Download Cullen Interview on Types of Buddhism

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 KabatZinn, 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
1
for his bell-like clarity and as a spokesperson for
nonsectarianism in his book One Dharma; and Jan Chozen Bays, Zen
priest 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.
2
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 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.
3
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 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
4
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, 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
5
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
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.
6
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 getgo, 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 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.
7
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.
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
8
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
JG: It can be confusing for students when teachers use the same
word to mean different things, especially when we don’t first
9
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,
10
coherent focus of attention upon a chosen object. In 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
11
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 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.
12
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.
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
13
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 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
14
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 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 disease resulting from our speedy consumer culture.
JKZ: These times call out for some kind of real recognition of
15
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.
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
16
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-greatgrandparents 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.
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
17
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, 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
18
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 the body.
19
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 Brahmaviharas (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.
20
[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
21
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
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.
22
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 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.
23