57सतिपट्ठानसुत्त · Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta

Majjhima Nikāya 10, Pali canon · translations by Bhikkhu Sujato (2018), Ñāṇamoli and Bodhi (1995) and Thanissaro Bhikkhu (2008)

Linked to 19 chapters: supports 8 · contradicts 8 · mechanism 5 · same claim 6 · pairing 2

The Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta is a list, and the list is the argument. The Buddha is at a market town of the Kuru people, and he opens by saying that there is one way to the purification of beings and that it is the four establishings of mindfulness: observing body as body, feelings as feelings, mind as mind, dhammas as dhammas. He then works through fourteen exercises on the body, one on feelings, one on the mind and five on dhammas, and after every single one of them repeats the same five-clause refrain without changing a word. The exercises are not alike — a man attending to the length of his breath, a man noticing which way his limbs are pointing, a man reciting the thirty-one parts of his own body, a man looking at a corpse in each of nine stages of decay — and the refrain is what makes them one practice rather than twenty-one. The discourse ends with a guarantee: seven years of this, or seven months, or seven days, and one of two results follows. It is the most widely taught meditation text in the world, and what it actually asks for is narrower and harder than the practice that now carries its name.

At Kammāsadhamma

The Kuru country lay north-west of the Ganges plain, around what is now Delhi and Haryana, and it is where the canon puts several of its longest and most technical discourses: this one, its expanded twin in the Dīgha collection, and the long discourse on dependent origination. Buddhaghosa's commentary explains the concentration by saying that the climate there suited body and mind and that the Kurus were fit to receive deep teaching, an explanation that says more about the commentary's habits than about the Kurus. Nothing else in the frame is personal. There is no named questioner, no incident that prompts the talk, no individual addressed. The discourse is delivered to the assembly as a whole and it never returns to the setting.

Everything contested about the discourse is already in the first sentence. Ekāyano maggo is a compound of eka, one, and ayana, a going or a way, and it can be read as the only path, the path that goes to one destination, the path travelled alone, or the path that converges. Soma Thera's translation of 1941 made it the only way, and the exclusive reading is the one that travelled: for most of the twentieth century the sentence was quoted as a claim that no other method reaches the goal. Ñāṇamoli and Bodhi print the direct path, and so does Thanissaro Bhikkhu; Sujato prints the path to convergence. The philological objection to the exclusive reading is that the same compound appears elsewhere in the same collection describing a track that leads down into a pit, where only a destination is at issue and no claim of uniqueness could be meant. Anālayo, whose 2003 study is the standard book-length treatment, takes the direct path as the best fit and points out that the commentary itself lists several readings rather than settling on one.

The second word is no easier. Satipaṭṭhāna resolves either as sati plus upaṭṭhāna, the establishing or setting-up of mindfulness, or as sati plus paṭṭhāna, a foundation of mindfulness. The Sanskrit of the northern parallels reads smṛtyupasthāna, which settles the grammar in favour of the first: the text is about establishing an attention, not about four objects that serve as its foundations. And sati itself is the Pali of Sanskrit smṛti, whose ordinary sense is memory. Thomas William Rhys Davids chose mindfulness for it in 1881, and every English version since has kept the word; the sense of holding something in mind, of not letting it drop, is closer to the Pali than the sense of attending closely to what is in front of you.

The doubled locative — kāye kāyānupassī, observing body in the body — is strange in Pali as it is in English, and the strangeness is doing work. The instruction is not to think about the body but to observe the body under the description of body, without letting it become someone's body, or an attractive body, or my body. The same restriction applies four times over. Three qualities are named and none of them is neutral watching. Ātāpī is from ātāpa, heat, and means ardent in the sense of burning at something; sampajāno is clear comprehension, a discriminating knowledge of what one is doing; satimā is the remembering already described. Then a participle that is usually skipped in summaries: vineyya loke abhijjhādomanassaṁ, having removed longing and aversion towards the world. Covetousness and displeasure are to be put away before the observing starts, or as part of it. This is not an exercise in accepting whatever arises.

Observing the body

The verb changes between the second step and the third, and the change is the whole design of the exercise. In the first two steps the verb is pajānāti, he knows: long breath is registered as long, short as short, and nothing is done about either. In the last two the verb is sikkhati, he trains, and the object is a future tense — I shall breathe in experiencing the whole body. The first half reports, the second half intends. A practice described entirely as bare registration would have kept one verb throughout, and this one does not. What sabbakāya, the whole body, refers to is disputed: the commentary takes it as the whole of the breath, its beginning, middle and end, while Ñāṇamoli and Bodhi and most modern teachers take it as the physical body entire, so that awareness widens from the nostrils to the whole frame.

The simile is about a craftsman at work, not about a watcher at rest. A lathe-turner pulling a cord knows the length of his own stroke while making it, and the knowing is part of the skill rather than a commentary on it. Every simile among the body exercises is drawn from a trade — a turner, a man sorting grain, a butcher — and in each the knowing belongs to someone who is doing something. The discourse could have compared the meditator to a spectator and does not.

This paragraph is the discourse's engine and it is the part most often dropped. It follows every exercise, with only the object changing, and it asks for five things that the exercise itself has not asked for. Observe the object internally, then in another, then both ways: the commentary reads bahiddhā as another person's body, which turns a private exercise into an exercise in generalisation, while some modern readers take it as the outward aspect of one's own. Observe the object arising, then vanishing, then both: whatever was being attended to is now to be watched coming into existence and going out of it, which converts a steady object into a process. Then the third clause, which limits rather than extends. Mindfulness that there is a body is to be present yāvadeva, just so far as, and no further — enough for knowing and for remembering, and not enough to build anything on. And the last clause, anissito ca viharati, na ca kiñci loke upādiyati, he dwells independent and clings to nothing in the world, is the goal of the whole discourse stated in eight words after every one of its exercises.

The second and third exercises take the practice out of the sitting posture and into the day, and they are the reason this discourse rather than any other became the basis of a full-time training. The list of occasions in the third is deliberately unglamorous and ends with defecating, sleeping and keeping silent; nothing is exempted and nothing is ranked. What is asked is sampajāna, clear comprehension, and the commentarial tradition analyses it into four questions applied to each act: what is its purpose, is it suitable, does it fit the meditation, is there any delusion in it. That fourfold analysis is not in the discourse. What the discourse gives is the bare instruction that the act be done with clear comprehension, and the list.

The exercise is what it appears to be, and softening it makes it unintelligible. The body is to be gone through from the soles up and from the hair down, item by item, thirty-one items, and the text says outright that it is full of impurity of various kinds. Later tradition names the exercise attention to the repulsive. The list is not squeamish about order or category: hair and nails sit beside pus and urine, and the organs are named as organs. What is being attacked is the composite image — the body as a single attractive or shameful thing — and what replaces it is an inventory. The simile does not carry disgust at all, which Anālayo takes to be a point about the exercise: a man with good eyes opening a grain sack is discriminating, not revolted, and the operation asked for is sorting rather than loathing. The Chinese Madhyama-āgama parallel includes the same contemplation, so it is not a Theravāda addition.

The four elements are not chemistry. Earth is whatever is solid and resistant, water whatever is cohesive and flowing, fire whatever is hot or maintains temperature, air whatever moves or holds pressure; the same body is being described under four functional headings rather than divided into four substances. The butcher simile is the sharpest image in the discourse and the commentary's reading of it is the one that stuck: while the animal is alive and whole, the perception "cow" applies; once it has been cut into portions and laid out for sale, what is there is meat, and the perception "cow" has nowhere to attach. The perception "being" is supposed to go the same way. The butcher is neither cruel nor kind in the simile, and no distaste is asked for; the change is in what can be truthfully said about what is on the table.

The nine stages are a timed sequence and they are meant to be looked at. Cremation was not universal, charnel grounds were real places outside the town where bodies were put, and the discourse assumes its hearers can walk to one. The operative verb is upasaṁharati, he brings together or compares: the corpse is not the object of the exercise, the comparison is. Nothing in the passage asks the meditator to feel anything about the corpse. What it asks is that he place his own body on the same line and grant that it has the same future, and it repeats the finding three times in the same words at every stage — of that nature, going that way, not exempt.

The Pali counts for us. Breathing, postures, clear comprehension, the parts, the elements and the nine stages of the corpse make fourteen, and the last line of the section says so. Anālayo's comparison of the three surviving versions — this one, the Madhyama-āgama discourse translated into Chinese from a Sarvāstivāda line, and the Ekottarika-āgama version — finds that the parts of the body, the elements and the charnel grounds appear in all of them, while breathing, the postures and clear comprehension do not. On that evidence the contemplations that modern courses begin with are the ones least securely attested, and the ones they usually leave out are the oldest layer.

Observing feelings

Vedanā is feeling in a narrow technical sense: the tone of an experience, pleasant or painful or neither, and not emotion, which in this scheme belongs to the mind section. The exercise has two moves. The first sorts every experience into one of three tones, including the third, which is the one that normally goes unnoticed and which the discourse insists be named. The second crosses that division with another: sāmisa means with bait or with flesh, nirāmisa without it, and the pair separates a pleasure that depends on the senses and their objects from a pleasure that does not — the gladness of meditative absorption, for instance, or the joy that comes of seeing something clearly. Six categories result, and the only instruction is to know which one is present.

Observing mind

Sixteen terms in eight pairs, and the pairs are not of one kind. The first three are the standard roots of unwholesome action — lust, hate, delusion — and their absence. The next three are conditions of attention: contracted or distracted, exalted or not, surpassable or not, where the middle two describe states reached in meditative absorption. The last two are the highest: concentrated or not, freed or not. Nothing is asked for except the knowing, and the last pair makes the point sharpest. A mind that is not free is to be known as not free, and the discourse offers no instruction about what to do next. The exercise is diagnosis without treatment, and the treatment is the next foundation.

Observing dhammas

The word left untranslated in the fourth foundation is the one that has to be. Dhammā runs from a thing simply present in experience to a teaching to a category in the analysis of mind, and the five sets the discourse lists under it are not one kind of thing: one is a set of obstructions, one is an inventory of a person, one is an account of how contact produces bondage, one is a set of qualities to be developed, and the last is a doctrine. Ñāṇamoli and Bodhi print mind-objects, Thanissaro mental qualities, Sujato principles, and none of the three works for all five sets. What they have in common is that each is a scheme from the teaching being used to read what is present, which is why observing dhammas as dhammas is not a further sense-channel but a further way of looking at the same material.

Five moves are asked for, and only the first two are observation of a state. The third, fourth and fifth are observation of a mechanism: how this arises, how it is abandoned, how it is prevented from returning. The verb throughout is pajānāti, he knows, and never pajahati, he abandons. What the meditator is told to see is the causal structure of his own hindrance, not to remove it; the removal, on the text's account, is what knowing the structure produces.

The five hindrances are sensual desire, ill will, dullness and drowsiness, restlessness and remorse, and doubt, and elsewhere in the canon they are the standard obstacle to meditative absorption. Here they are not obstacles to the exercise; they are the exercise. A mind too restless to settle has, on this instruction, something to observe rather than something to fix, and the state that would elsewhere be a failure of practice becomes its object. That inversion is why the discourse can be given to beginners at all.

The second set is the five constituents — form, feeling, perception, volitions, consciousness — the same inventory taken apart in the discourse on the mark of not-self, and here it is handled in three words each. What is asked is not the argument of that discourse but a smaller thing: to see each constituent, to see it start, to see it stop. The qualifier upādāna, clung to, is doing work, since the objects are not the five in general but the five as the objects of clinging. This is the shortest of the five sets and the one that most obviously assumes prior doctrine; a hearer who did not already know what saṅkhārā covers would get nothing from the sentence.

Three items are named where two would do. There is the faculty, there is what meets it, and there is the fetter that arises in dependence on the two together — and the fetter is placed in neither of them. It is not in the eye, because the eye of a freed person meets the same sights; it is not in the sight, because the same sight binds one person and not another. The mind counts as the sixth faculty on the same footing as the other five, with its own objects and its own fetter, which is why the discourse never divides experience into a physical outside and a mental inside.

The seven factors are mindfulness, investigation of dhammas, energy, rapture, tranquillity, concentration and equanimity, and they are the positive counterpart of the hindrances. The formula applied to them is the same as the one applied to the hindrances with one term changed. The hindrance formula ends in non-recurrence: how the abandoned does not arise again. The awakening-factor formula ends in fulfilment: how the arisen comes to completion through development. Everything else about the two is symmetrical, including the verb. Even here, where the object is something to be grown rather than got rid of, the instruction is to know how it grows and not to grow it, which is the strongest evidence in the discourse that observation and cultivation are not being distinguished as they are in most modern accounts.

The last set takes four lines, and the brevity is itself evidence. In the Dīgha collection the same discourse appears at three times the length under the title of the Great Discourse on the Establishings of Mindfulness, and the whole of the difference falls here: in that version the four truths are analysed at length, with a definition of suffering, an account of craving, and the eightfold path spelled out limb by limb. Everything else in the two versions matches. Neither the Chinese Madhyama-āgama version nor the Ekottarika-āgama version has a truths section at this point, which is part of why Anālayo treats the fourth foundation's five sets as a body of material that grew rather than as a fixed list; the Theravāda commentary, by contrast, reads the order as a deliberate ascent from what obstructs to what liberates.

Seven years, or seven days

The ladder descends by single years, then by single months, then by halves: seven years down to one year, seven months down to one month, then half a month, then seven days. Sixteen rungs in all. The promise is stated in the same words at every rung, and it is a conditional about a method rather than a claim about any particular person: whoever should develop them evaṁ, in this way. What is promised is not a guaranteed enlightenment but one of two outcomes, the second of which is a stage short of the first.

The opening sentence returns as the closing sentence, and the clause between them — so it was said, and it was said with reference to this — tells the hearer what the discourse has been. The claim made at the start was not self-evident and was not defended by argument; it was defended by exhibition. Everything between the two statements is the content of the word this. The discourse never says why observing the body should purify a being, or why knowing that a hindrance is present should cause it to go. It says what to do, for how long, and what follows.

Since the fifth century BC

The discourse survives three times in Pali. This version in the Majjhima collection is the tenth discourse of the first book; the Dīgha version, longer by its analysis of the four truths, is the twenty-second of that collection; and the Saṁyutta collection devotes a whole division of a hundred and four short discourses to the subject. Two more versions survive in Chinese, one in the Madhyama-āgama translated at the end of the fourth century from a Sarvāstivāda line of transmission, one in the Ekottarika-āgama. Anālayo's Perspectives on Satipaṭṭhāna of 2013 sets the three side by side and finds that the exercises common to all of them are the anatomical parts, the elements, the charnel grounds, the feelings, the states of mind, the hindrances and the awakening factors; breathing, the postures, clear comprehension, the constituents, the sense bases and the four truths appear in some and not others. Buddhaghosa's fifth-century commentary, which knows none of this, reads the Pali order as designed, each set placed where it is for a reason, and Soma Thera's translation of that commentary in 1941 put the reading into English as The Way of Mindfulness.

For most of the intervening centuries the text was chanted rather than practised. Theravāda monasticism treated serious meditation as the work of a small number of forest monks, and the systematic treatment of the discourse's exercises lived in Buddhaghosa's Visuddhimagga as one subject among forty. The change came from Burma in the late nineteenth century, and it was a change of audience before it was a change of method. Ledi Sayadaw, who died in 1923, argued that lay people could and should study the higher doctrine and meditate, and wrote manuals in Burmese for people who had no Pali. Mingun Jetavana Sayadaw and then Mahāsi Sayadaw built a method out of the discourse that could be taught to a beginner in an afternoon: observe the rise and fall of the abdomen, and label whatever interrupts it — hearing, thinking, aching — with a single word. The colonial and post-colonial Burmese state backed the revival; the Sixth Buddhist Council held in Rangoon between 1954 and 1956 edited the canon and made mass lay meditation a national project. U Ba Khin, an accountant general, taught a parallel method built on sweeping attention through the body, and his student S. N. Goenka carried it to India and then everywhere as the ten-day course.

Nyanaponika Thera, a German-born monk in Ceylon, gave the method its English vocabulary. His The Heart of Buddhist Meditation, published in German in 1950 and in English from 1954, glossed sati as bare attention: attending to what appears at each moment of perception, and to nothing beyond it. The phrase is a reading of one clause of the refrain, the clause that limits mindfulness to what is needed for bare knowing, and it was made to carry the whole. Jon Kabat-Zinn opened a stress reduction clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in 1979 and took that vocabulary with him; and the eight-week course he designed there became mindfulness-based stress reduction, and the cognitive therapy built on it followed in 2002, and between them they put the discourse's first exercise, stripped of its frame, into hospitals, schools and companies in every country. The correction from the scholars came later and is textual rather than clinical. Rupert Gethin showed that sati in the canon keeps its sense of remembering and calls a scheme to mind rather than emptying the mind of schemes; Bhikkhu Bodhi argued in 2011 that no early text defines mindfulness as non-judgemental awareness and that the discourse's fourth foundation is explicitly evaluative, since the hindrances are to be abandoned and the awakening factors fulfilled; Robert Sharf traced the Burmese revival's emphasis on unmediated experience to a modern argument rather than an ancient one. What none of them disputes is that the practices work as taught. The dispute is over what the text was asking for, and on that the text is not ambiguous: it asks for ardour, for the prior removal of longing and aversion, for observation extended to another person's body and another person's mind, and for a series of exercises on decomposition that no clinical course includes.

Evan Thompson's argument that mindfulness is not the inward inspection of a private mental theatre cuts against the modern teaching and not against this text, which places another person's body and another person's mind among the objects of the practice from the first exercise onward and never treats the meditator as sealed in. And the discourse on the mark of not-self, delivered to five men in a deer park, supplies what this one leaves out: the reason why watching a body arise and vanish should end in clinging to nothing at all. Read alone, the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta is a method without an argument. Read after the other, it is the procedure by which the argument is made available to someone who has only his own experience to work from.

The renderings above are made from the Pali of the Mahāsaṅgīti edition and are meant to be plain rather than graceful. Bhikkhu Sujato's translation is in the public domain and is the one to set beside them; the version by Ñāṇamoli and Bodhi is the standard scholarly English, and Thanissaro Bhikkhu's is the one that keeps the technical vocabulary visible.