, collected or not. Some days you feel you could conquer the world. Some days it all feels too much and the mind just shrinks. These are qualities of the mind, and you simply know them.

If the body and feeling tone are known through interoception, this is introspection: the mind looking at the mind.

The fourth foundation is dhammas. Translators render it as mental objects, phenomena, or the nature of things, in the sense that it is the nature of a thing to behave the way it does. In the sutta, this section works through particular sets: the five hindrances (desire, ill will, dullness, restlessness and worry, doubt), the five aggregates, the six senses, the seven factors of awakening, and the four noble truths. The hindrances deserve a talk of their own, so I won't go into them today.

What matters here is that you are not observing the content of a thought so much as its nature: that it arose, how you are responding to it, and that it passes.

Bare Knowing

This, I think, is the fulcrum. At the end of each section the sutta says that awareness is established yāvadeva ñāṇamattāya paṭissatimattāya: just to the extent needed for knowing and for mindfulness. Anissito ca viharati: you abide independent, na ca kiñci loke upādiyati, not clinging to anything in the world.

When anger comes up while you are sitting, you can get angry. Or you can know: anger arose. It is the same thought. But there is a difference between "anger arose" and "I need to do something about him".

Sitting with the knowledge that something has arisen on the surface of your mind, and that like a wave it will pass. Not becoming the wave. It is very easy to say and extremely difficult to do.

This is also why I sometimes ask you to sit through some discomfort without moving. There is so much to learn there. The discomfort grows, and there will be tipping points: I have to get up. If you can just observe, "I'm thinking I have to get up", and relax the body a little, take awareness to another part, work with it, very often it eases and passes. You'll feel some heat, maybe some sweat, and later that part feels free. It's not magic. These things come and go. But you start to see how much of it is the sensation and how much is your reaction to it.

The Second Arrow

Two arrow stories from the suttas are worth putting side by side here.

In the first (MN 63), a man is struck by a poisoned arrow. Before he lets the surgeon remove it, he wants to know who shot it, what caste he was, what wood the shaft was made of, what feathers were used. He would die before the answers came. The Buddha told it about speculative questions that don't lead to the end of suffering, but the lesson carries: when you are already in distress, the first thing is to pull the arrow out. Investigation can come later.

In the second (SN 36.6), the Buddha says that when an untrained person meets a painful feeling, they worry, grieve and lament. It is like being struck by an arrow and then by a second one. The trained practitioner feels the first arrow, the bodily pain, but not the second.

The first arrow is not up to you. Somebody said something, intentionally or not, whether they like you or not. It has come. The second arrow, your reaction, is the part you can work with. Satipaṭṭhāna, Vipassana, is learning to see that there are two arrows, not one.

So when people come to you with ill will, you try to meet them with goodwill rather than equal ill will. A later commentary, the Visuddhimagga, has a good image for this: getting angry to hurt someone is like picking up a burning ember to throw at them. You burn yourself first.

A Map, Not a Ladder

This is one of the Buddha's longest and most comprehensive teachings on meditation. To go through all of it would take ten or twelve hours. I've tried to give you the overall shape.

You can observe your body. You can observe your feeling tone. You can observe your mind. You can observe the nature of what moves through it. In each, see what arises and passes, see what reaches you and what you do with it, and keep a little distance: just the observing.