Satipatthana: The Direct Path to Realization
For those who have floundered in many different Buddhist traditions and want a solid foundation of Early Buddhist teachings, the following review highlights some of the works of Bhikkhu Analayo who is one of the best scholars of Early Buddhist texts. For this review I’ll focus on what good meditation practice is in this tradition. This will be mainly from Satipatthana: The Direct Path to Realization.
Bhikkhu Analayo
Bhikkhu Analayo is a Sri Lankan monk from the Amarapura Nikaya monastic fraternity. He was born in Germany in 1962, and ordained as a novice in Sri Lanka in 1995. In 2007 he received the Upasampada which is a marker of him “nearing the ascetic tradition” which is only available for those over 20 years of age. He became known for his work on comparing the Pali and Chinese Buddhist Canon. As instructions change with Buddhist lineages, many practitioners feel that the differences in the texts matter in defining what good practice is. His philosophy is that these early scriptures point to more accuracy and reliability when they agree.
Analayo’s thesis on the Satipatthana Sutta is dense but clearly laid out. Like most meditation manuals of this caliber, it has a lifetime’s worth of practice instructions that help the practitioner understand what good practice actually is. The way to read it is understanding the role of definition and how the differences in definition matter.
The practice of Satipatthana, as defined in the book, requires the establishment of four mental qualities which can be taken to represent the mental faculties of effort, wisdom, mindfulness, and concentration. To develop these qualities requires practicing diligence (effort), to know experiences clearly (wisdom), to be mindful, and to be free from desires and discontent (concentration and equanimity). Here is how it’s broken down:
Diligence
Diligence requires balance. Desire must be cultivated to have it, but the strange situation of creating a desire only to let go of desire seems logically circular. In Buddhism it is well known that you don’t give up desire until the mind naturally gives it up on its own. The mind strains less as the desire is naturally relinquished, but in the meantime, having desire can animate continued practice before the goal is reached.
Because desire for an outcome is the source of stress, there has to be a balanced practice to avoid burnout, and on the other hand there can’t be too little desire so that practice is given up. The book suggests that “one must avoid a submission to destiny which slackens the necessary sustained application of effort, but one must also avoid excessive effort that causes suffering. The Buddha once compared the balanced effort needed for proper progress to the tuning of a lute, whose strings should be neither too tight or too loose.”
For the practitioner the book recommends “keeping up one’s contemplation with balanced but dedicated continuity, returning to the object of meditation as soon as it is lost.” For those who have trouble with straining in their meditation I recommend looking at my review of the Anapanasati Sutta where relaxation is balanced with effort. See: The Anapanasati Sutta: https://rumble.com/v1gon6r-the-anapanasati-sutta-4-stages-of-meditation.html
In my experience, being lost in thoughts can feel like a tension bubble and with earlier practice methods there was often too much straining to bring the mind back to the object. As practice matures you can put just enough effort to come back and then resume your continuity. A good goal would be to think when you need to think and then naturally let it drop with an adequate bit of effort that increases or decreases according to how strongly fixated you are. More effort when it is required and less effort if it is enough. As practice deepens, less effort is required.
Clearly knowing
With clear knowing there are a range of definitions which include a presence of deliberateness, awareness of impermanence, and clear knowledge for overcoming unwholesomeness and establishing wholesomeness.
This clear knowing can be viewed as a progression to clearly know the purpose of progress to awakening, to clearly know the suitability of conduct that is careful and dignified, especially for one who is living like a monk or a nun. The third quality is called pasture which relates to the inappropriateness of being distracted by sensuality, compared to the sense-restraint required for the proper pasture of a monk or nun.
As wisdom is developed, clear knowledge starts losing its delusion. The typical description is to have an absence of lust, anger and delusion whereby there is an absence of “pulling in, pushing away, and running around in circles”, as Buddhadasa describes. For example, if anyone looks at their addictions there is often a pulling in of what you want, a pushing away of what you don’t want leading to circular results without lasting satisfaction.
Mindfulness
With diligence and clear knowing the practitioner will require mindfulness to remember to come back to the present moment, but also to guard against improper “pastures”. See: Emotional Feeding: https://rumble.com/v1gqvl1-emotional-feeding-thanissaro-bhikkhu.html
Mindfulness has this non-interfering quality to clearly observe the building up of reactions and their underlying motives. The book warns that “as soon as one becomes in any way involved in a reaction, the detached observational vantage point is immediately lost.” To me this reminds me of the psychological debate between an outcome orientation versus a learning orientation. When the goal is learning, then success is all around. When the goal is an outcome then the mind gears up to make those preferences happen, often with a lot of mental pressure. Mindfulness is humble with one’s own shortcomings and therefore reduces the energy needed to defend a self-image.
Analayo provides a good description of mindfulness in his book Early Buddhist Meditation Studies:
“Regarding the early Buddhist conception of mindfulness, a point worthy of note is that the instructions for Satipatthana meditation make use of conceptual labels to facilitate recognition. The actual instructions for contemplation of feelings or of states of mind, for example, use direct speech to formulate the conceptual labels to be used when practicing. In the case of a mind with anger, for instance, the task is to know a mind with anger as being ‘a mind with anger’. This unmistakably envisions that satipatthana meditation involves the use of concepts. A practice like the labeling technique employed in the Mahasi tradition does in this respect seem to reflect quite well what the early discourses suggest actual practice to have been about.” See: Mental Noting: https://rumble.com/v1grcgx-mindfulness-nirvana.html
Freedom from desires and discontent (equanimity)
When the practitioner develops their skills to this level, they often find themselves absorbed in concentration states with progressively more freedom from desires and discontent leading to calm and contentment. This equanimity along with the prior attributes prepares the practitioner to see the futility of clinging to anything in experience until the mind surrenders the stress at arhatship.
This is represented with clarity in a figure of four cones where the four qualities are applied to all experiences.
In the book, Early Buddhist Meditation Studies, the four cones of the Satipatthana are described as follows:
“Here the body furnishes the material and spatial location ‘where’ I am, feelings provide the affective or hedonic tone of ‘how’ I am (in terms of feeling pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral), perceptions supply the conceptual appraisal of ‘what’ I am experiencing, formations are responsible for ‘why’ I react to anything that happens (in the way I actually do), and consciousness is that ‘whereby’ I experience.” Whereby being the cause and effect of what is happening.
Since consciousness is involved in all four cones it is a good reminder to not look at it as a solid place for the self. Look at it more as a “flow of moments of being conscious.”
Bhikkhu Analayo ends his book with his view of the importance of the Satipatthana Sutta and views it as “the direct path to the realization of Nibbana, to the perfection of wisdom, to the highest possible happiness, and to unsurpassable freedom.”
Books:
Early Buddhist Meditation Studies – Bhikkhu Analayo: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781540410504/
Satipatthana: The Direct Path to Realization – Bhikkhu Analayo: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781899579549/
Mindfulness: Nirvana: https://rumble.com/v1grcgx-mindfulness-nirvana.html
Credits:
Bhikkhu Anālayo By Bhikkhu Analayo, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14907622
A lute being made in a workshop By © Jorge Royan / http://www.royan.com.ar, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15104236
Contemplative Practice: https://psychreviews.org/category/contemplativepractice/