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Chapter Three

Experience Is Purposeful

Dependent co-arising (paṭicca samuppāda) is the Buddha’s most detailed explanation of how stress and suffering are caused and how they can be put to an end. It’s also notoriously complex, containing many non-linear feedback loops in which events appear at multiple points in the causal sequence, and can turn around and act as conditions for factors that condition them.

Still, the map of dependent co-arising has some blatantly obvious features, and one of the most obvious is also the most relevant for understanding why right mindfulness is best developed through mastering the processes of fabrication: the fact that so many factors of dependent co-arising, including fabrication, occur prior to sensory contact. This means that sensory experience is primarily active, rather than passive. The mind is not a blank slate. Even before contact is made at the senses, the factors of bodily, verbal, and mental fabrication have already gone out looking for that contact, shaping how it will be experienced and what the mind will be seeking from it. Because these fabrications, in an untrained mind, are influenced by ignorance, they lead to suffering and stress. This is why insight has to focus on investigating them, for only when they're mastered as skills, through knowledge, to the point of dispassion can they be allowed to cease. Only when they cease can suffering and stress be brought to an end.

As we noted in the preceding chapter, the main role of right mindfulness here is to remember to provide a solid framework for observing the activity of fabrication. At the same time, it remembers lessons drawn from right view in the past—both lessons from reading and listening to the Dhamma, as well as lessons from reading the results of your own actions—that can be used to shape this activity in a more skillful direction: to act as the path to the end of suffering, which—as we noted at the end of Chapter One—is also a form of fabrication. This means that right mindfulness doesn’t simply observe fabrications, nor is it disinterested. It’s motivated by the aim of right view: to put an end to suffering. It’s a fabrication that helps to supervise the intentional mastery of the processes of fabrication so that they can form the path of the fourth noble truth.

As part of this task, it has to interact with all of the factors in dependent co-arising, and in particular with those that precede sensory contact. These preliminary factors are: ignorance, fabrication, consciousness, name-and-form, and the six sense media. SN 12:2 explains them in reverse order:

Among these factors, it’s especially important to note the place not only of fabrication but also of consciousness and of attention (under name-and-form) in the causal sequence, for these are the components of sensory experience with which right mindfulness must most closely interact. This interaction is fairly complex. To begin with, right mindfulness must remember from right view exactly where these factors come in the causal sequence, so that it can direct right effort to deal with them in time. Second, right mindfulness has to remember that fabrication underlies and shapes them, so that it can focus right effort on the most effective strategies for using fabrication to turn unskillful instances of attention and consciousness into more skillful ones. Third, it has to remember how to apply skillful instances of attention and consciousness in fabricating the path. This entails remembering that, given the non-linear pattern of dependent co-arising, skillfully fabricated consciousness and appropriate attention can turn around and shape the very conditions that underlie them. This is why they can help in the path’s fabrication.

These are the classic lessons that right mindfulness draws from right view, in the form of dependent co-arising, about consciousness and attention.

However, because of the modern tendency to equate mindfulness with bare awareness or bare attention, we have to look particularly at what dependent co-arising has to say concerning the nature of attention and consciousness (which is often confused with bare awareness) and their relationship to right mindfulness.

The first lesson is that neither of them is bare. In the untrained mind, each is conditioned by intentional activity—through the factor of fabrication, and the sub-factor of intention in name-and-form—so that by the time they come into contact with sensory data, they are already preconditioned by ignorance to receive and attend to those data in a particular way.

Even in the mind on the path they are still preconditioned, because the purpose of knowledge in terms of right view is to condition consciousness and attention in another direction, toward the ending of suffering. Only when ignorance is totally eradicated, at the culmination of the path, is there an experience of unconditioned awareness. Until that point, consciousness and attention are inevitably purposeful in aiming at happiness: unskillfully in the untrained mind; with increasing skill in the mind on the path.

The second lesson is that neither attention nor consciousness is identical with mindfulness. Consciousness is the act of receiving and registering phenomena; attention, the act of choosing which phenomena to focus on. However, even though these functions are not identical with mindfulness, they do play a role in the establishing of mindfulness, because they are both related to the activity of remaining focused, in that attention is the quality that has to stay focused on the most important events detected through consciousness in the present. In the case of consciousness, the discourses present this relationship only in an implicit way, for consciousness is not mentioned by name in the satipaṭṭhāna formula. However, the formula would obviously not work without the presence of consciousness. The relationship is more explicit in the case of attention, for MN 118—in showing how the sixteen steps of breath meditation fulfill the practice of satipaṭṭhāna—speaks of close attention to the breath in terms that connect it with the activity of remaining focused and alert (see Chapter Six).

The relationship between mindfulness and attention grows even closer when mindfulness becomes right mindfulness; and attention, appropriate attention. As these qualities are trained to act skillfully for the end of suffering, they both become forms of anupassanā, or remaining focused on something. In Chapter One, we have already noted how this happens in the case of mindfulness. In this chapter, we will see how appropriate attention is a form of dhammānupassanā—the act of remaining focused on mental qualities—directed by the framework of the four noble truths with the purpose of performing the duties appropriate to the four noble truths in relation to those qualities.

This means that, although mindfulness is not identical with bare attention, appropriate attention—as a purposeful process guided by the agenda of right view—serves as an aspect of right mindfulness.

At the same time, right mindfulness plays a role in training attention to be appropriate. By remembering that both consciousness and attention are shaped by fabrication, which in turn is shaped either by ignorance or knowledge, right mindfulness is able to supervise the task of using this knowledge to provide fabricated—and thus purposeful—consciousness and attention with a skillful purpose.

To understand how this is done, we have to look in more detail at the factors of dependent co-arising that provide consciousness and attention with their sense of purpose. And the most coherent way to do that is to review the above factors in forward order, starting with ignorance.

“Ignorance” in the context of dependent co-arising doesn’t mean a general delusion or lack of information. It means not viewing experience in terms of the four noble truths. Any other framework for viewing experience, no matter how sophisticated, would qualify as ignorance. Typical examples given in the Canon (MN 2, MN 38, SN 12:20) include seeing things through the framework of self and other, or of existence and non-existence: What am I? What am I not? Do I exist? Do I not exist? Do things outside me exist? Do they not?

Viewing experience with right view means not getting involved in trying to answer these questions. Instead, right view focuses directly on the questions of what stress is, how it’s caused, and how it can be brought to an end. As we noted in Chapter One, viewing experience in terms of the four noble truths also includes understanding the motivation for using this framework and knowing the tasks directed by the framework: comprehending stress, abandoning its origination, realizing its cessation, and developing the path to its cessation.

The motivation, of course, is the desire to put an end to suffering and stress. Without this desire, you would see no reason to replace ignorance with knowledge, and the path would never take root. In recognition of the fact that all phenomena are rooted in desire (AN 10:58; SN 51:15), you have to replace the desires underlying ignorance with the desire to focus primary attention on how to understand suffering and bring it to an end. You adopt the framework of the four noble truths because you’re convinced that it will direct you to where you want to go.

As for the tasks dictated by the framework, these are an essential element in the knowledge replacing ignorance as well. The Pāli word the Buddha chose for ignorance—avijjā—is the opposite of vijjā, which means not only “knowledge” but also “skill,” as in the skills of a doctor or animal-trainer. In stating that people suffer from not knowing in terms of the four noble truths, he wasn’t just saying that they lack information or direct knowledge of those truths. He was also saying that they lack skill in handling them. They suffer because they don’t know what they’re doing.

This lack of skill conditions the way the mind intentionally fabricates or manipulates bodily states, verbal events, and mental states. As we noted in the preceding chapter, the breath is the primary means for fabricating bodily states, and practical experience shows that—in giving rise to feelings of comfort or discomfort—it has an impact on mental states as well. Even just breathing, when colored by ignorance, can act as a cause of suffering. As for verbal events, directed thought and evaluation are the means for fabricating sentences. Mental states are fabricated by feelings of pleasure, pain, and neither pleasure nor pain; and by perceptions—the labels the mind applies to things.

The role of fabrication here is to take the karmic potentials for experience coming from past actions and to shape them into actual present experience, at the same time introducing a purposeful element into that experience. For instance, with reference to the five aggregates (khandhas):

This means that conditioned experience, even at the most basic level, is for the sake of something at all times, both in the present and on into the future. Now, this “for the sake of something” functions on many levels. As SN 22:60 indicates, the mind isn’t infatuated with the aggregates for their own sake; it’s infatuated with them for the sake of the pleasures they provide. In other words, they’re tools. Because the mind uses the aggregates as tools in the pursuit of pleasure, experience starts by fabricating the tools it wants.

This process of fabrication relates to all three time frames. Informed by the past, it shapes the present as it leans toward to the future. The future orientation of fabrication is illustrated by the skillful verbal fabrications we noted in MN 118, which are expressed in the future tense: “I will breathe.…” The same principle, of course, operates in unskillful verbal fabrications as well. At the same time, the purpose at which fabrication aims has to be shaped by memories from the past, of what has and hasn’t worked in producing happiness. As long as those memories are ignorant, the present- and future-leaning quality of fabrication will lean toward suffering and stress.

As SN 22:79 shows, the factor of sensory consciousness that follows on fabrication is anything but passive awareness. It’s colored and motivated by the sense of purpose provided by the ignorant fabrications that turn it from a potential into an actuality. SN 22:54 illustrates the active nature of consciousness with an analogy: Consciousness is like a seed that grows and proliferates by feeding off the soil provided by form, feeling, perceptions, and fabrications. As dependent co-arising shows, among the proliferations produced by this consciousness is a cluster of mental and physical events called name-and-form.

This is the stage, under the heading of “name,” where attention occurs. As if the preconditions for attention weren’t already complex enough, its co-conditions in name-and-form add another level of complexity. “Form” means the form of the body as experienced from within as properties of earth (solidity), water (liquidity), wind (energy), and fire (heat), and as shaped by the activity of breathing (part of the wind property). “Name” includes not only attention, but also intention, again (as a repetition of fabrication in general); feeling and perception, again (as a repetition of mental fabrication); and contact, which here apparently means contact among all the factors already listed. The repetition of these factors is an illustration of the non-linear nature of the causal sequence.

All of these conditions, acting together under the influence of ignorance in the unawakened mind, color every act of attention to contact with the world of the six senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, the tactile sense, and the intellect that knows mental qualities and ideas.

This is why what may appear to be a simple act of attention is anything but simple, and anything but bare. It’s shaped, consciously or not, by views and the intentional actions informed by those views. If those views are ignorant, the act of attention is conditioned to be inappropriate: applied to the wrong things, in the wrong framework, and for the wrong reasons, aggravating the problem of stress and suffering rather than alleviating it.

The issue, then, is how to turn attention into appropriate attention, focused on the right questions, to avoid this fetter of views. One seeming option would be to use something unconditioned or unfabricated as a tool to free attention from the conditions of ignorance and fabrication, but that is an impossibility, for the unfabricated is not the cause of anything (MN 1) and has no features—no arising or passing away—by which it could be used as a tool.

Because the unfabricated cannot be used in any way, there is only one possible approach: the Buddha’s strategy of using the processes of fabrication informed by skillful knowledge to free the mind from the fabrications conditioned by ignorance so as to arrive at the unfabricated. This is why he called his strategy a path: Just as a path to a mountain doesn’t cause the mountain, yet following it can take you there; in the same way, the path doesn’t cause the unfabricated, but the act of following the path can arrive at the unfabricated. The dynamic of this strategy explains why the path, as a form of fabrication, is so self-referential: On the one hand, it takes the fabricated nature of experience, which is so often unskillful, and applies right effort to fabricate it in a skillful way. On the other hand, it aims at developing dispassion for all fabrications, which means that ultimately it has to turn attention to relinquishing itself.

As we noted in the preceding chapter, there are stages in this process. First the Buddha recommends mastering fabrication by using it as a tool to disband ignorant fabrications. Then he has you observe it as it’s being used, so that finally you abandon passion for fabrication of any type. This is the basic dynamic of the path.

The standard description of dependent co-arising shows that when ignorance is fully ended, all the succeeding factors—including fabrication—also end. However, because the type of knowledge that replaces ignorance involves mastering a skill, there are two important points to note:

1) Ignorance is overcome gradually, in stages, as unskillful fabrications are increasingly stilled through mastering the activity of skillful fabrications aimed at dispassion. This is why the path progresses in a step-by-step manner as dispassion grows more encompassing to the point ultimately where fabrications totally disband.

2) The knowledge that replaces ignorance is not a disinterested awareness of things as they are. As the Buddha pointed out, he taught only stress and the end of stress (SN 22:86). The categories of right view are meant to help in bringing about the end of stress. This means that they’re purposeful, aimed directly at developing the skills needed to bring stress to an end.

Because the role of attention on the path—as appropriate attention—is shaped by fabrications, it, too, has to be purposeful. It cannot be merely receptive all-around. It must aim at putting an end to the effluents (āsava): unskillful impulses toward sensuality, becoming, and ignorance that “flow out” of the mind and keep it returning again and again to stress. For this reason the role of appropriate attention is to choose to avoid issues that will encourage the effluents and to focus on issues that will help get rid of them.

This passage shows that appropriate attention is directly connected to right view, as it keeps the mind focused on the categories of right view. Other passages show that appropriate attention also attends to the duties appropriate to these categories. For example, it helps in comprehending the five clinging-aggregates, which are identical with the truth of stress (SN 56:11):

Similarly, SN 46:51 (see Chapter Nine) shows how appropriate attention is used to starve the five hindrances (thus helping to abandon the origination of stress) and to feed the seven factors for awakening (to help develop the path). These are some of the ways in which appropriate attention focuses both on the noble truths and on accomplishing their attendant tasks.

As we will see in Chapter Nine, the four topics mentioned in these descriptions of appropriate attention—the four noble truths, the five clinging-aggregates, the five hindrances, and the seven factors for awakening—all come under the fourth frame of reference: the act of remaining focused on mental qualities in and of themselves. And as we will see in Chapter Six, the primary use of this frame of reference is to subdue greed and distress with reference to the world. For this reason, the activity of appropriate attention—both in terms of the topics it focuses on and in terms of its purpose for focusing on them—falls squarely under the fourth establishing of mindfulness. Informed by right view, appropriate attention also includes the qualities of alertness and ardency in remaining focused. All it needs is mindfulness—to remember to stay focused—and the identity with the fourth establishing is complete.

All of this shows that there is no role for bare attention or bare awareness on the path. Instead, the type of attention that does play a role in the path is aimed somewhere: at dispassion. It plays an active, purposeful role in focusing awareness on how the processes of fabrication are causing stress and how they can be redirected to act as the path to the end of stress.

The sequence of factors listed in dependent co-arising shows what right mindfulness needs to remember in order to supervise the reconditioning of attention to make it appropriate. To begin with, there needs to be at least a rudimentary understanding of the four noble truths to counteract ignorance. This corresponds to right view. This has to be followed by an act of the will—fabrication—to act on the duties assigned by right view. This corresponds to right resolve and right effort. Finally, under name-and-form, there has to be the ability to remember to establish attention in the proper framework so as to keep these views and duties in mind in a way that will develop the steadiness of concentration in which the mind can remember to apply lessons learned from the past, and to pick up new knowledge from the present that can be applied in the future. These are the direct duties of right mindfulness.

This sequence of factors explains why MN 117 states that the factors of right view, right effort, and right mindfulness have to circle around every factor of the path so as to lead to right concentration. Without these combined factors, the processes of fabrication would easily slip back into their old, unskillful ways. With these factors, fabrication can be employed to develop all the factors of the path.

As we noted above, fabrication relates to all three time periods—past, present, and future. This is why the practice of right mindfulness has to relate to all three time periods as well: to the past through mindfulness, to the present through alertness, and to both the present and the future through ardency. Otherwise, right mindfulness would not be able to encompass all the aspects of fabrication and direct them toward right concentration.

Right concentration in turn provides an excellent opportunity for gaining insight into the role played by fabrication in shaping experience. It does this in five interconnected ways.

1) To concentrate the mind on any of the themes provided by right mindfulness, you have to focus on the role of fabrication in shaping sensory experience, for only when this factor is managed skillfully can right mindfulness perform its function of “subduing greed and distress with reference to the world” of the senses. In other words, only when you are sensitive to the fabricated nature of greed, distress, and the sense of the world nourishing greed and distress, can you successfully disband them so that they don’t disturb the focus of the concentration you’re trying to develop. This sensitivity helps to bring unskillful processes of fabrication out of the unconscious and into the light of day.

2) The ensuing state of concentration—especially when focused on the breath—requires further sensitivity to all three forms of skillful fabrication within the concentration itself:

Note that these forms of fabrication involve not only the aggregate of fabrication, but also the aggregates of form, feeling, and perception. This means that the practice of right concentration takes advantage of the fabricated nature of all the aggregates to shape them in a positive direction: into the peaceful and pleasant abiding of jhāna.

3) Once you have acquired a taste of the peaceful pleasure that comes from fabricating states of concentration, you have a standard against which to measure the pleasures created by the fabrications of greed, distress, and all other unskillful mental states used to create pleasure in terms of the world. Through this comparison, you learn an important lesson: the calmer the fabrication, the better.

4) Once the mind is established in right concentration, it acquires a solid, still frame of reference against which it can observe even subtler movements of fabrication within the concentration itself.

5) As the mind’s sensitivity grows subtler, it can see the stress caused by relatively grosser levels of fabrication within the concentration, which induces it to let them fall away in favor of calmer levels of fabrication. As the various layers of fabrication fall away, the mind progresses through increasingly subtle and stable levels of concentration.

In fact, this procession through the levels of concentration all the way to the cessation of perception and feeling is one of the ways in which awakening is achieved. This is because the attainment of the cessation of perception and feeling entails the ending of all three types of fabrication. That, in turn, entails a level of insight that at the very least can bring about the penultimate level of awakening, non-return. In one sense, this insight is the logical outcome of the pursuit of ever more refined states of calm, based on ever more refined types of fabrication. In another sense, however, this insight comes from a radical break from this progression, in that it confronts the fact that all types of fabrication, no matter how refined, involve some level of stress and disturbance. The only way to find true calm is to abandon fabrication altogether. This is how the pursuit of calm ultimately leads to the unfabricated ease of unbinding.

So the underlying dynamic of the five ways in which right concentration can foster insight into the processes of fabrication is one of sensitivity through manipulation, followed by the use of that sensitivity to bring about calm. This same dynamic is reflected in the basic pattern of the Buddha’s sixteen purposeful steps for breath meditation.

For instance, in the first tetrad: When attention is directed to the breath as an object of mindfulness and concentration, you become sensitive to the way in which in-and-out breathing fabricates the experience of the body. From that sensitivity, you can allow that fabrication to grow calm. Similarly in the second tetrad, with the steps connected with feeling: You use the breath to develop rapture and feelings of pleasure, both of which help the mind to settle down. As you do this, you become sensitive to the effect that feelings—and the perceptions around them—have on the mind. Then you can allow that effect to grow calm. Similarly in the third tetrad, with the steps associated with the mind: As you use the processes of fabrication to bring the mind into balance—gladdening it when its energy is low, steadying it when its energy is erratic—you become sensitized to how the three forms of fabrication have an effect on it. That enables you to release it from them. In the fourth tetrad, your hands-on knowledge of fabrication sensitizes you to the inconstant nature of anything fabricated. That allows you to develop dispassion for the fabrications you see as gross. With dispassion comes calming: Those fabrications cease and can be relinquished. As this sensitivity to inconstancy is applied to increasingly subtle levels of fabrication, it ultimately arrives at the radical calm of total dispassion, total cessation, and total relinquishment.

This dynamic of sensitizing the mind to fabrication by focusing attention on how to calm fabrications is one of the primary ways in which right mindfulness trains attention to become appropriate attention. In doing so, it can use appropriate attention—especially in the fourth tetrad, which is connected with the fourth frame of reference—to turn around and help in the refining of the fabrications that condition it. This shows how the non-linear aspect of dependent co-arising is not a mere formality. It’s of immense practical value in the practice.

In a similar way, the dynamic of sensitizing the mind to fabrication by learning how to calm fabrications is also the basic strategy by which the sixteen steps develop tranquility and insight in tandem. As they work together, they foster both right concentration and right view, making right view more precise in its understanding of the effects of fabrication so that it develops the dispassion leading to full unbinding.

However, the qualities of tranquility and insight don’t always develop smoothly in tandem, for sometimes insight overtakes tranquility, in which case you have to focus particular attention on the step of steadying the mind. In other cases, it’s possible—on attaining the pleasure, rapture, and equanimity of jhāna—to become complacent and to stop short of the goal.

In cases like these, right view, right effort, and right mindfulness need to work together with appropriate attention to provide other tools that will make the heart leap up and grow firm at the prospect of the cessation of self-identification and the breaching of ignorance. These tools are composed of the verbal fabrication of directed thought and evaluation, and the mental fabrication of perceptions, designed to develop insight leading to dispassion for the process of fabrication at work in the activity of jhāna itself. Right view provides the framework for understanding why it’s desirable to use these insight-inducing fabrications; appropriate attention directs attention to them; right mindfulness keeps them in mind; and right effort provides the energy to use them effectively.

These fabrications can be applied at any level in the practice of jhāna. Although SN 36:11, above, traces a path to awakening through all the levels of concentration, AN 9:36 shows that awakening can come about even with contemplation of just the first jhāna.

Note the four steps in this process. First, you master bodily, verbal, and mental fabrications to the point where they settle the mind in the first jhāna. Second, you focus attention on the fact that the first jhāna is composed of fabrications with inherent limitations. The perceptions listed in this passage—identical to the perceptions of appropriate attention applied to the clinging-aggregates in SN 22:122, quoted above—are an expansion of the more common list of three: the perception of inconstancy (“a disintegration”), the perception of stress (“a disease, a cancer, an arrow, painful, an affliction”), and the perception of not-self (“alien, an emptiness”). The purpose here is to induce a sense of dispassion for the fabrications of jhāna.

The third step is to develop perceptions that incline the mind to look favorably on the prospect of a deathless happiness that would be free from the limitations of fabrication. (“This is peace, this is exquisite.…”) Finally, you have to remember—i.e., be mindful—to protect the mind from developing a sense of passion for the experience of the deathless, for that passion forms the final obstacle to total release.

Right mindfulness plays several roles in this process. To begin with, it acts as the theme on which the mind is concentrated so as to enter jhāna. Then it plays a supervisory role to remind you not to get stuck on that attainment: reminding you to look for the limitations of that jhāna, and reminding you of the perceptions that will help toward that end. It also reminds you to view the ending of fabrications—even the fabrications of the path—in a positive light, and to abandon passion even for the much greater happiness of the deathless that appears when fabrications fall away.

Similarly, appropriate attention plays a purposeful role throughout these steps, directing you first to the object of your concentration, then—as we have noted—turning attention to the processes fabricating that state of concentration, attending to the perceptions that will develop dispassion for that concentration, and looking for any passion that may arise around the experience of the deathless.

Although appropriate attention looks for things as they are directly experienced throughout the stages of gaining insight into jhāna, it also knows—when reminded by right mindfulness—which experiences and fabrications to choose to attend to at which stage in the process. For instance, when the mind is beginning to settle down in jhāna, that’s not a time to focus on the drawbacks of jhāna. When the time comes to focus on developing dispassion for jhāna, that’s not a time to focus on how much pleasure and rapture the jhāna entails. In this way, appropriate attention is selective in what it attends to because, informed by right view and right mindfulness, it’s aimed at a particular goal: the step-by-step mastery of fabrications leading to the ending of stress.

Only at full awakening, with the full completion of the duties associated with the four noble truths, does the mind drop all agendas and experience things simply as they are—or in the terms of the Canon, purely as they have come to be, free from the activity of present fabrication:

The three rounds in this knowledge and vision correspond to the three levels of knowledge for each of the noble truths: knowing the truth, knowing the duty appropriate to the truth, and knowing that the duty has been completed. The twelve permutations come from applying these three levels to all four of the truths (3 x 4 = 12). When this knowledge and vision is completely pure, it yields release and the knowledge and vision of release.

The consciousness attained through this release is the only type of awareness that the Canon recognizes as truly unconditioned, for—unlike every other form of consciousness—it can be known without recourse to sensory contact, even contact at the intellect.

The “allness of the all” here is a reference to the world of the six internal and external sense media.

“Beyond range” here means not “beyond the range of possible knowledge” but “beyond the range of adequate description,” for there are other canonical passages indicating that even though the dimension beyond the six senses cannot be adequately described, it can still be directly known.

After the experience of total release, the arahant returns to an experience of the world of the six senses, but with a sense of being disjoined from it because the mind no longer needs to feed on it.

Similarly, as we noted in Chapter One, when the arahant after full awakening engages in right mindfulness, it’s with a sense of being disjoined from body, feelings, mind, and mental qualities. At the same time, he/she continues to engage in appropriate attention. Although the purpose now is different from that of an unawakened person, there is a purpose nonetheless.

So even though arahants have completed the duties and tasks associated with the four noble truths—and have gained access to an unconditioned awareness outside of the dimension of the six senses—their attention, when sensitive to the world of the six senses, is still a purposeful activity.

Which goes to show that—both in the course of the path and in its aftermath—neither mindfulness nor attention plays a purely receptive role. In line with the Buddha’s depiction of the processes of sensory experience in general, they act purposefully. This is true whether the mind is engaged in giving rise to stress, following the path to the end of stress, or sensitive to sensory input after the experience of total release from stress.

In part, right mindfulness and appropriate attention serve overlapping functions on the path, particularly in line with the fourth establishing of mindfulness: that of choosing which phenomena and tasks to focus on in the present moment, and which ones to ignore. However, these qualities start from different functions: memory in the case of mindfulness, choice of what to attend to in the case of attention. Only when they are trained, through the addition of other mental qualities, to become right mindfulness and appropriate attention do their functions overlap. Even then, though, right mindfulness covers a broader range of functions, encompassing all the ways in which memory can be brought to bear on the purpose at hand.

The distinction between mindfulness and attention is an important one, for it’s useful in sorting out the various ways fabrication shapes all the functions associated with the path. Only when they are seen clearly as separate types of fabrication can they be developed skillfully. It’s like cooking: You want your spices and herbs to be precisely labeled so that you can produce precisely the flavor you want in your food.

At the same time, only when these fabrications are seen clearly as fabrications can insight enable the mind to go beyond them. In other words, an understanding of the fabricated nature of mindfulness and attention is what allows you ultimately to develop dispassion for them when they have performed their duties. The ultimate duty of right mindfulness is to keep this understanding in mind so that, when the time comes, even the refined fabrications of the path—including mindfulness itself—can be recognized as fabrications and so abandoned for the sake of an unfabricated calm. Otherwise, the mind will mistake these refined levels of fabrication for unfabricated phenomena, a mistake that can stand in the way of genuine release.