Awareness of Breath

In the English language the word “meditation” is thrown about in the most awkward places. The word itself seems to lack a cogent meaning. It’s a little like the word “love.” What does that mean? It means whatever the speaker or writer wants it to mean. That is the problem with words — they have no inherent meaning, we give words meaning and they mean whatever we say they mean, regardless of the listener or the reader.

“Meditation” is used to describe the act of thinking deeply about some problem, daydreaming, listening to music, contemplation, mindfulness practice, yoga, prayer,  Buddhism, and Christianity. Usually, when a Buddhist meditation master asks someone if they meditate the response is “yes!” Later, after sitting we find out that they have never trained and what they are doing is thinking about something. Buddhist meditation is vast, but well-defined in its approach. Here we will discuss “mindfulness of the breath.”

Much has been said about mindfulness meditation. It is often characterized by psychologists  as a practice that may or may not involve meditation.  In that view, mindfulness is merely being aware of one’s environment, both physical and mental. In the Buddha’s teaching, the practice is based on meditation and carries the person through the day. In this brief explanation I would like to explain how one meditates using mindfulness of breathing,.In Pàli this is called ànàpànassati (= “breath mindfulness”). This explanation is based mainly on the `Ánàpànassati Sutta' (= “The Mindfulness of Breathing Discourse”) of the Majjhima Nikàya 118 (The Middle Length Discourses). There the Buddha explains why one should practice mindfulness of breathing. 

When, bhikkhus, mindfulness of breathing is developed and cultivated, it is of great fruit and great benefit. 

Then The Buddha explains how mindfulness of breathing carries both rewards and benefits for the practitioner: 

When mindfulness of breathing is developed and cultivated, it fulfills the four foundations of mindfulness. When the four foundations of mindfulness are developed and cultivated, they fulfill the seven enlightenment factors. When the seven enlightenment factors are developed and cultivated, they fulfill True Knowledge and Liberation. 

The Buddha tells us that when ànàpànassati, (mindfulness of breathing) is developed and cultivated, the thirty-seven (37) requisites of enlightenment (sattatimsabodhipakkhiyadhammà), are simultaneously developed and cultivated. 

I shall now explain how it is done and also how the thirty-seven requisites of enlightenment (sattatimsabodhipakkhiyadhammà), are also developed and cultivated by referring to `Ànàpànassati Sutta' section by section. In the next verse the Buddha's explains: 

Here, bhikkhus, a bhikkhu gone to the forest, or gone to the foot of a tree, or gone to a secluded place, sits down, having crossed his legs, set his body straight, having mindfulness established before him. He breathes in mindfully; he breathes out mindfully. 

In modern meditation, often loosely based on the Buddha’s instructions, the term “bare attention” is used quite often. The Buddha never used the word for "bare attention" in his meditation instructions. He understood that attention never occurs in a bare, pure, or unconditioned form. It's always colored by views and perceptions, these are the labels you tend to give to events, and by our intentions also called kamma. Our intentions are our choices of what to attend to and our motivation for being attentive. If we don't understand the conditioned nature of even simple acts of attention, we might just surmise that a given moment of “nonreactive attention” is a moment of Awakening, or kensho, as they say in Zen. If we do this we miss one of the most pivotal insights in Buddhist meditation of how even the most fundamental events occuring in the mind can form a condition for clinging and suffering. If we presume a conditioned event to be unconditioned, we slam shut the door to the unconditioned. It's important to understand the conditioned nature of attention and the Buddha's recommendations for how to discipline it as appropriate attention, to be a factor in the path leading beyond attention to total Awakening.

The Pali term for “attention” is manasikara. Many believe that the term for mindfulness, sati,  means “attention.” The Buddha did not use the term in this way; this is a modern convention. For the Buddha, “Mindfulness” means “keeping something in mind” and this is a function of memory. The word sati literally means “to remember.” When we practice the establishing of mindfulness (satipatthana), we remain focused on observing the object we’ve chosen as our frame of reference: the body, feelings, mind, or mental qualities in and of themselves. This is called anupassana. Mindfulness is one of three qualities we bring to anupassana. Its role is to keep our frame of reference in mind, to keep remembering it. At the same time, we have to be alert (sampajana), clearly aware of what we are doing, making sure that we are doing is trying to remember to keep the object in mind; enthusiastic (atapi) to do it skillfully. The act of establishing mindfulness in this way, through being mindful, alert, and enthusiastic, then shape the topic or theme (nimitta) of right concentration.

For instance, if the meditator’s focus is on the breath, in and of itself, as the frame of reference, anupassana means keeping continual and consistent watch over the breath. Mindfulness means simply remembering to bond with it, keeping it in mind at all times; whereas alertness means knowing what the breath is doing and how well you're staying with it. Enthusiasm is the effort to do all of this skillfully. When all these activities stay fully coordinated, they form the theme of the concentration.

To understand how appropriate attention works in the context of this training we first have to understand how attention usually functions in an untrained mind.

The Buddha's explanation of how events interact to create the conditions for suffering is called, “the teaching on dependent co-arising.” In the teaching attention appears early in the sequence of arising in the factor for mental events called "name," where it comes even before sense media and sensory contact. It comes just after ignorance, fabrication, and consciousness.

In the Buddhist context, "ignorance" (avijja) does not mean a general absence of knowledge. It means not viewing experience in context of the four noble truths: stress, its cause, its cessation, and the path to its cessation. No matter how sophisticated, any other framework for examining experience would be considered as ignorant. Typical examples given in the Canon include seeing things through the framework of self and other, or of existence and nonexistence. ““What am I?” “What am I not?” “Do I exist?” “Do I not exist?” “Do things outside me exist?” “Do they not?” All these questions qualify as eminently ignorant questions. 

These ignorant views condition the way we intentionally fabricate or manipulate bodily, verbal, and mental states. The breath is the primary means for fabricating bodily states, and practical experience shows that in leading to feelings of comfort or discomfort the breath has an impact on mental states as well. When tinted by ignorance even breathing can act as a cause and condition of suffering. Directed thought and judgements are the vehicles used to fashion words and sentences. Mental states are fashioned by feelings; pleasure, pain, neither-pleasure-nor-pain; and perceptions; the patterns we perceive and the labels we apply to things. Sensory consciousness is tinted by these fabrications. Based on the conditions of ignorance, fabrication, and sensory consciousness, the act of attention arises as one of a cluster of mental and physical events called name and form (nama and rupa).

The preconditions for attention are complex, but the co-conditions in name and form add another level of complexity. "Form" means of the form of the body as experienced from within as properties of earth (solidity), water (liquidity), wind (energy), and fire (heat), as shaped by the activity of breathing. "Name" includes not only attention, but also intention (kamma), as a repetition of fabrication; feeling and perception, as a repetition of mental fabrication; and contact, here taken to mean contact among all the factors already listed.

Acting together under the influence of ignorance, these conditions are what usually color every action of attention to any of the six senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, the tactile sense, and the sense of “the mind” that knows mental qualities and ideas. Conditions existing in the mind are prepared to create suffering and stress from that contact even before we are aware of contact at the senses.

In order for attention be disciplined and trained in the other direction it ought to be freed from the conditions of ignorance, but that doesn't mean that it should, or even can, be freed from conditions of fabrication altogether. That would demand an act of willful intention, and that act of will would, of course, have to be formed by a correct and pragmatic understanding of suffering and its causes. That act of will and that understanding would have to be continually brought to mind, remembered, so that attention could be effectively retrained.

Attention needs a new set of conditions to make it appropriate. This is why the Buddha said that the factors of the path corresponding to understanding, will, and memory (right view, right effort, and right mindfulness) are poised around every step of the path. Right view provides the skill of seeing things in context of the four noble truths; right effort initiates the desire and intent to act skillfully on those views; while right mindfulness furnishes a solid foundation for keeping that view and that effort in mind.

Notice the order of these three factors of the path, right view comes first, for it's the direct antidote for the primary condition of ignorance. Right view is not only knowledge about the four noble truths but it sees things in context of those truths. A person intending to end suffering and stress ought to be aware of the four salient factors at any given moment. At the same time, Right View causes us to see the actions appropriate to each factor: 

• Stress is to be comprehended, 
• Its cause abandoned, 
• Its cessation realized, and 
• The path to its cessation developed. 

In his first sermon the Buddha explained this knowledge of the appropriate actions for each truth comes in two stages. The first stage identifies the action. The second realizes that it has been completed. This second stage is the knowledge of Awakening. Because it involves mastering the skills of each task, between the first and the second resides the practice itself and it develops gradually. That's why it's called a path.