Anapanasati Day

The suttas often tell us where they happened, but not when. Even the sutta we chanted just now, the Buddha’s first sermon, which we believe was given during the full moon in July, doesn’t say that. The date is a later tradition.

One of the exceptions is the Ānāpānasati Sutta, the sutta about mindfulness of breathing. It was given on the full moon of the very last night of the rainy season. The Rains Retreat ends one month before the end of the rainy season so that the monks can have time to go around and get their robes done before they head out in the cold season. But the Buddha has an allowance that if things are going well in the Saṅgha—the practice is going well, people are making good progress—they can delay the Pavāraṇā, the night of invitation, either two more weeks or another month, to allow their good community to continue practicing and making more progress. That’s what happened that year.

At the end of the Rains Retreat, the Buddha said, “Let’s stay on for another month.” So they did. And he gave his reason: The monks were practicing well. There were monks who were becoming stream enterers, once returners, non-returners, arahants. Even those who weren’t gaining the noble attainments were making good progress in their meditation.

So on the last night of the rainy season, i.e., tonight, he gave a long talk in celebration of what they had done. It’s a sutta that affirms the principle that even though the Buddha extolled living alone, there was still value in living together, when everyone is working together toward the goal, helping one another toward the goal. It’s an important part of our lives as practitioners.

So in celebration of that he gave a very long sermon on what the different monks were practicing. He mentions the Wings to Awakening, various meditation topics, but then he goes into detail only on one, which is mindfulness of breathing. He mentions the 16 steps, which fall into four tetrads.

The first tetrad has to do with the body. As you breathe in and out, you discern when the breath is long; you discern when it’s short. Then you train yourself to breathe in and out sensitive to the whole body. And then you train yourself to calm what the Buddha calls bodily fabrication, in other words, the in-and-out breathing. Why he calls it that, he doesn’t say, but it’s probably because he wants you to start thinking in terms of fabrication: how the mind puts together its experience in the present moment. And bodily fabrication, the way you breathe, is an important part.

We talked about this today, how emotions can hijack your breath, then hijack the whole physical process in the body, making you feel you’ve got to do something to get that emotion out of your system. Yet you have an alternative: You can turn around and choose different ways of breathing to calm things down. That will have an impact on how you fabricate your present moment.

That’s the first tetrad.

The second tetrad has to do with feelings. You breathe in and out training yourself to be sensitive to rapture, sensitive to pleasure, sensitive to mental fabrications, which are perceptions and feelings. And then you calm mental fabrications. Again, think about how you’re shaping your mind state by the perceptions you hold in mind. You can think about things that get you all upset. All kinds of perceptions can get you upset—about what’s going on in the world right now, what’s going on in your life, or in the lives of those who are dear to you. Or you can stop and create other perceptions and images that are just as true but calm you down.

Or even directly staying with the breath, there are ways of perceiving the breath that are calming both for the breath and the mind. You can perceive the breath as the air coming in and out through the nose, or you can perceive it as the sense of energy throughout the body, which is more calming. It allows a sense of well-being to spread through the body. So try that.

That’s the second tetrad.

The third tetrad deals directly with the mind. First you breathe in and out sensitive to the state of your mind. You come from the day; you come from your dreams. All kinds of things can be influencing your mind right now. So where is your mind? What does it need? The remaining steps deal with getting the mind to counteract whatever is out of balance. You can gladden the mind as you breathe in, breathe out. You can steady and concentrate the mind as you breathe in, breathe out. You can release the mind from whatever thoughts oppress it as you breathe in, breathe out. The important thing is you get a sense of what your mind needs in order to stay with the breath.

With these first three tetrads, it’s not the case that you do the first and then the second and then the third. You’re doing all three together at the same time. When you’re with the breath, what are you going to feel? You have feelings of pleasure or pain. And you’ve got the mind state that either stays with the breath or doesn’t stay with the breath. So the three tetrads are useful ways of looking at what you’ve got. If things are going well, you try to keep them together. If they’re not going well, you try to figure out what’s the problem. Is it with the breath? Is it with the feelings? Is it with your mind state? The Buddha gives you ideas of how to deal with these things.

The fourth tetrad has to do with mental qualities or dhammas. In this particular case, you breathe in and out focused on inconstancy. You breathe in and out focused on dispassion. You breathe in and out focused on cessation. And you breathe in and out focused on relinquishment. This is an expansion of the last step of the third tetrad, releasing the mind. Whatever it is that’s causing trouble for your mind, you try to look to see how it’s inconstant. And that, of course, includes the fact that if it’s inconstant, you look for the stress that it’s creating. If it’s inconstant and stressful, is it really worth holding on to? We’re here looking for ways to create long-term welfare and happiness. So if something is inconstant and stressful and not yours, then it’s not what you’re looking for. Look for something else.

We don’t usually think in those terms, but it’s a useful way of thinking. An emotion comes up in the mind and you feel, “Well, this is how I really feel about this,” and you let it take over. But you can ask yourself, “Is this what I’m here for? Just to be driven around by these emotions?” Well, no. So try to take the emotion apart. This is where thinking in terms of fabrication gets useful. There’s bodily fabrication: the way you breathe. Mental fabrication: perceptions, images, labels you hold in mind. And then the one kind of fabrication that’s not mentioned in the instructions: verbal fabrication, the way you talk to yourself. But the instructions themselves are an example of how you talk to yourself: “I will breathe in this way, I will breathe in that way.”

So if you see that if something has overwhelmed your mind, you can ask yourself, “How does the way I breathe make me feel overwhelmed? How does the way I talk to myself make me feel overwhelmed? The way I image things in my mind and the feelings I focus on: How does that make me feel overwhelmed? I don’t need that. I can construct these things in a different way.”

This is why we have all those texts by the Buddha. Sometimes you see things reduced to lists, as if the lists were the heart of what the Buddha taught. But there’s so much in the suttas where he’s giving you ways of talking to yourself. He’s recommending ways of imaging things to yourself. He’s even telling you how to breathe—in other words, how to fabricate your experience in a better way.

So those are the 16 Steps. But the Buddha doesn’t stop there. He points out, as I said, that when you’re focused on the breath, you’ve got body, feelings, mind states, and mental qualities all right there. When you’ve got them all together like that, then as the mind gathers together, you develop the factors for awakening. You start with mindfulness. Then on top of that is analysis of qualities, in other words, you look at how you’re fabricating things right now. Ask yourself, “Is this skillful? Is it not?” If it’s not skillful, what alternatives do you have? And then there’s persistence. You try to abandon what’s unskillful and develop what’s skillful. When you do this well, there’s a sense of fullness, rapture, refreshment. We think of skillful and unskillful simply as duties to be developed and abandoned. But remember we’re doing it for a sense of refreshment for the mind, learning how to delight when unskillful things lose their power and skillful things begin to take hold. With that sense of refreshment there’s a sense of calm. From the calm there comes concentration. As the mind gets concentrated, it settles into equanimity. The equanimity that comes when your needs for a sense of inner well-being have been met allows you to view yourself, to view the world, with a lot more stability. Then, based on these seven qualities, you gain clear knowing and release.

So it’s all there in breath meditation. Ajaan Fuang summarizes it by saying the breath can take you all the way to unbinding. Here the Buddha sets out the steps by which that happens. It’s all there in those 16 steps. When you do the 16 steps, the four establishings of mindfulness are there. When you do the four establishings of mindfulness, the seven factors for awakening are there. It’s all there in how you relate to your breath in line with those 16 steps.

So it’s good to know them. This is one of the practices that had that community of monks on such good terms that they extended their Rains Retreat. Usually at the end of the Rains Retreat, monks can’t wait to get away. They’ve been cooped up for three months, can’t go anywhere. But here was a case where, staying together, they were helping one another in really substantial ways.

We should think of this as an ideal. It’s one of the reasons why the Buddha had us divide the year into times when we’re together and times when we’re off on our own. You want to see that both have their advantages. When you’re off on your own, you’re confronted by a lot of things that you’re not confronted with as you live together. It’s just you and you. When things aren’t going well, you can’t blame anybody else. That makes you confront your defilements. When you’re together you can take advantage of other people’s wisdom. This is why the Buddha had us divide the year in these ways.

So on a night like this—it’s called the Water Lily Moon. We in America have different names for full moons. In India, this is the one that’s called the Water Lily Moon. They have white water lilies that bloom this time of year. I happened to be in India years back to visit the Buddhist holy sites, and it was just this time of year, the beginning of November, and sure enough, in the ponds by the railroad tracks, ponds here, ponds there, white water lilies were all blooming. The white of the flowers reflected the white of the full moon. It’s a lovely time of year.

So given that this is one of the few suttas where we know what time of year it was given, it’s good to mark that. We don’t know which year it was, but that doesn’t matter. The principles it teaches are timeless. You don’t practice meditation or breath meditation only on this night, but on this night it’s a good time to reflect on all the people who’ve benefited from this practice. And here’s your opportunity to add yourself to that list.