the practice of satipaṭṭhāna [2]
Feb. 15th, 2019 11:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cattasallaContinuing my previous post on satipaṭṭhāna, let's now get into the pericope:
I'm going to break each of the phrases into parts and deal with those parts. There's the starting bit, which is what changes in each repetition, kāye kāyānupassī viharati, vedanāsu vedanānupassī viharati, citte cittānupassī viharati, dhammesu dhammānupassī viharati. That's followed by ātāpī, sampajāno, satimā, and vineyya loke abhijjhādomanassaṃ. I'll take up each of those pieces in turn.
So, the first thing worth noting--and most commonly noted--is that there's four fields, or four classes of object one can use for satipaṭṭhāna practice. Each of these gets a pretty detailed treatment in MN 10. Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu refers to them as "frames of reference". They are kāya, vedanā, citta, and dhamma. The first, kāya, is straightforward: the body. The second, vedanā, is generally translated as "feeling", but perhaps a more precise translation is "hedonic tone". It's how pleasant or unpleasant (or neither) an experience is. It's worth noting that Goenka renders it as "sensation".
The third is citta. This one is a bit tricky, because it translates as "mind" or "consciousness" (or sometimes "heart" in the sense of the seat of feeling), but there's actually a trio of words that can be translated thus (viññāṇa and manas being the others), and sometimes they're interchangeable, but sometimes they refer to more specific things. Sue Hamilton's Identity and Experience has a great chapter discussing these terms in depth, and the wikipedia article on citta is a pretty decent place for an introduction. Basically, citta refers to the quality of mind, or the quality of the mental processes. The quality of the awareness. There's a pretty thorough treatment of it here, too, as mindfulness of mind or awareness of awareness.
The fourth, dhamma (perhaps more familiar to some readers in its Sanskrit form, "dharma"), is a really tricky one to translate. The word itself is extremely multivalent, and includes things like "nature", or "law", or "doctrine", as well as the whole of the Buddha's teaching. In this context, it's often translated as "phenomena" or "mental objects". I think "mental qualities" kind of works, too. I don't want to go too deep into it here, so maybe I'll punt it for a later post.
I think I'll wrap this up with a quick note on the opening phrases: kāye kāyānupassī viharati, vedanāsu vedanānupassī viharati, citte cittānupassī viharati, dhammesu dhammānupassī viharati. The verb is viharati, which means "dwells" or "abides". It refers to living in a specific location. (Monasteries are referred to as vihāra.)
Right before the verb, there's the noun for the field adjoined to the word anupassī. This word derives from passati, "sees". It refers to a clear, emphatic, repeated observation. It's generally translated as "contemplation" or "observation". It means keeping your attention on something, so kāyānupassī would be keeping your attention on your body. The first word in the phrase is that field, but in the grammatical case referred to as locative. It indicates that the noun is a location, for example "I stand on the mountain" (pabbate tiṭṭhāmi), "mountain" is in the locative case, so it's "on the mountain". That means kāye kāyānupassī viharati is "dwells observing the body in the body." It's a tricky thing to understand grammatically. I take it to mean the intimacy with which one makes these observations while doing mindfulness meditation. When doing mindfulness of body, it's not like you are outside looking into your own body, but you are observing it from inside. You aren't a detached observer, you are intimately involved with your experience of the body. (This kind of doesn't jibe with the "vipassanā refrain" in MN 10, but we'll burn that bridge when we get to it.)
Idha, bhikkhave, bhikkhu kāye kāyānupassī viharati ātāpī sampajāno satimā vineyya loke abhijjhādomanassaṃ, vedanāsu vedanānupassī viharati ātāpī sampajāno satimā vineyya loke abhijjhādomanassaṃ, citte cittānupassī viharati ātāpī sampajāno satimā vineyya loke abhijjādomanassaṃ, dhammesu dhammānupassī viharati ātāpī sampajāno satimā vineyya loke abhijjādomanassaṃ.
I'm going to break each of the phrases into parts and deal with those parts. There's the starting bit, which is what changes in each repetition, kāye kāyānupassī viharati, vedanāsu vedanānupassī viharati, citte cittānupassī viharati, dhammesu dhammānupassī viharati. That's followed by ātāpī, sampajāno, satimā, and vineyya loke abhijjhādomanassaṃ. I'll take up each of those pieces in turn.
So, the first thing worth noting--and most commonly noted--is that there's four fields, or four classes of object one can use for satipaṭṭhāna practice. Each of these gets a pretty detailed treatment in MN 10. Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu refers to them as "frames of reference". They are kāya, vedanā, citta, and dhamma. The first, kāya, is straightforward: the body. The second, vedanā, is generally translated as "feeling", but perhaps a more precise translation is "hedonic tone". It's how pleasant or unpleasant (or neither) an experience is. It's worth noting that Goenka renders it as "sensation".
The third is citta. This one is a bit tricky, because it translates as "mind" or "consciousness" (or sometimes "heart" in the sense of the seat of feeling), but there's actually a trio of words that can be translated thus (viññāṇa and manas being the others), and sometimes they're interchangeable, but sometimes they refer to more specific things. Sue Hamilton's Identity and Experience has a great chapter discussing these terms in depth, and the wikipedia article on citta is a pretty decent place for an introduction. Basically, citta refers to the quality of mind, or the quality of the mental processes. The quality of the awareness. There's a pretty thorough treatment of it here, too, as mindfulness of mind or awareness of awareness.
The fourth, dhamma (perhaps more familiar to some readers in its Sanskrit form, "dharma"), is a really tricky one to translate. The word itself is extremely multivalent, and includes things like "nature", or "law", or "doctrine", as well as the whole of the Buddha's teaching. In this context, it's often translated as "phenomena" or "mental objects". I think "mental qualities" kind of works, too. I don't want to go too deep into it here, so maybe I'll punt it for a later post.
I think I'll wrap this up with a quick note on the opening phrases: kāye kāyānupassī viharati, vedanāsu vedanānupassī viharati, citte cittānupassī viharati, dhammesu dhammānupassī viharati. The verb is viharati, which means "dwells" or "abides". It refers to living in a specific location. (Monasteries are referred to as vihāra.)
Right before the verb, there's the noun for the field adjoined to the word anupassī. This word derives from passati, "sees". It refers to a clear, emphatic, repeated observation. It's generally translated as "contemplation" or "observation". It means keeping your attention on something, so kāyānupassī would be keeping your attention on your body. The first word in the phrase is that field, but in the grammatical case referred to as locative. It indicates that the noun is a location, for example "I stand on the mountain" (pabbate tiṭṭhāmi), "mountain" is in the locative case, so it's "on the mountain". That means kāye kāyānupassī viharati is "dwells observing the body in the body." It's a tricky thing to understand grammatically. I take it to mean the intimacy with which one makes these observations while doing mindfulness meditation. When doing mindfulness of body, it's not like you are outside looking into your own body, but you are observing it from inside. You aren't a detached observer, you are intimately involved with your experience of the body. (This kind of doesn't jibe with the "vipassanā refrain" in MN 10, but we'll burn that bridge when we get to it.)