31. Mindfulness, Concentration, & Discernment at the Breath

The Buddha calls his sixteen steps for breath meditation both a mindfulness practice and a concentration practice (SN 54:8). The way these two aspects of the practice overlap can be shown by how the sixteen steps map both onto the standard formula for right mindfulness and onto the standard formula for right concentration, or the four jhānas.

First, mindfulness: MN 118, in describing how the four tetrads map onto the four establishings of mindfulness, shows that the first three tetrads form a set, in that the breath forms the focal point for all three.

In the first tetrad, the act of focusing on the breath counts as keeping track of the body. That’s because, in the Buddha’s way of classifying physical phenomena, the in-and-out breath counts as part of the wind property in the body (MN 28). In other words, if we were to classify it under the factors of dependent co-arising, it’s an aspect of form, in name and form, rather than an object of the bodily sense medium. So when the Buddha tells you to focus on the breath, he’s not telling you to focus on the tactile sensation of air flowing in and out the nose. Instead, he’s having you focus on the flow of energy in the body, as felt from within, that allows the air to come in and out.

Now, as we noted when quoting the sixteen steps, when you move to the second tetrad, you don’t change your focus away from the breath to feelings; when moving to the third, you don’t change your focus from the breath to the mind. Instead, you stay with the breath and notice that, in paying close attention to the breath, you’re creating feelings; in order to stay with the breath, you need mind states of mindfulness and alertness. Wherever there’s the sensation of breath in the body, feelings are right there. Mind states are right there. In this way, the first three tetrads promote the essential quality of concentration: having a single gathering place for the mind.

At the same time, they work together in performing the first duty of right mindfulness—keeping track of body, feelings, and mind, in and of themselves, all at once. In terms of the determination underlying the path, the first three tetrads promote desires that fall in line with the determination for calm.

The fourth tetrad, though, focuses on the second duty of right mindfulness: subduing greed and distress with reference to the world. However, because this tetrad involves understanding inconstancy to the point of giving rise to dispassion, you do more than simply pacify distracting thoughts, as you would in Ariṭṭha’s method. You actually abandon and relinquish them through discernment.

Here, in terms of determination, you’re using discernment to truly relinquish any desires that would run counter to your determination for awakening, and in so doing, you bring the mind to calm. In other words, you’re employing all four determinations at once.

As for how the sixteen steps of breath meditation relate to the practice of right concentration or the four jhānas: Here again, it’s important to notice that the practice is aimed, not just at calming the mind, but also at developing discernment.

As we just noted, because the first three tetrads form a set, they provide a single gathering place for the mind, which is the defining feature of concentration. They bring together the three things that characterize any of the four jhānas: the sensation of the body as felt from within, a feeling-tone, and an alert, mindful state of mind.

This fact has two practical applications. The first is that if you have trouble getting the mind to settle down with a sense of ease in the breath, you can look to see which of the tetrads is lacking: Is the problem with the breath, with the feeling-tone, or with the mind? Then you can look to see which of the steps in which tetrad are deficient, so that you can make up the lack.

The second practical application is that, when you read the three tetrads as parallel instructions, you’ll notice that one tetrad can fill in details missing from the others. Even though the sixteen steps are the Buddha’s most complete meditation instructions, when we compare the tetrads with one another and with other passages in the Canon that describe meditation, we can see that some details are missing. The Buddha may have chosen the format of sixteen steps—four tetrads of four steps each—for ease of memorization, and expected his students to fill in the implicit steps when teaching their own students.

For instance, the first tetrad makes only one explicit reference to fabrication—calming bodily fabrication—but the standard formula for the factors of awakening says that before the body and mind are calmed, they should first be energized (MN 118). The second tetrad makes a similar point: You should breathe in a way that allows you to sense rapture and pleasure—here the rapture would be energizing—before you calm mental fabrication. So there would be nothing wrong with filling in two steps in the first tetrad: Before calming bodily fabrication, you sensitize yourself to it and then you use it to energize the body with feelings of rapture and pleasure.

Here’s how the tetrads map onto the jhānas:

The first tetrad—discerning the breath as long or short, training yourself to be sensitive to the entire body, and to calm bodily fabrication—describes the progress of breath meditation up through the fourth jhāna. You start by maintaining focus on the breath and then, as you enter the first jhāna, develop a full-body awareness (DN 2). The breath grows progressively more refined and calm as you move through the jhānas until you reach the fourth, at which stage in-and-out breathing stops (SN 36:11; AN 10:20; AN 10:72).

The second tetrad—training yourself to be sensitive to rapture, to be sensitive to pleasure, to be sensitive to mental fabrication (perception and feeling), and to calm mental fabrication—describes the progress from the early stages of meditation up through the cessation of perception and feeling. Rapture is present in the first two jhānas; pleasure, in the first three. Perception plays a role in all the meditative attainments up through the dimension of nothingness (AN 9:36); as you go through these levels, the underlying perception grows more refined (MN 121). Similarly with feelings: From the rapture and pleasure of the first two jhānas, feelings become more refined through the equanimous pleasure of the third, and then to the pure equanimity of the fourth, which forms a foundation for the next four formless attainments (MN 140). Finally, the total calming of perception and feeling occurs with the cessation of perception and feeling, the ninth attainment.

The question arises, if verbal fabrication ceases with the second jhāna, and the breath with the fourth, how can any of the sixteen steps apply to those attainments or to any of the higher levels of concentration? After all, all of the steps are done in conjunction with breathing, and steps 3 through 16 employ verbal fabrication in the act of training.

The answer is that even though these forms of fabrication are not present in the higher levels of concentration, the mind will sometimes have to make a deliberate choice when moving from one attainment to the next (MN 121; AN 9:34; AN 9:41). This will require a moment of reflection in which you step back from your full focus before plunging in again. AN 5:28 illustrates this process with the image of a person standing and watching a person sitting down; or a person sitting and watching a person lying down. Verbal and bodily fabrication will resume during those moments of choice, which means that any of the sixteen steps could also be applied at those times.

The third tetrad—training yourself to be sensitive to the mind, to gladden it, to concentrate it, and to release it—covers all the stages of training the mind. You start by simply observing it, and then you train it in the proper direction in any of the following ways through exerting skillful fabrications: bodily, verbal, and mental.

Gladdening begins with the preliminary practices of practicing generosity, observing the precepts, and abandoning the hindrances, practices that give rise to a sense of well-being and joy that can induce the mind to settle down in concentration. The gladdening grows more refined as the mind progresses through the first three jhānas, where you experience rapture and pleasure. It culminates in the joy that accompanies the attainment of the goal (MN 137).

Concentrating the mind is also a process of progressive refinement up through the cessation of perception and feeling. Although each level of jhāna and each formless attainment grows increasingly steady as you go up the series, only the levels beginning with the fourth jhāna are said to be imperturbable (MN 106).

Likewise, releasing the mind is a progressive process: You release the mind at least temporarily from the affliction of attending to perceptions of sensuality on entering the first jhāna, from the affliction of attending to perceptions of directed thought on entering the second jhāna, and so on up through the cessation of perception and feeling. Finally, release from affliction becomes total on reaching unbinding (AN 9:34).

The fourth tetrad—training yourself to remain focused on inconstancy, dispassion, cessation, and relinquishing—goes into more detail on how the last step in the third tetrad, releasing the mind, is carried out.

This release, as we just noted, develops through progressive levels of refinement while mastering concentration. But then it goes beyond refinement with the attainment of total unbinding.

In the beginning stages, when you’re trying to master concentration, you direct the four steps of this fourth tetrad to any object that would distract you from your theme. In other words, you focus these contemplations on anything that would provoke greed and distress with reference to the world outside of your concentration, seeing the distraction as composed of events (dhammas) that are inherently unworthy of attachment. In this way, you wean the mind from the distraction and from the desires and passions underlying it.

When concentration is fully mastered, you then turn these same contemplations onto the internal world of becoming created around the concentration itself. You see that it, too, is composed of dhammas that are inconstant—even though the inconstancy is very subtle—and from that insight you develop dispassion for the process of continuing to fabricate anything at all, even the most refined states of concentration. This dispassion puts an end to the passion that fuels fabrication, so all fabrications cease. At that point, everything—even passion for the deathless—is relinquished, and total unbinding occurs (AN 9:36).

These are some of the ways in which the four tetrads of the sixteen steps, when developed and pursued, bear great fruit. They start with mindfulness and concentration, and then lead through discernment to dispassion and total release.

However, even though the fourth tetrad gives more detail than the third in explaining how the mind is released, it’s still just a bare outline. The Canon has many more useful things to say on the topic.