Mindfulness of Breathing: Body

This morning, I’d like to begin talking about how we can use the Buddha’s teachings on breath meditation to help prepare ourselves for aging, illness, and death.

Given how mindfulness of breathing can have a positive impact on your health, it’s obvious that breath meditation can be helpful as you age and grow ill. But given that the breath stops at death, it may seem odd that the breath could help prepare you for the process of dying. But it’s important to note that many of the factors that will be playing a role in the mind as you approach death are the same factors that are listed in dependent co-arising prior to sensory input. Two in particular stand out: fabrication (intention) and attention (under the factor of name and form). For a meditation method to give rise to discernment and insight, it has to direct attention to precisely these factors. Otherwise they stay in the dark, underground. And you don’t want any important forces in the mind to be in the dark as you’re about to die. You want to be on familiar terms with them.

Now, when we look at the Buddha’s instructions on breath meditation, we find that the steps he lays out do precisely that: They focus attention on the processes of fabrication (intention) and attention so that you can know them well in real time.

There are sixteen steps in all, divided into four sets of four, called tetrads. Each tetrad deals with one of the frames of reference for the establishing of mindfulness: body, feelings, mind, and mental qualities. These frames of reference, in turn, are the themes for getting the mind into concentration.

The Buddha put four steps into each tetrad apparently for ease of memorization, because when we see how he elaborates on these steps in other parts of the Canon, some of the tetrads contain a number of implied steps. So to understand them, it’s good to know what those implied steps are.

This morning we won’t have time to cover all four tetrads, so I’ll focus the discussion on the first one, dealing with the body. We can save the other tetrads for the mornings to come.

The main thing I want you to notice this morning is that even though the first tetrad focuses on the body, it does so in a way that underlines the role that the mental event plays in shaping your experience of the body. This is in line with the first verse of the Dhammapada: Phenomena are preceded by the heart and mind. The first tetrad focuses on how this principle applies to your experience of the breath.

Part of this focus lies in the way the Buddha uses the word fabrication in the fourth step of this tetrad. The basic dynamic—which he follows in other tetrads as well—is that he first tries to sensitize you to the fact that you fabricate this aspect of your awareness through your intentions. Then he has you use that sensitivity first to energize yourself, and then to calm yourself. In this way, he’s having you develop tranquility and insight together. As he says elsewhere, insight is developed by understanding fabrications. Tranquility comes from calming the mind down and allowing it to enjoy the resulting stillness. So when you use the processes of fabrication to calm the mind down, you’re gaining both insight and tranquility together.

The emphasis on fabrication means that you’re not just learning about the breath here. You’re also learning about the mind. This is why breath meditation is such a good preparation for death. Given that we’re using the breath to become more sensitive to the mind’s activity of fabrication, the breath is actually leading us to the mind in a way that helps us master the processes of fabrication, knowledge that will be especially useful both in daily life and as we encounter death.

One more point before looking at the first tetrad: It’s not the case that the four tetrads are to be followed in numerical order. Actually, each tetrad deals with an aspect of experience that’s constantly present throughout the meditation. When you’re with the breath, feelings are right there, your mind state is right there, mental qualities are right there. This means that the four tetrads have to be practiced together. As you focus on the breath to get the mind to calm down but encounter problems, sometimes the problem is breath, sometimes feelings, sometimes the state of mind and the mental qualities you’re bringing to the breath. So your focus will have to shift among these tetrads to deal with the problem at hand. In all cases, though, you stay anchored in the breath to ensure that you’re staying with what’s actually going on in the present moment.

The four steps in the first tetrad are: discerning when the breath is long; discerning when the breath is short; training yourself to breathe in and out sensitive to the whole body; and then training yourself to breathe in and out calming what the Buddha calls bodily fabrication, which is a technical term for the in-and-out breath. All these steps fall under the body in and of itself as a frame of reference.

Let’s look at these steps in detail.

The first two steps consist of simply discerning distinctions between breaths: How do you experience the difference between long breathing and short breathing? Which feels better? Ajaan Lee would add a few more variables here. He would note that there are a lot of other ways you can adjust the breath, too: in long, out short; in short, out long. You can do heavy breathing, light breathing; fast, slow; shallow, deep.

The purpose of discerning distinctions in the breathing is to see what really feels good right now, because ultimately—as we’ll see tomorrow in the section on feeling—you try to arrive at a state where you’re sensitive to rapture, sensitive to pleasure. These states of rapture and pleasure don’t just happen on their own. These feelings are called “pleasure not-of-the-flesh,” the pleasure associated with strong concentration, and that pleasure doesn’t happen without your intending it to happen.

How is that going to happen? Through the way you intend to breathe. So you want to get sensitive to variations in the breath. What kind of breathing feels good right now and what way of breathing would induce, say, a state of rapture?

That requires the next step, which is to train yourself to be aware of the whole body as you breathe in, the whole body as you breathe out. Ajaan Lee notes that as you become sensitive to the whole body, you will sense subtle energies flowing through the body in sync with the breath. This perception is useful, because in other suttas where the Buddha’s talking about concentration, he says that you then want to take whatever sense of feeling of pleasure or rapture you’ve developed and let it permeate the entire body, suffuse the entire body. Having a sense of the breath flowing throughout the body makes it easier for those feelings to flow without interruption as well.

Now, there’s an implied step that follows here, which is that when you become aware of the whole body, you try to energize the body as you breathe in and breathe out. That’s because the next step is to calm bodily fabrication. As the Buddha says elsewhere, in his explanation of the factors for awakening, if you try to calm things down before they’re energized, you go to sleep, which is not what you want. So you’ve got to energize things first.

This is why Ajaan Lee, when he gives breath meditation instructions, says to start out with long breathing, deep breathing, and then let the breath adjust to what seems to be just right. Otherwise, you’re going to put yourself to sleep. The important point here is that you don’t just stay with whatever way the body is breathing on its own. You’re going to take advantage of the fact that you can adjust the breath to create feelings of rapture and pleasure.

In the fourth step of this tetrad, you train yourself to calm bodily fabrication. This doesn’t mean that you try to suppress the breath. It’s simply that as the mind grows calmer, the breath naturally grows more gentle on its own. This is where you can see how the state of the mind has an influence on the breath. You can actually reach the point where the in-and-out breathing stops—again, not because you’re holding it or suppressing it, but simply that you feel no need to breathe: The breath energy in the body is sufficient. In fact, there’s one sutta where the Buddha says that’s precisely where bodily fabrication has been calmed: when you’re in the fourth jhāna, where the sense of the in-and-out breathing has stopped. The oxygen-use in the body is very low at that point.

I’ve heard different explanations as to whether there’s oxygen exchange going on through the skin. Some people say Yes; other people say No. What’s important for you as a meditator, though, is that the sense that the energy in the body is sufficient. You don’t feel the need to breathe, because you feel breath energy already saturating the body. All the breath channels are so well connected that if there’s a lack of breath energy in one part, the excess energy in another part will flow right there, so everything is kept in balance.

The question sometimes is asked, why does the Buddha use a technical term, bodily fabrication, when he’s simply talking about the in-and-out breath? The answer, as I’ve already indicated, is that he’s pointing to the role that your intentions play in shaping the way you breathe. The breath is a rare bodily function that can be both automatic and intentionally shaped. The Buddha is emphasizing this so as to turn your attention inside, toward the mind, and the mental processes that will play a role in calming the breath: choosing what to pay attention to, which intentions to follow, which intentions to drop.

That’s the first tetrad. We’ll look in more detail at feelings tomorrow.

We’ll now begin our period of walking meditation. We suggest that you try to find a path that’s no less than 30 steps long. There are two ways you can do meditation while you walk. One is to focus on the breath. In other words, you try to take the same meditation topic you’ve been focusing on as you sit and then carry it into the next step, which is to stay focused there even while you move the body. In America, we would say that you learn how to meditate while you walk and chew gum at the same time.

The other way is to focus on the movement of your feet. You can think of a meditation word as your feet go left, right, left, right. You can use the words “left, right” or “Bud-dho, Bud-dho.” Try to walk at a normal pace, because the purpose of walking meditation is to learn how to carry your concentration into the movement and activities of daily life.

If you have a path where you’re walking back and forth, when you reach the end of the path, stop for a moment, make sure that your mindfulness is established, then turn and head in the other direction. Make up your mind ahead of time that you will always turn in the same direction, clockwise or counterclockwise. Do your best to maintain your mindfulness all the way to the other end of the path.

The image they give in the Canon is of a man with a bowl on top of his head, filled to the brim with oil. On one side of him, there’s a beauty queen singing and dancing. On the other side, there’s a crowd of people excited about the beauty queen singing and dancing. He has to walk between the two. Behind him is a man with a raised sword. If he drops one drop of oil, the man with the sword will cut off his head. We’ll meet back here at 10:45. I hope you all will still have your heads on.