Now that Thanksgiving has passed and we are well and truly in the weeds of the impending holiday season, something became clear this morning. As I move through the Fourth Foundation of Mindfulness with you, I have slowly been realizing that the journey seems to get longer and longer the farther we progress along our path. As I ponder it, I think it’s because the Buddha is teaching about the whole of "the way things are". So it makes sense that "the way things are" might take a little time to understand. And in turn to teach. If "the way things are" was a simple concept, we probably wouldn’t be spending so much time trying to escape into or avoid a future that will never exist the way we imagine it or a past that we will mourn either because we loved it or we didn’t love it. Accepting and settling into the way things are is the whole of the path - but it has a number of approaches.
So I want to offer a bit of an overview of the journey ahead.
But first, I want to give you a greater sense of how our current subject - the seven factors of awakening - appears in our daily experience during practice. The seven factors of awakening - mindfulness, investigation, energy, joy, tranquillity, concentration, and equanimity or equipoise - sound so lofty that we might mistake them for qualities we will only access much, much further down a murky path that doesn’t feel like it relates to us.
This is both true and not true.
We experience many of these factors already but we may not realize it or be able to name them when they arise. Venerable Analayo, renowned meditation teacher, scholar of early Buddhism, and revered practitioner, shares some deep and surprisingly clear guided meditations on his corner of the Barre Center for Buddhist Center (BCBS) website. Tonight we will hear a guided meditation on awareness of breathing that will help us to see, in first hand experiential terms, how the seven factors of awakening appear in the course of the practice of mindfulness of breath. The meditation is about 27 minutes long. We’ll try to get to the meditation by 5:55pm so that we might have a few minutes at the end for questions or reflections on the experience.
Venerable Analayo is currently in residence at BCBS. He is supported entirely by dana - the Pali word for generosity. He offers these guided meditations free of charge for listening or for downloading. If you feel so moved, you could go to the website and offer dana to contribute to his support at the center in gratitude for his practice and his teachings. The following is the link to his guided meditations and the donation page. https://www.buddhistinquiry.org/resources/type/offerings-analayo/
Now for the overview, there are three more “topics” in this Fourth Foundation of Mindfulness: 1) the six sense doors; 2) the five aggregates of clinging; and 3) the Four Noble Truths.
This is how the Buddha introduced this seminal teaching of the Four Foundation of Mindfulness to his monks:
This is the only way, monks, for the purification of beings, for the overcoming of sorrow and lamentation, for the destruction of suffering and grief, for reaching the right path, for the attainment of Nibbana, namely, the four foundations of mindfulness. What are the four?
The Buddha didn’t mince words. This is the only way, he says, for the purification of beings, for the overcoming of sorrow and lamentation… and so on. The only way. Mindfulness of body, feelings, "objects" of mind such as emotions, thoughts, concepts, etc., and “the way things are.”
The next two topics of the fourth foundation deal with the concepts in our minds that cause us suffering. The six sense doors refer to seeing, hearing, touch, smell, taste and consciousness (anything in our minds which is pretty all-encompassing). The Buddha teaches that what we add to seeing or hearing etc., what we think about, remember, attach to, project on to what we see, causes us suffering. Can we just see? The same with the other five.
The five aggregates of clinging are a model of human experience the Buddha used to help the monks let go of clinging. Aggregates refer to things stuck together but not dissolved one into another - like a sack of five different items. Those items are form (body, materiality), feelings (feeling tones of positive, negative or neutral), perceptions, volitional formations (this includes our will, habit formation, and more and bears more elaboration), and consciousness (thoughts, concepts, emotions, moods, mind states). Remember this is a model that he found useful. More about these later.
The Four Noble Truths we have come across before - 1) there is suffering (recognizing, acknowledging, accepting that suffering is present when it is), 2) there are causes for suffering, 3) there can be an end to suffering, and 4) here, the Eight fold Noble Path, is the way out of suffering.
These three topics open into a universe but we will just introduce them in coming weeks.
Later on this year or early next, I think it might be useful to explore the teachings on Mindfulness of Breathing in greater depth. There are two - the one we have just covered in the first foundation of mindfulness and a second one called the Ānāpānasati Sutta which is an in-depth look at the progress of mindfulness of breathing as it leads toward full awakening. It is made of sixteen steps divided into tetrads. So you will hear Analayo refer to tetrads in this guided meditation tonight. I have included the sixteen steps at the end of this email.
We will also explore what is meant by full awakening and why it’s so important. As it was considered indescribable, Buddhist scholars have counted 52 words used to refer to full awakening including enlightenment, the deathless, the island and more.
And we’ll move back and forth between these teachings and their relevance to our own lives and especially our current predicament in which we might be anticipating greater suffering. And we’ll ground our experience in loving kindness, compassion, joy in the good fortune of ourselves and others, and equanimity. These four sublime feelings can help us transform our suffering and that of others.
If this all seems a bit overwhelming, please just let it go. It will unfold in its own time. Laying it out like this is as much for me as for you. But it will give you a glimpse of the way ahead.
If you are accessing this Musings from the internet and wish to learn more, please go to https://www.innerlightyoga.com/