cullen interview on types of buddhism
TRANSCRIPT
Mindfulness: The Heart of Buddhist Meditation?
A Conversation among Jan Chosen Bays, Joseph Goldstein, Jon Kabat-Zinn
and Alan Wallace
Mindfulness has played a key role in western Buddhism, particularly in the
teaching of vipassana and more secular programs such as Mindfulness-Based
Stress Reduction (MBSR). Having been steeped in both these traditions
myself I was surprised to learn that the Tibetan Buddhists have a different
understanding and usage of the term mindfulness.
Some of these differences arise from diverging scriptural sources and
interpretations dating back to the time of the Buddha. Our intention here is
not to present a scholarly argument nor definitive interpretations of
mindfulness. Rather, we would like to help make explicit ways that
contemporary streams of Buddhism use this term, particularly since
practitioners today have unique opportunities to practice with teachers from
all the Buddhist traditions.
To explore mindfulness, Inquiring Mind invited Jon Kabat-Zinn, the
founder of MBSR who was called “Mr. Mindfulness” in a headline in the
Washington Post; Alan Wallace, a Buddhist scholar and prolific writer on
Buddhism with whom I am collaborating on another secular meditation
program, Cultivating Emotional Balance; Joseph Goldstein, a vipassana
teacher known for his bell-like clarity and as a spokesperson for
nonsectarianism in his book One Dharma; and Jan Chozen Bays, Zen priest
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and pediatrician to whose trenchant and witty voice I had been introduced at
the 2005 Mind and Life Conference in Washington, D.C. As someone who has
studied and worked with these teachers, I was honored to facilitate this
dialogue along with Inquiring Mind coeditors Barbara Gates and Wes Nisker.
—Margaret Cullen
I. What Is Mindfulness?
Inquiring Mind: As Western students of Buddhism are increasingly
exploring different Buddhist traditions, many have encountered conflicting
interpretations of basic terms and practices. In particular, the term
mindfulness is broadly used by Western teachers and students, sometimes in
opposing ways. As you learned it and teach it, what is mindfulness?
Jan Chozen Bays: What is the Zen teaching on mindfulness? I guess I would
say, “When eating, just eat. When tired, just sleep.” There’s a lot in there. I
often tell my students that mindfulness is a mind that is full of everything
that is, not what you think about everything that is.
Jon Kabat-Zinn: In teaching Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR),
my colleagues and I use the word mindfulness in a lot of different ways,
some narrower and some broader. Sometimes I use mindfulness as a kind of
umbrella term for the dharma. But in terms of an operational definition of
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mindfulness for people in a stress-reduction clinic or for a medical or
scientific audience, I tend to speak of it as an awareness oriented in the
present moment and cultivated by paying attention on purpose with a
discerning, nonjudging, nonreacting, mirror-like quality of mind which is
underneath discursive thinking.
Alan Wallace: From all the research I’ve done on this, the primary meaning
of mindfulness, or sati—in the Pali canon, in the Sanskrit canon, and later in
the Tibetan canon—is that of recollection, of memory. In fact, I believe sati is
the only word in Pali, Sanskrit or Tibetan that means “recollection” or
“memory.” As the Buddha himself says, “The noble disciple is endowed with
perfect sati; he’s one who recollects what was done and said long before.”
Mindfulness can be retrospective, as in the psychological category
more commonly understood as memory. It can be in the present moment, as
an ongoing flow of remembering to remember to remember. And
mindfulness can be prospective: remembering to pick up bread on the way
home from work tonight.
In the meditative context, mindfulness enables us to retain our
attention upon a familiar object without distraction. Of course, we can be
mindful of many things without that recollection itself being instrumental in
liberating the mind from its afflictive tendencies. The type of mindfulness
that is liberating is that which is discerning, intelligent and able to distinguish
one type of phenomena from another. In a recent conversation I had with
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Ajahn Amaro, we talked about sañña-sati as the type of mindfulness that
liberates. It is a discerning mindfulness that recognizes: “This is conducive to
my own and others’ well-being, this is unconducive. This leads to misery, this
leads to liberation.”
Joseph Goldstein: One of the problems we face in trying to understand the
meaning of certain terms, like mindfulness, is that the Pali or Sanskrit words
often include a range of meanings, each with various nuances of
interpretation and implication. As I understand it, mindfulness is
remembering the present object (it’s function is nonforgetting) with the
implication that the mind for that moment is free of attachment, aversion
and delusion. So mindfulness itself includes what Alan is referring to, the
aspect which liberates.
AW: None of the Buddhist Sanskrit sources, such as Vasubandhu’s Treasury
of Abhidharma and Asanga’s Compendium of Abhidharma, equate sati with
bare attention or suggest that bare attention is intrinsically wholesome.
Neither do the Buddhist Pali sources, such as The Questions of King Milinda
and Buddhaghosa’s classic text, The Path of Purification. Sanskrit Buddhist
definitions of sati suggest that as one of ten mental factors that is present in
every mind moment, and not invariably wholesome, mindfulness takes on
qualities of the mental factors with which it’s conjoined.
In the context of the Seven Factors of Enlightenment, for example,
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mindfulness clearly has, as religious scholars would say, a soteriological
function—that is, the function of liberating. On the other hand, a rabbit can
be very mindful of its surroundings because it doesn’t want to be eaten. A
fox can be very mindful of its surroundings because it wants to eat the
rabbit. In these contexts, mindfulness is neither wholesome nor liberating. A
sniper who is trying to shoot somebody can be very, very mindful. Of course,
there’s nothing liberating about that, even if he doesn’t do it with hatred or
craving. The context is crucial.
JG: I believe the Theravada Abhidharma explains mindfulness a little
differently from what you mentioned Alan. In my understanding of those
teachings, mindfulness is always a wholesome factor, unlike one-pointedness
and attention, which are both ethically neutral. In the context of these
teachings, I don’t think we would say that a cat waiting to pounce on a
mouse is being mindful. Rather that it’s quite concentrated with strong
attention. Attention as a mental factor directs the mind towards the object
and concentration keeps it undistracted. It is the same with the sniper. He
might be concentrated; the attention factor is certainly there. But in a true
moment of mindfulness there is freedom from greed, hatred and delusion
from the mind-state of the cat or the sniper, where there is probably great
identification with the motivating factors.
JKZ: Alan, what you are saying in some ways emphasizes why I use
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mindfulness as a kind of umbrella term: if we were to use it only in its
narrowest operational definition, mindfulness would be devoid of morality. As
with the sniper, there are aspects to the quality of attention that really have
no, as you say, wholesome or unwholesome valence at all. So in MBSR we
often speak of mindfulness not just as a bare attention but as an affectionate
attention. Woven into it is an orientation towards nonharming and seeing
deeply into the nature of things, which in some way implies, or at least
invites, one to see the interconnectedness between the seer and the seen,
the object and the subject.
We’re trying to bring mindfulness into the mainstream of society in a
way that draws people into an experience of cultivation, reflection and a
deep intimacy with the present moment in a way that very much does
include the element of discernment. If what we taught didn’t have behind it
the true transformative and liberative power of the dharma from the get-go,
there wouldn’t be much point in offering it as a challenge to people who are
suffering in the first place.
JCB: Jon, when you said you don’t teach just bare attention but affectionate
attention, it sounded like a wonderful antidote to the tendency of the mind in
the West to have undetected and subtly pervasive negative feeling tones.
As to Zen approaches to instructing students, I’d say that Zen is
probably the most pitiful tradition in terms of teaching people how to
meditate. My instructions were, “Sit down, face the wall, count your breath
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to ten, and if you lose track, start again.” That was it. Zen is called the
practice without a handrail for a good reason. A lot of the teachings in Zen
are implicit rather than explicit, and in the West I think it helps to have
things much more explicit. Myself, I’ve gone back to the Pali Canon. I read it
and teach it all the time. In fact, recently I taught a retreat on the Four
Foundations of Mindfulness.
Zen tends to skip to mind-ground, to what I see as the fourth
foundation of mindfulness. But I think it helps to go through the four
foundations, beginning with just body as body, and moving to feelings as
feelings, mental contents, and then mind-ground. To me, there are three
aspects to mindfulness. We’ve already touched on them some, but not
explicitly as three. First is bare attention, a full awareness, ideally without
attachment, aversion or self-identification. That, to me, is perfected
mindfulness, samma-sati. Before that we have lifetimes of relative
mindfulness. We keep on perfecting mindfulness. It might start out as barely
attending—we have to be frank—and then we cultivate it. Alan mentioned
the second aspect of mindfulness, the recollecting and returning that bring
us back to the first aspect, the clear attention or clear awareness. The third
aspect of mindfulness is seeing deeply into things, at a micro level and also
at a macro level. Mindfulness is like a microscope and a telescope; it can be
focused in on the space between milliseconds, and it can be pulled way out
to extend our awareness into forces in the universe.
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JKZ: I’d like to add that, as I understand it, mindfulness plays a special role
among all the other elements of the Eightfold Path. One view of mindfulness
that influenced me deeply from very early on was Nyanaponika Thera’s in
The Heart of Buddhist Meditation. He writes: “Mindfulness, then, is the
unfailing master key for knowing the mind, and is thus the starting point; the
perfect tool for shaping the mind, and is thus the focal point; and the lofty
manifestation of the achieved freedom of the mind, and is thus the
culminating point.”
JG: I think it’s true in the sense that through the practice of mindfulness, all
of the other factors of enlightenment (mindfulness, investigation, energy,
rapture, calm, concentration and equanimity) are automatically cultivated.
Mindfulness does have that function of drawing the other factors of
enlightenment together.
II Clarifying Related Terms
IM: Just as the term mindfulness is used in various ways depending on the
tradition, the historical source or the context (such the Eightfold Path or the
Seven Factors of Enlightenment), other related practices also are often
taught with conflicting meanings. Let’s try to clarify some of the differences.
Mind
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JG: It can be confusing for students when teachers use the same word to
mean different things, especially when we don’t first define it for use in that
particular context. For example, often we use the words, mind,
consciousness and awareness synonymously. At other times, they might
have quite distinct meanings. Mind can refer to the whole range of mental
activity; it can also mean “consciousness,” the knowing faculty, as
distinguished from the fifty-two mental factors. Sometimes we use
awareness to mean “consciousness,” sometimes “mindfulness,” and
sometimes “mindfulness plus wisdom.” The point here is that as we translate
some very specific terms from the Pali or Sanskrit, often there is not an
equally precise English version. Perhaps a worthy project for Western
Buddhists would be to create a standard dictionary of terms.
Samadhi
AW: I think sometimes samadhi gets a bad rap when it’s compared to
mindfulness, as if samadhi somehow has a quality of fixation or tunnel vision.
When it’s placed on the Eightfold Path within the threefold framework of sila,
samadhi and pañña, it’s samadhi that is central, not mindfulness. Samadhi is
the collectedness and composure of the mind, a kind of heightened sanity.
And it may be focused on a single point, a whole field of experience, or an
ongoing flow of events, like the breath or thoughts. Mindfulness, as the
mental factor of not forgetting an experienced object, supports samadhi,
which is the sustained, coherent focus of attention upon a chosen object. In
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vipassana, one discerningly applies the mindfulness (as in the Four
Applications of Mindfulness) that has already been cultivated in the practice
of samadhi
Sampajañña
AW: There’s another factor—and I’m surprised how little this crops up in
what I’ve read from the modern Theravada tradition—called sampajañña in
Pali. It’s translated variously as “clear comprehension” and “full awareness.”
It’s really more the introspective monitoring of the state of one’s body and
mind, both internally and in relation to the environment. In order to achieve
samadhi, in order to balance the attention, you need not only mindfulness in
the service of samadhi, but you also need this monitoring, this quality control
of the mindfulness, so that when the mind falls into laxity, you’re able to
discern that very quickly. When it falls into excitation, rambling, distraction
and so forth, you’re able to discern that as well. Sampajañña, then, has a
meta-cognitive function. And both mindfulness and sampajañña are crucial
for balancing the mind. Without such awareness of your own mental
processes, you’re basically operating on autopilot out of sheer habit.
JKZ: Right. That’s precisely why I tend to include the dimension of meta-
cogntion, or meta-awareness under the umbrella of mindfulness—we can be
mindful of the quality of our awareness just as we can any other object of
attention. In introducing the cultivation of mindfulness to people who have
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no experience with formal meditation practice, this orientation is woven into
the practice in a way that becomes almost second nature to people. Anybody
who is just getting started soon realizes that there’s much more going on
than just the breath. We see how easily we get distracted and soon realize
there’s a faculty that’s actually aware of when our mind wanders; otherwise
we’d never bring it back. I’m not criticizing the various more precise
scholarly views of this at all. I’m just trying to find a language, a context and
a container that can make the dharmic and liberative elements of practice
available to people in ways that are maximally skillful, generate minimal
resistance, and that neither denature nor complicate and put out of reach
the fundamental beauty and simplicity of wakefulness and wisdom.
JG: Sampajañña actually is talked about a lot in Theravada teachings. I
recently sat a retreat with Sayadaw U Pandita where he spoke often about
this quality of mind. One of the interesting applications of clear
comprehension is that it applies to our relationship to our environment and
what’s happening around us, as well as to what is happening within us. For
example, one aspect of sampajañña is considering the suitability of an
action. That opens up the whole aspect of motivation, of whether the action
is wholesome or unwholesome, and if wholesome, whether it’s the right time
to do it. I see this as an important function of sampajañña: enlarging the
context of mindfulness beyond attending to only our internal process.
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Vipassana, Shamatha, Mindfulness
IM: Joseph, could you differentiate between shamatha, mindfulness and
vipassana practices?
JG: In some of the Theravada traditions there are some clear distinctions
between shamatha and vipassana. In shamatha practice, we take a single
object of concentration, like the breath, a light, an image, etc., and train the
mind to stay focused on it. Here, the idea is not to see its changing nature;
rather, there’s a whole sequence of practices and experiences that lead the
mind into absorption in the object. In vipassana, on the other hand, the aim
is to see the three characteristics: impermanence, unsatisfactoriness and
not-self. So shamatha and vipassana have very different functions. The word
vipassana means “seeing clearly” or “seeing precisely”; passana means
“seeing” and vi means “clearly or precisely,” which refers to the deepening
penetration or opening to the three characteristics. We train in seeing the
momentary arising and passing away of all phenomena and in the
nonclinging wisdom that arises from that clear seeing. Of course, the deeper
the concentration that comes from shamatha practice, the more powerful
the vipassana practice becomes. So I see the two as very much mutually
supportive. The Buddha himself said that concentration is the foundation of
wisdom.
We might consider vipassana as the over-arching term for meditative
techniques leading to liberation. Mindfulness is a central practice of all these
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teachings. And as mentioned earlier, mindfulness brings together all the
other factors of enlightenment.
III. Mindfulness in the Modern World
IM: How do you honor these ancient traditions while, at the same time,
allowing the unfolding of Buddhadharma in the West to be a dynamic
process?
AW: I see this contemporary generation of Buddhist teachers and
practitioners in dialogue with the continuum of elders, going right back to the
Buddha himself. Not that we’re supposed to be just obedient puppets and
say whatever the last generation said.
But insofar as we’re preserving the currents of Buddhist traditions,
which some people care about and others don’t, then going back to the
original meanings of the terms we use provides some continuity. We
shouldn’t freeze the meaning of Buddhist terms and concepts, but at least
we should know where they came from and how we are using them in light
of their traditional usage.
I think there’s a danger nowadays of creating artificial polarities, for
example by drawing a sharp distinction between scholars and practitioners.
In this exaggerated dichotomy, scholars are portrayed as bookworms who
have only an intellectual interest in Buddhism, while practitioners views
themselves as people who are really after experience. In this scenario
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practitioners often look down on the scholars, scholars look down on
practitioners, and higher scholars look down on lower scholars [laughter].
IM: That’s why we’re all talking together today—to facilitate communication
and understanding. Mindfulness in the modern world needs language that
can serve those interested in the depth and beauty of the lineage as well as
those who simply seek relief from the dukkha of stress and the myriad
manifestions of dis-ease resulting from our speedy consumer culture.
JKZ: These times call out for some kind of real recognition of the potential
transformative power of the dharma.
JG: Maybe not any more than at any other time, but certainly now. Whether
we move toward greater suffering or the alleviation of suffering depends on
whether we’re mindful of our emotions or we’re not mindful of our emotions.
JCB: That’s the beauty of the studies you’ve done, Jon; they’re framed in a
context that people can understand. People think, I can be healthier if I do
this, and then become curious and begin investigating. It’s wonderful to see
people start to do mindfulness meditation for their blood pressure and by the
fourth week find themselves saying, “Who’s actually thinking? Who am I?
What’s going on here?” Mindfulness is a wonderful way to lead people in.
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IM: As an MBSR instructor, I have seen a tremendous hunger for the
nourishment which mindfulness provides.
JCB: I imagine people in primitive times had more of that nourishment in
their lives: they watched campfires, they stood by streams trying to intuit
where the fish were just by watching the flow of the water, and they layed on
the hillsides at night with their sheep watching the sky. And so we’re
supplying something that we’ve forgotten, that we’ve left behind. When it
comes back into people’s lives, even in the MBSR classroom setting, people
feel nourished and healthy and free.
IM: At the Fall 2005 Mind and Life Conference, I noticed several times when
His Holiness the Dalai Lama didn’t seem to connect with the way Westerners
were using the word mindfulness. It made me wonder if he fully recognizes
how starving we are for this medicine and how broad an application it can
have in our culture.
JCB: The idea of stress could be foreign to somebody whose has spent their
whole life doing what theit great-great-great-grandparents did, like standing
and watching the ice freeze. If your culture is not highly technologically
evolved, if information doesn’t get poured into you all the time, if
everybody’s not trying to get advanced degrees and stuff knowledge into
their heads, maybe mindfulness is much more present.
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AW: I saw a number of points at that conference where there was a
disconnect. His Holiness is well versed in all schools of Indian and Tibetan
Buddhism, but the way some Buddhist terms are being used in the modern
vipassana tradition differs from the Buddhist traditions with which he is
familiar. Also, the practice of bare attention is not prominent in the Tibetan
tradition as a whole, which includes an extremely rich and diverse array of
meditation practices.
There’s another factor here, too, that I think easily escapes our vision.
In quite a number of traditional Buddhist countries—Tibet is a good example
of this—there is incredible faith and devotion. I consider myself quite a
devout Buddhist, but the level of faith and devotion of an elderly Tibetan
woman living in the backwoods of Tibet is unimaginable to me. It is hard to
comprehend the great trauma Tibetans experienced with the invasion of
their country—the torture and the genocide. Yet they have done remarkably
well, considering that many are relatively free of post-traumatic stress
disorder. Their way out of that was by faith, not by bare attention; it simply is
not a central feature of Tibetan Buddhist practice.
JKZ: After the recent Mind and Life Conference, some interesting things
happened in meetings with His Holiness. As you know, in my presentations I
sometimes equate stress to dukkha, as do a number of other contemporary
teachers. Now there’s no real word stress in Tibetan. But later that week,
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when His Holiness spoke in front of 14,000 neuroscientists, at one point he
said, “I think the Dalai Lama is a little bit stressed.” It was really quite
something.
AW: He learned a new word.
JKZ: And used it totally appropriately and with a lot of humor.
JG: In expressing the scope and practice of mindfulness, it’s important to
remember that training in it is often difficult. Munindraji, my first teacher,
would often say, “Mindfulness is simple but not easy.” The Buddha spoke of
the practice as being like swimming upstream, swimming against the current
of our conditioning. Along the way, we face challenges and different
obstacles. These are part of the path. Times of our greatest difficulties are
also often times of our greatest insights.
IM: Any closing reflections.
JCB: The more I practice the more I have absolute faith that what the
Buddha taught is true—that mindfulness truly works, beginning with body as
body, feelings as feelings, and proceeding to mind objects and mind-ground.
It has to be done in that order. Then when the mind-ground becomes very
big and inevitably collapses because of impermanence, we start again with
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the body.
AW: As an endnote, I’d like to repeat the Buddhist adage that wisdom
without compassion is bondage and compassion without wisdom is bondage.
Mindfulness can be a servant to both the cultivation of wisdom and
compassion. We have the four Brahma-viharas (lovingkindness, compassion,
empathetic joy and equanimity), which I think are a marvelous, elegant and
majestic complement to the Four Applications of Mindfulness. Seeing the
interrelationship, the synergy, between the active cultivation of the heart
and the cultivation of wisdom makes the practice of Buddhadharma very
rich, very balanced.
JKZ: I think it is wonderful to have a diversity of viewpoints and to reflect on
the degree to which mindfulness is recollection, the degree to which it’s bare
attention, the degree to which it’s open-hearted presencing. All of these
expressions of mindfulness, as Alan rightfully said, are not frozen. Otherwise
Buddhism would be a quaint museum. Instead, these are forces that are
actually transmuting our own lives and even our own bodies as we practice
and as we live our lives.
JCB: So maybe our last message is to practice mindfulness and then you’ll
find out what it is.
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[Sidebar to the first section, on the first spread]
Defining Terms
In the compound Pali term sati-patthana, the first word, sati, (Sanskrit:
smirti), had originally the meaning of “memory,” “remembrance.” In
Buddhist usage, however, and particularly in the Pali scriptures, it has only
occasionally retained that meaning of remembering past events. It mostly
refers there to the present, and as a general psychological term it carries the
meaning of “attention” or “awareness.” But still more frequently, its use in
the Pali scriptures is restricted to a kind of attentiveness that, in the sense of
the Buddhist doctrine, is good, skillful or right (kusala). It should be noted
that we have reserved the rendering mindfulness for this latter use only. —
Nyanaponika Thera, from The Heart of Buddhist Meditation.
[Sidebar on the second spread]
A Note on Translation from Bhikkhu Bodhi
Any language, I have found, has an underlying conceptual scheme built into
it by the metaphors that govern its vocabulary and by the connotations and
nuances of its words. Thus in translating from one language into another,
one is always faced with the problem of dissonance between their two
underlying conceptual schemes. This leads to conflicts that often can only be
resolved by sacrificing important conceptual connections in the original
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language for the sake of elegance or intelligibility in the target language.
This problem becomes all the more acute when one is translating from an
ancient language utilizing a somewhat archaic set of conceptual metaphors
into a modern language pertaining to a very different culture.
We can see this problem in some of the simplest Pali words. For
instance, the word samadhi can be translated as “concentration, composure,
collectedness, mental unification, etc.,” but none of these renderings convey
the idea that samadhi denotes a specific meditative state, or set of
meditative states, in the Buddhist (and broader Indian) system of spiritual
cultivation. Even the word sati, rendered mindfulness, isn’t unproblematic.
The word derives from a verb, sarati, meaning “to remember,” and
occasionally in Pali sati is still explained in a way that connects it with the
idea of memory. But when it is used in relation to meditation practice, we
have no word in English that precisely captures what it refers to. An early
translator cleverly drew upon the word mindfulness, which is not even in my
dictionary. This has served its role admirably, but it does not preserve the
connection with memory, sometimes needed to make sense of a passage.
Satipatthana is often translated “foundation of mindfulness,” which
sounds elegant; but if one knows Pali one might suspect that the compound
represents not sati + patthana (which gives us “foundation of mindfulness”),
but sati + upatthana, “establishment of mindfulness” (the u dropping off
through union of vowels). Then, if one knows the texts in the original, one
will have encountered a number of phrases that pair sati with words related
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to upatthana, such as upatthitassati, “one with mindfulness established,” but
no other phrases that pair it with forms related to patthana. And this would
confirm the case for “establishment of mindfulness” over “foundation of
mindfulness.” However more graceful the latter might sound, the accent is
on the internal process of setting mindfulness up rather than on the object to
which it applies.
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