More than a Slice of Mindfulness

There’s a very long sutta on the topic of establishing mindfulness—in fact, there are two very long versions of it—and they’re so long that they give the impression that they provide a complete description of what mindfulness practice is all about.

But if you look carefully at them, you see that they’re very frank about the fact that they’re telling only part of the story. They start with the full formula for the establishing of mindfulness: You keep track of the body in and of itself—ardent, alert, and mindful—putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world. Then the same with feelings, mind states, mental qualities: You keep track of each in and of itself—ardent, alert, and mindful—putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world. That’s the formula.

But then the sutta goes on to ask and answer questions only about one part of the formula: “What does it mean to keep track of something in and of itself?” It gives long lists of the various ways you can keep track of various topics, either in terms of the body, in terms of feelings, in terms of mind states, in terms of mental qualities. But it says nothing about what it means to be alert, what it means to be ardent, or how you put aside greed and distress with reference to the world.

People reading those suttas, thinking that they’re complete, have often come away with the impression that mindfulness is simply about noting things—the presence or absence of something. When something is there, you note that it’s there; when it’s not there, you note that it’s not there. But you don’t do anything about it—you’re just watching things coming and going.

This impression is augmented by a refrain that occurs throughout the suttas—that you’re aware of the phenomenon of arising with reference to the body; you’re aware of the phenomenon of passing away with reference to the body, or feelings, or mind states, or mental qualities, all arising and passing away. Or at least that’s how it’s translated. But, as we’ll see, that’s a mistranslation and it gives a very false impression of what you’re up to.

If you want a complete picture of mindfulness practice, there are two things you have to do to augment the long suttas. One is to look at how the missing terms are defined in the rest of the suttas.

Alert is defined as being aware of what you’re doing while you’re doing it. This can refer to physical actions or to mental actions, like perceptions and thought constructs. *Ardent *means engaging in the right effort. If something unskillful is there in the mind, you try to get rid of it and try to make sure it doesn’t come back. If you’re missing skillful qualities, you try to give rise to them. Once they’re there, you try to develop them to the full extent of your ability.

As for putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world, there are lots of contemplations you can do to give rise to a sense of dispassion toward the world while you’re sitting here meditating, trying to keep your focus on one thing. That’s what it’s all about—keeping focused on one thing as your frame of reference, not just noting everything that passes by, but getting established first in one central topic.

In other words, this is a concentration practice. Look at the place of right mindfulness in the path—it’s always before right concentration. That’s its position in the noble eightfold path. That’s its position in the seven factors for awakening; its position in the five strengths and the five faculties.

Every list of Dhammas that talks about mindfulness and concentration puts mindfulness before concentration. Mindfulness is what you do to get into right concentration. The descriptions of right concentration are basically telling you what you’re going to experience as the mind begins to settle down.

You can see this most clearly in Majjhima 125, where the Buddha compares taming a monk to taming a wild elephant. At first, the elephant is going to fight and fight and fight to get away from the post it’s tied to, but you feed it with grass, feed it with good water, you play music for it. When it finally accepts the grass, that’s the sign it’s going to live and will find pleasure in living with human beings.

In the same way, your mind is fighting its one frame of reference in the beginning—thinking about this, that, and the other thing. But you keep pulling it back, pulling it back, and offering it something good, i.e., comfortable breathing. The Buddha talks about how, as you breathe in the contemplation of the body in and of itself, you’re discerning short breathing, you’re discerning long breathing. And what do you discern? Not just the shortness or the length, but also what kind of breathing feels good.

Then you’re aware of the whole body as you breathe in, the whole body as you breathe out. Think of the breathing as a whole-body process to give rise to the sense of full-body awareness that lies at the heart of right concentration. Then you calm bodily fabrication, i.e., you calm the effect of the breath and you can get so calm that the breath stops. That takes you all the way to the fourth jhāna. One of the steps there, for training that elephant, once it’s happy to be with the post—is that you train it in all the tricks that an elephant is supposed to do, all the jobs that an elephant is supposed to take on.

In the same way, once the mind settles down and is happy to be at the post of the breath, then the Buddha says the next step is to focus on the body in and of itself, ardent, alert and mindful, but don’t think any thoughts related to the body. In other words, you don’t engage in direct thought and evaluation, and in that way you enter the second jhāna. That means that the practice of establishing mindfulness in the body and in the breath is basically to get you into the first jhāna, and then from there you can go into deeper and deeper levels of concentration.

As for that issue of “discerning the phenomenon of arising and passing away”: That’s the second issue, and actually the real translation there is, “discerning the phenomenon of origination and passing away.” Now, origination means causation, and not just any causation—it’s almost always causation coming from within the mind. This is the same term the Buddha uses for the origination of suffering, i.e., the craving that leads to becoming, which is something that originates in the mind. This is what gives rise to suffering.

In the same way, as you’re looking at the phenomenon of origination, you want to see what gives rise to what in your mind. The best way to do that is to experiment, to do something with your mind. Don’t just watch things coming and going.

This is where the ardency helps. If you’re trying to give rise to skillful qualities, what helps skillful qualities originate? If you’re battling with unskillful qualities, what’s their origination?

You’re looking for cause and effect, and the way to understand cause and effect is to experiment by manipulating the potential causes. If the mind refuses to settle down, you can breathe in different ways or visualize the breath in the body in different ways. You can ask yourself, “How about holding the perception that the breath is already there throughout the body, and whatever blockages I feel are not really blocking the breath. The breath is still coming in and going out, circulating around the body. It’s not really blocked. Whatever tension is there is totally unnecessary. You can relax it. What does that do? Does that help you get deeper into concentration? If it does, hold on to that perception.”

You’re learning about origination: What gives rise to what in the mind? What causes what to pass away?

So it’s important that you understand that the long descriptions of mindfulness in those suttas are by no means a full guide to mindfulness practice. They’re not even a very practical guide. They’re more like catalogs. They just list all the various ways you can begin to establish mindfulness and keep track of something. But they don’t tell you what you need to know about ardency, what you need to know about putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world. For that, you read in other parts of the Canon and you experiment.

I remember, after being in Thailand and studying with Ajaan Fuang for a while, I came back to the States and I came across a book that talked about how the Buddha taught basically two types of meditation: One was mindfulness meditation and the other was concentration. To me, that was a new idea, because in my time with Ajaan Fuang—at that point, I hadn’t gone back to re-ordain—my time with Ajaan Fuang had shown me that mindfulness and concentration were pretty much the same thing. Mindfulness is what you develop to get into concentration.

But the idea that they were separate practices was a new idea to me. I found out later, of course, that it was not a very good new idea. You can’t just do mindfulness or just do concentration. Concentration without mindfulness is just deluded concentration. Mindfulness without concentration doesn’t allow you to see deeply into cause and effect. You just see things coming and going. If you can’t interfere with the chain of cause and effect in their comings and goings, you don’t really know what causes what, what’s the effect of what. It’s when you make changes, when you experiment, that you begin to get a sense of origination. This is when the concentration begins to develop into insight, as you start looking to see what causes what.

When you question origination—that was what sparked Sāriputta’s gaining the Dhamma eye, just that much of an insight—you’re looking for the cause of something in the mind and how it can be made to cease. That’s what you’re learning as you’re sitting here, experimenting with the breath, experimenting with the mind, experimenting with your perceptions.

So when you practice mindfulness, don’t practice just a slice. Those huge suttas are just slices of mindfulness. Practice the whole thing. Be ardent, be alert, put aside greed and distress with reference to the world, in addition to being focused on one thing.

And it is one thing. It is concentration practice—keeping track of one thing, fending off other things. There are a couple of activities there, but they’re all centered on gaining one thing, which is a mind that’s still and alert, clear, that understands itself. When you bring in mindfulness, the ability to keep things in mind; alertness, the ability to see what you’re doing while you’re doing it; and ardency, the wholehearted desire to do this well—that’s when you have mindfulness and concentration and the beginnings of discernment. It’s in this way that the factors of the path start to come together. It’s when they come together that they show their real strength.