In January through the beginning of March, I myself will be taking Venerable Analayo’s 8-week course on the Sattipathana Sutta - or the Four Foundations of Mindfulness. These four foundations are Mindfulness of the Body, Mindfulness of Feelings, Mindfulness of the Mind, and Mindfulness of the Dharma (or the way things are). We explored this teaching last year and earlier this year. I always intended to go through it with you again because it is a life long teaching which deepens as our practice and understanding deepens. So this will be a wonderful iopportunity for all of us to delve into the Four Foundations of Mindfulness again - with the understanding of one of our great teachers, scholars, and practitioners in the background.
The opportunity and the invitation here both for those of you who are familiar with this teaching and those who may have missed all or part of the previous teachings is to start over, to begin again at the beginning and go all the way through exploring the very foundations of mindfulness - both in the teaching itself and in our own experience of mindfulness - as Andrew Olendzki wrote last week - “investigated moment by investigated moment.”
T.S. Eliot’s famous lines from “Little Gidding” also come to mind:
"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
will be to arrive where we started
and know the place for the first time."
Many of you who took MBSR first learned of mindfulness of the body, of feelings and of the mind during that course. Mindfulness of Dharmas was not called that in MBSR, of course. Nevertheless, mindfulness of hindrances, of the enlightenment factors, and of the four Noble Truths also were part of the MBSR experience.
This Sattipatthana teaching is fundamentally a teaching about how to practice mindfulness, how to bring mindfulness to every aspect of our experience. The field is vast and the task can be daunting but the experience is rich and the practice fruitful. And this Sattipatthana Sutta is the clearest, most complete teaching in the entire Pali canon (body of teachings) on how to understand and enlarge our practice of mindfulness. This deepening of mindfulness goes to the very core of our practice and of our being as Andrew Olendzki made clear in the last week’s teaching.
And so we are cloaked in ignorance and tied to craving; and we are also incapable of discerning a beginning or an end to the flowing-on known as saṃsāra (Samsara). Taken as a whole, this passage is laying out the nature of the human condition and the limitations of our ability to see the impermanence of our own experience. It shows how, from one moment to the next..., we are compelled to move on and on and on, continuing to construct and inhabit our world. And both the beginning and end of the entire process are entirely beyond the capacity of our minds to conceive...
So this passage sets the stage for us…No story is going to help us much in figuring out what we’re doing here. All we have is what is right in front of us, and that is obscured by the ignorance and craving we continue to manifest.
But this is by no means an insignificant starting point. The beginning and end of the process might be unknowable, but we can know what is present to our immediate experience. Since there is no point in wasting energy on speculation about origins or destinies, our attention is best placed on investigating the present and unpacking the forces that keep it all flowing onward. This is really where Buddhism starts and where it thrives—in the present moment. We have no idea how many moments have gone before or how many will yet unfold—either cosmically or individually—but each moment that lies before our gaze is, potentially, infinitely deep.
The critical factor is the quality of our attention. If a moment goes by unnoticed, then it is so short it might not even have occurred. But if we can attend very carefully to its passage, then we can begin to see its nature. The closer we look, the more we see. The more mindful we can be, the more depth reality holds for us.
The Buddhist tradition points out some of the dynamics of the present moment—its arising and passing away, its interrelatedness to other moments, its constructed qualities, the interdependence of its factors—and then we have to work with it from there. The only place to start is the only place to finish—in this very moment. And that of course is why the experiential dimension to Buddhism—the practice of mindful awareness—is so crucial. You can’t think your way out of this. You just have to be with the arising and passing of experience, and gain as much understanding from the unfolding of the moments as you can.
Step by step, investigated moment by investigated moment, the illusions that obscure things and the desires that distort things will recede as they yield to the advance of insight and understanding. In this direction lies greater clarity and freedom.
**"The Context of Impermanence" (Insight Journal, Fall 1999) https://www.buddhistinquiry.org/article/the-context-of-impermanence/.