Breathe Your Way to Awakening

Ajaan Fuang once said that the breath can take you all the way to nibbāna. And if you look at the Buddha’s explanation of the 16 steps for breath meditation in the Ānāpānasati Sutta, you see he’s making the same point. When you fulfil the 16 steps, he says, that fulfils the four establishings of mindfulness. When you fulfil the four establishings of mindfulness, that fulfils the seven factors for awakening. And when they’re fulfilled, together with seclusion and dispassion, they lead to knowledge and release. In other words, you attain the freedom of nibbāna.

The relationship between the 16 steps and the four establishings of mindfulness is pretty clear because the 16 steps fall into four tetrads. The first tetrad has to do with the body, the second with feelings, the third with mind, and the fourth with dhammas. Those are the frames of reference for establishing mindfulness.

The relationship between the 16 steps and the seven factors for awakening is not quite so clear, but it’s there. If you look carefully at the steps, you see that they do fulfil the factors for awakening.

So let’s look at the steps.

In the first tetrad, there’s discerning long breathing, discerning short breathing, training yourself to breathe in and out aware of the whole body, and training yourself to breathe in and out calming bodily fabrication—in other words, the in-and-out breath.

In the second tetrad, you train yourself to breathe in and out sensitive to rapture, to breathe in and out sensitive to pleasure, breathe in and out sensitive to mental fabrication, in other words, feelings and perceptions—the labels you put on things—and finally, you train yourself breathe in and out calming mental fabrication.

In the third tetrad, you train yourself to breathe in and out sensitive to the mind, the state of mind you have right now, and then you see what needs to be done with it. You train yourself to breathe in and out gladdening the mind, to breathe in and out concentrating the mind, and to breathe in and out releasing the mind.

These three tetrads are done in parallel. It’s not the case you focus on the body, and then you focus on feelings, and then you focus on mind, because after all, you’re trying to bring the body, the feelings, and the mind all together into a state of oneness. So you do those three tetrads in parallel. They’re like a checklist. If the mind doesn’t settle down, what’s the problem?

Is it with the way you’re breathing? Or with the way you approach the breath? Is it with the feelings you’re encouraging in the body? After all, feelings are things we do encourage. We don’t just experience them willy-nilly. They’re potentials coming from past kamma, and—either consciously or subconsciously—we focus on certain potentials and turn them into actual feelings. So those are things we can develop.

And finally, states of mind: If you’re not settling down, is the problem with the state of your mind? You can change the state of your mind right now. You’re not stuck with whatever. You can incline the mind to be glad that you’re here. You can incline it to be steadier, more concentrated; you can incline it to gain release from whatever is holding it down.

The fourth tetrad goes into more detail about how you gain release. You train yourself to breathe in and out sensitive to inconstancy. You train yourself to breathe in and out sensitive to dispassion, which is the result of seeing how things are inconstant, stressful, not-self.

Then you train yourself to breathe in and out sensitive to cessation. When you have dispassion for the process of fabricating fabrications, they cease. And finally, you train yourself to breathe in and out sensitive to relinquishment. When everything has ceased, you let go of everything, including the path that got you there. That’s the discernment tetrad.

When you’re working with these four tetrads, the elements of the seven factors for awakening are all there. To begin with, the big one, of course, is mindfulness. The whole practice here is a practice of mindfulness. It’s an interesting practical application of the principles of mindfulness. And contrary to the general understanding of mindfulness, we’re not just here to watch things come and go, or just to be with whatever comes up with as much equanimity as we can muster.

We’re actively doing things, because after all, mindfulness, in the Buddha’s vocabulary, means to keep something in mind. Here you’re keeping the breath in mind; you’re keeping these various tasks in mind. As you apply the things you need to keep in mind, you’re also sensitive to when they’re appropriate. That brings in the alertness factor in mindfulness practice. And then of course, you’re doing things: encouraging skillful qualities and discouraging unskillful ones. That’s the ardency in mindfulness. So the 16 steps give you some important lessons in what mindfulness means and how it’s best put to use.

As for the next factor for awakening, analysis of qualities, that’s the discernment factor. You see discernment playing a role at several places in the practice.

First you start out with the fact that the Buddha calls attention to the processes of fabrication, beginning with bodily fabrication. How does the in-and-out breath shape your experience of the present moment? How can you best use the breath to shape your experience of the present moment? There’s an intentional element there. Then, there’s mental fabrication: How do you use perceptions and feelings to shape your experience of the present moment?

Being sensitive to fabrication like this helps you see how things are constructed. But also, eventually, it’ll help you see why they’re worthy of dispassion. Anything that’s put together, anything that’s fabricated, is going to be stressful and is going to fall apart. If it’s something you want to maintain, then you have to keep working at maintaining it—that’s its drawback.

So just calling your attention to the fact that these things are fabrications is the beginning of discernment.

Then you use those fabrications to create skillful states of mind, as when gladdening the mind. What perceptions gladden you? What perceptions don’t gladden you? Choose whichever ones work best. Which feelings gladden you?

Which perceptions and feelings help you concentrate? The feeling of ease that spreads through the body makes it a lot easier to attain the oneness of concentration. And finally, what perceptions do you use to release the mind? This is where you get into the three perceptions of inconstancy, stress, and not-self.

The ultimate work in analysis of qualities is that last tetrad, as you’re learning how to take apart any disturbance in the mind, any distraction that would pull you away from your concentration. Then, when the concentration is really solid and everything else has been cleared away, you use that fourth tetrad to take apart your passion for concentration. So analysis of qualities plays a huge role in the practice of the breath, in many levels and at many points along the way.

As for the next factor for awakening, persistence: This is when you make the effort to be sensitive to rapture or sensitive to pleasure, when you make the effort to gladden the mind, steady and concentrate the mind, or release the mind. You keep at these things. As you do, that induces rapture: rapture in the body, rapture in the mind. Rapture of the mind includes the step of gladdening of the mind.

And that finally leads to calm. After a while there’s a sense that rapture gets to be a little bit too much: It’s energizing for a while, refreshing for a while, but then it gets tiresome. You think about calming the way you breathe, calming the perceptions you hold in mind, allowing the breath to become subtler, along with the perceptions you have of what energy you’ve got in the body.

There are many levels of energy there: blatant levels of energy and subtler ones. There’s a tendency, after you’ve been nourishing yourself on the blatant ones, to want to rest and ease into the subtler ones. This is calm as a factor for awakening. And when everything grows calm, the mind gets firmly into concentration.

When the Buddha explains calming bodily fabrication, he says that the ultimate calm in bodily fabrication is the fourth jhāna, where you’re fully aware of the body, but everything in the body is still. The in-and-out breathing has grown calm. You have a sense that the breath energy originates in the body itself, so you don’t need to pull anything in from outside. A still, well-connected energy fills the body.

The image in the Canon is of a person sitting with a white cloth covering his body from head to foot. A bright awareness covers you, and you’re fully aware of the body. Everything is still. You hold on to that stillness of the body, stillness of the mind as your object.

So you’re sensitive to fabrication: That’s insight. You’re sensitive to calming fabrications: That’s tranquility. You’ve got tranquility and insight working together to get you into concentration. And in that concentration, the mind becomes equanimous. That brings you to the last of the factors for awakening.

There’s the equanimity just of getting the mind into jhāna, the fourth jhāna. There’s also the equanimity in the fourth tetrad, as the Buddha says. To develop seclusion, dispassion, cessation, and relinquishment requires that you get the mind very equanimous.

That’s the ideal state you want to develop here: fully aware of the body, but the body is fully still. The breath is still; the mind is still. And in that stillness you can see subtle things you didn’t see before. You want the kind of concentration that allows you to observe things, not the kind of concentration that blanks you out.

This is the ideal state. There are deeper levels of concentration that become formless, where you lose your sense of the body, but not everybody who loses a sense of the body is actually going forward in concentration. Some people are really good at denying their sense of the body, usually as a result of childhood trauma. In their case, they have to actively work on maintaining the sense of the body, becoming at home in this sense of the body, because your ability to maintain full-body awareness allows you to see things coming from different corners of the mind that you wouldn’t have seen otherwise if everything were just one-pointed or blanked out.

It’s when you have full awareness of the body, full awareness of the present moment, that the Buddha says your mindfulness is finally pure, your equanimity is pure. And in that state you can see the allure of the things that have been weighing down the mind. You can see through them; you can see their drawbacks as well. It’s when you compare the allure with the drawbacks that you can escape from them—through dispassion, followed by cessation, followed by relinquishment.

That’s how the 16 steps fulfil the seven factors for awakening. They’re a complete path of concentration and discernment, based on virtue.

So don’t look down on the breath. It’s not just a preliminary step in meditation practice. It’s a path all the way to awakening—if you do it right. And the Buddha gives examples for exactly how to do it right. So take advantage of his teachings. They’re there for you to use for the sake of your freedom. When you use them in that way, you’re showing honor to the Buddha, respect for the Buddha—and respect for your own desire to be free.