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I decided to give my next Dhamma Talk on satipaṭṭhāna, a word usually translated as "foundation of mindfulness" or "establishing of mindfulness". I think Bhikkhu Anālayo makes a very good argument that these are not great translations, and it probably means something more like "staying near awareness", which is why I titled the talk "Satipaṭṭhāna: The Practice of Staying Near Our Experience." But that translation is not what this post is going to be about.
The most common place to go for instructions on satipaṭṭhāna are, quite naturally, the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta from the Majjhima Nikāya (collection of middle-length discourses, or suttas) or a few related suttas. But there's a whole collection of short suttas on the topic in the Saṃyutta Nikāya, which is a collection of very brief suttas organized by topic. Bhikkhu Sujato argues that these represent an earlier strata than the popular sutta in the MN, that indeed the more well-known sutta is actually pretty late in composition. So I've decided to mine that for my talk. And man, there's some gold in there.
Starting with something I touched on in a previous post, that ethical practice is meant to be preliminary to formal meditation practice, which is the reverse of the way it's generally taught in the West (outside of the Asian diaspora, of course). I think this is generally because people coming to Buddhism are fleeing the moralizing of Western religion, with its Thou Shalt Nots and so forth, and are interested in meditation for whatever reason, and in order to win converts Dharma teachers set aside Buddhist morality and teach the meditation part first. But, in fact, the set of practices grouped together as "mindfulness meditation" relies on a solid foundation of ethical living, so doing this does a disservice to what the Buddha taught. Instead, I think it's good to underline it, as well as the fact that the Buddhist approach to ethics is radically different from approaches in which morality is about adhering to absolute rules delivered by a deity in order to avoid eternal punishment.
( Read more... )
The most common place to go for instructions on satipaṭṭhāna are, quite naturally, the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta from the Majjhima Nikāya (collection of middle-length discourses, or suttas) or a few related suttas. But there's a whole collection of short suttas on the topic in the Saṃyutta Nikāya, which is a collection of very brief suttas organized by topic. Bhikkhu Sujato argues that these represent an earlier strata than the popular sutta in the MN, that indeed the more well-known sutta is actually pretty late in composition. So I've decided to mine that for my talk. And man, there's some gold in there.
Starting with something I touched on in a previous post, that ethical practice is meant to be preliminary to formal meditation practice, which is the reverse of the way it's generally taught in the West (outside of the Asian diaspora, of course). I think this is generally because people coming to Buddhism are fleeing the moralizing of Western religion, with its Thou Shalt Nots and so forth, and are interested in meditation for whatever reason, and in order to win converts Dharma teachers set aside Buddhist morality and teach the meditation part first. But, in fact, the set of practices grouped together as "mindfulness meditation" relies on a solid foundation of ethical living, so doing this does a disservice to what the Buddha taught. Instead, I think it's good to underline it, as well as the fact that the Buddhist approach to ethics is radically different from approaches in which morality is about adhering to absolute rules delivered by a deity in order to avoid eternal punishment.
( Read more... )
