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The Four Foundations of Mindfulness
An absolute essential of Buddhist thought and practice.
In addition to practitioners of Insight meditation, those who engage in other meditation forms such as dzogchen, mahamudra, and zazen will find that The Four Foundation of Mindfulness provides new means of understanding how to approach and deepen their own practices.
The entire Great Discourse is included here, coupled with a beautifully clear commentary from the great scholar-yogi, Venerable U Silananda.
In addition to practitioners of Insight meditation, those who engage in other meditation forms such as dzogchen, mahamudra, and zazen will find that The Four Foundation of Mindfulness provides new means of understanding how to approach and deepen their own practices.
The entire Great Discourse is included here, coupled with a beautifully clear commentary from the great scholar-yogi, Venerable U Silananda.
- GenresBuddhismMeditation
247 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 1995
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April 19, 2020
A knowledgeable and thorough commentary to the Buddha's Maha Satipatthana Sutta.
The late Sayadaw U Silananda (1927-2005), who was sent to North America in 1979 by the Burmese meditation master Mahasi Sayadaw to spread the Dhamma in the West, specialized in teaching Buddhist psychology and vipassana, or insight, meditation. I got this book as part of an effort to learn about the Buddha's Eightfold Path in more depth. The seventh aspect of that path is Right Mindfulness, which I had read is summed up mostly in this sutta. When I did a search, this book looked like just the ticket.
And I think it is. Based on talks given by the author, the book is divided into three sections: a large section that is the commentary itself, followed by a translation of the original sutta, and finally detailed meditation instructions. There is also a glossary of Pali terms. The author goes through the whole sutta in detail, explaining each part carefully and clearly from a position of great depth of experience as well as knowledge of the Buddha's teachings generally. The reader gets a very good and traditional introduction to the sutta and to the practice it teaches.
My own introduction to the Four Foundations of Mindfulness was by reading a talk by the Tibetan teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. He presented a somewhat different list, or different translations, of the Four Foundations, and it was done in the context (I believe) of shamatha rather than vipassana meditation. In Silananda's book the practice is definitely vipassana, and the translated Foundations adhere closely to the four named in the sutta: mindfulness of body, of feeling, of consciousness, and of dhammas. The idea is for the meditator not to look for all these things, but rather to note them as they arise in the mind, since all of meditative experience can be subsumed under those four categories (such, anyway, is my understanding).
Some of the sutta is clearly the product of the Buddha's own time and not applicable to modern students; here I'm thinking of the several meditations on the body that have the meditator visiting a charnel ground to meditate on corpses in various stages of decay. But although we handle our corpses differently today, the human mind is just as it was 2,500 years ago when the Buddha taught, and so the practice and its aims are just the same. Mindfulness is the mental act of placing one's attention on a chosen object. We do it all the time in various contexts in everyday life. Mindfulness as a meditative practice trains us to apply this effort in a directed way to deepen our relationship with the way things really are. The Buddha gave detailed instructions about how to do this, but, as so often with his teachings, they are presented in a bare-bones style that really calls for elaboration in order for less experienced students to understand. Silananda's text provides a very reader-friendly elaboration of this kind for the modern student.
The original sutta closes with what is called the "Assurance of Attainment"--what amounts to a guarantee by the Buddha that anyone who practices the Four Foundations of Mindfulness for seven years would can expect to attain at least the state of a Nonreturner, that is, someone whose future enlightenment is now assured of enlightenment and who will no more be reborn as a human, but only as a deva. Like a salesman, the Buddha keeps knocking down the amount of time required to achieve this result, finally asserting than anyone who practices the Four Foundations for seven days can expect this result.
I don't know how many people have truly put this to the test, but I can say that if they have Silananda's book, they will have a key helper in making good the Buddha's guarantee.
The late Sayadaw U Silananda (1927-2005), who was sent to North America in 1979 by the Burmese meditation master Mahasi Sayadaw to spread the Dhamma in the West, specialized in teaching Buddhist psychology and vipassana, or insight, meditation. I got this book as part of an effort to learn about the Buddha's Eightfold Path in more depth. The seventh aspect of that path is Right Mindfulness, which I had read is summed up mostly in this sutta. When I did a search, this book looked like just the ticket.
And I think it is. Based on talks given by the author, the book is divided into three sections: a large section that is the commentary itself, followed by a translation of the original sutta, and finally detailed meditation instructions. There is also a glossary of Pali terms. The author goes through the whole sutta in detail, explaining each part carefully and clearly from a position of great depth of experience as well as knowledge of the Buddha's teachings generally. The reader gets a very good and traditional introduction to the sutta and to the practice it teaches.
My own introduction to the Four Foundations of Mindfulness was by reading a talk by the Tibetan teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. He presented a somewhat different list, or different translations, of the Four Foundations, and it was done in the context (I believe) of shamatha rather than vipassana meditation. In Silananda's book the practice is definitely vipassana, and the translated Foundations adhere closely to the four named in the sutta: mindfulness of body, of feeling, of consciousness, and of dhammas. The idea is for the meditator not to look for all these things, but rather to note them as they arise in the mind, since all of meditative experience can be subsumed under those four categories (such, anyway, is my understanding).
Some of the sutta is clearly the product of the Buddha's own time and not applicable to modern students; here I'm thinking of the several meditations on the body that have the meditator visiting a charnel ground to meditate on corpses in various stages of decay. But although we handle our corpses differently today, the human mind is just as it was 2,500 years ago when the Buddha taught, and so the practice and its aims are just the same. Mindfulness is the mental act of placing one's attention on a chosen object. We do it all the time in various contexts in everyday life. Mindfulness as a meditative practice trains us to apply this effort in a directed way to deepen our relationship with the way things really are. The Buddha gave detailed instructions about how to do this, but, as so often with his teachings, they are presented in a bare-bones style that really calls for elaboration in order for less experienced students to understand. Silananda's text provides a very reader-friendly elaboration of this kind for the modern student.
The original sutta closes with what is called the "Assurance of Attainment"--what amounts to a guarantee by the Buddha that anyone who practices the Four Foundations of Mindfulness for seven years would can expect to attain at least the state of a Nonreturner, that is, someone whose future enlightenment is now assured of enlightenment and who will no more be reborn as a human, but only as a deva. Like a salesman, the Buddha keeps knocking down the amount of time required to achieve this result, finally asserting than anyone who practices the Four Foundations for seven days can expect this result.
I don't know how many people have truly put this to the test, but I can say that if they have Silananda's book, they will have a key helper in making good the Buddha's guarantee.
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