The Buddha’s teaching on Mindfulness of Breathing is one of the most important teachings in Buddhism and the fruits are implicit in every breath awareness meditation you have ever heard and are ever likely to hear - in yoga studies, on meditation apps, in therapist’s offices. Mindfulness of breathing can lead to complete freedom. As the Buddha said - and I paraphrase, “If this were not so, I would not have told you."
Venerable Analayo’s Mindfulness of Breathing guided meditation series on the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies website follows the 16 Steps of Mindfulness of Breathing that the Buddha offered. Earlier, we had touched on the first three tetrads, each tetrad composed of 4 instructions for moving the Mindfulness of Breathing practice along the path. I have included the entire teaching below.
It starts with the instruction to find a place of seclusion, then to adopt a posture that promotes stillness and alertness, then it launches into the 16 steps. In the first four lines, the focus is on breath and body. You might remember this is the first foundation of mindfulness - mindfulness of breathing and of the body of which breathing is a part.
The second four lines are on feelings - rapture, pleasure, and mental formations. This corresponds to the second foundation of mindfulness - positive, negative, or neutral feeling tones.
The third tetrad focuses on the mind - experiencing the mind, gladdening the mind, tranquillizing the mind, liberating the mind. This corresponds to the Third Foundation of Mindfulness - mindfulness of mind.
Then we come to the fourth tetrad. After calming the body, calming the feelings, gladdening and tranquilizing the mind, deeper states of concentration are possible. And the deeper states of concentration prepare the mind for deepening insights. This is the focus of the fourth tetrad - the deeper insights that arise when the mind has freed itself from the hindrances and is able to see clearly. And in seeing clearly, the first insight is impermanence. Everything arises and passes away. Good things, happy states arise and pass away. Bad things, miserable states arise and pass away.
When we are finally able to see deeply into the irrefutable fact of impermanence, we begin to realize the futility of holding on the the good states, happiness, good fortune, all of it, and the futility of continually battling to keep out bad states, bad fortune, bad feelings. It’s like trying to stop a waterfall or a landslide. Lasting happiness is not to be found in the passing pleasant experiences of the body, feelings, and mind.
These states, happenings, phenomenon - every single one of them - will arise and pass away. Impermanence. This realization leads to dispassion, loosening our grip of attachment to the good feelings and aversion to the bad feelings - the fading away of passion. This leads us to begin to see, not just the beginning of things, but the end of things - cessation. This ends, that ends. This minute ends. That day ends. This coming together with friends ends. That relationship ends. This person’s life ends. That country’s existence ends. The stars explode. Suns burn out. Our universe is constantly changing. That is the only constant we can count on - whatever it is, it will change. And we begin to let go of our useless insistence that things stay the same - relinguishment. The end of the path laid out in the 16 steps of mindfulness of breathing that began with being mindful of this long breath, this short breath culminates in letting go or relinquishment into freedom, into the unconditioned, that which has never been born and never dies. This is called, among other names, enlightenment and is possible in every human life. We may or may not find our way to this ultimate freedom but we can experience small moments of freedom, of the unconditioned, all along the path.
To end, I want to just add another word about retreats. I may take up the subject of retreats again later as I received several emails from teachers this week alone talking about retreats. I suspect it is because the retreat experience can take us deeper into our practice to places where real change manifests, where deeper acceptance can be cultivated and realized, where equanimity and compassion can be fostered and take hold as bulwarks to help us live in these times joyously and productively. And retreats can effect changes which are more lasting, increased insights into our stuck places, increased ability to see the ego-I, to see our own propensity to think and act from the place of I and mine, to begin to recognize the freedom of letting go of the concepts of self that were never intrinsic in the first place.
On this recent retreat, I began to slip into another way of viewing the world - a bit more cosmically. It was prompted by a form of meditation called awareness meditation - which basically means we start to shift our focus in meditation from an object (the breath, the body, emotions, mind states, a mantra, a color, feather, flame) and turn our attention to the awareness itself, with consciousness itself. By asking the question, am I aware? you can settle back a bit and acknowledge the fact of awareness. You can explore the awareness that is seeing, hearing, feeling, cognizing, without getting tangled in the object of the seeing, hearing, feeling, cognizing. It goes straight to the heart of the inquiry, how did you get in there? Another way of asking the questions is Who is knowing? or even What knows? As Ajahn Sumedho, well-known monk and meditation teacher said, it’s akin to trying to see your own eyes. Another way of exploring it is to begin to imagine boundless space and then realize that consciousness is as boundless as any imaginings of boundless space we can have so then you are contemplating boundless consciousness.
It opened up a lot of space around current and global events including the rise and fall of civilizations.