Perspectives On Satipatthana

"e;In this new book, Analayo builds on his earlier ground-breaking work, Satipatthana: The Direct Path to Realization. Here, he enlarges our perspective on this seminal teaching by exploring the practices of mindfulness as presented in both the Pali and Chinese versions of this important discourse. The brilliance of his scholarly research, combined with the depth of his meditative understanding, provides an invaluable guide to the liberating practices of the Buddha's teaching."e; Joseph Goldstein, author Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening

"This book helps to fill what has long been a glaring gap in the scholarship of early Buddhism, offering us a detailed textual study of the Satipatthāna Sutta, the foundational Buddhist discourse on meditation practice."--Back cover.

A comprehensive guide to ending suffering through the practice of mindfulness In Uncontrived Mindfulness Vajradevi guides us in the practice of exploring our experience as it happens. The emphasis is on cultivating wisdom, using the tools of attention and curiosity to see through the delusion that is causing our suffering.

From the Buddhist meditator and scholar, Bhikkhu Anālayo, this is a thorough-going guide to the early Buddhist teachings on Satipatthana, the foundations of mindfulness, following on from his two best-selling books, Satipatthana: The Direct Path to Realization and Perspectives on Satipatthana. With mindfulness being so widely taught, there is a need for a clear-sighted and experience-based guide. Analayo provides it.

The Satipatthana Sutta is well known as the main source for Buddhist teachings on mindfulness and its place in Buddhism.

An Insight Meditation teacher explores the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, an essential teaching that transcends all Buddhist traditions and provides a path to true liberation Awakening manifests through the application of mindfulness to four areas: body, feelings, mind, and dharmas. Buddhists of all the traditions share this foundational principle, which is defined in the Satipatthana Sutta and has been expounded upon since the time of the Buddha himself. In Touching the Infinite, Rodney Smith guides readers through the Four Foundations to provide a solid understanding of the teaching. He goes on to challenge us to hold this teaching up against our own experience—and in doing so, to discover the inherent interconnection of all Four Foundations. They are a sequential path that reveal the true nature of things, leading the practitioner to the perception of the formless and then back to daily life infused with that great freedom. The Four Foundations of Mindfulness thus serve as a road map for any genuine spiritual path.

Deepening Insight presents a selection of passages from the early Buddhist discourses that provide perspectives on the cultivation of liberating insight into vedanā, “sensation,” “feeling,” or “feeling tone.” For meditators, such passages can be of considerable help as a reference point for deepening insight. A metaphor that can offer considerable help when facing vedanās describes bubbles arising on the surface of a pond during rain...they arise and soon enough burst and disappear. Contemplation of the changing nature of vedanā provides a firm foundation for the growth of insight into not self. Such insight proceeds through successive layers of the mind’s ingrained habit of self-referentiality. Based on relinquishing the explicit view of affirming the existence of a permanent self, increasingly subtler traces of conceit and possessiveness need to be successively overcome until with full awakening all selfing in any form will be removed for good. Deepening Insight is based on textual sources that reflect “early Buddhism,” which stands for the development of thought and practices during roughly the first two centuries in the history of Buddhism, from about the fifth to the third century BCE. These sources are the Pāli discourses and their parallels, mostly extant in Chinese translation, which go back to instructions and teachings given orally by the Buddha and his disciples. In those times in India, writing was not employed for such purposes, and for centuries these teachings were transmitted orally. The final results of such oral transmission are available to us nowadays in the form of written texts. Bhikkhu Anālayo's presentation is meant to provide direct access, through the medium of translation, to the Chinese Āgama parallels to relevant Pāli discourses. In commenting on such passages, his chief concern throughout is to bring out practical aspects that are relevant to actual insight meditation. Endorsements In spring 1990 S.N. Goenka initiated an international seminar named The Importance of Vedanā and Sampajañña. It had the purpose to disseminate the prominence of sensations (vedanā) as a core object of meditation to recognize the intrinsic nature of change and impermanence. Venerable Bhikkhu Anālayo now provides a thorough, comprehensive and well selected collection on vedanā as maintained in the original early Pāli Canon. Along with the comparison to the Chinese Āgama, otherwise hardly available, this collection if adapted and applied to practice may indeed serve as an inspiring source for deepening insight. —Klaus Nothnagel, Pāli teacher and Center Teacher for Dhamma Pallava in Poland

The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate and explain the efficacy of the method of mindfulness (satipatthana), that is, to show the actual power of mindfulness. Those who do not yet know the Buddha's teaching well enough to accept it as a reliable guide, may hesitate to take up, without good reasons, a practice that just on account of its radical simplicity may appear strange to them. In this essay a number of such “good reasons” are therefore proffered for the reader's scrutiny. They are also meant as an introduction to the general spirit of mindfulness and as pointers to its wide and significant perspectives. Those who have already taken up the practice of mindfulness will recognize in this essay features of their own practice, and be encouraged to cultivate them deliberately.