Satipatthana Meditation: A Practice Guide

A friend recently took a class with Bikku Analayo at the Barre Center For Buddhist studies.  The class was based on the Analayo's interpretation of the Satipatthana-sutta -- the Buddha's discourse on the foundations or establishment of mindfulness.  As both a scholar and a monk, this is not the first time Analayo has written about the Satipatthana-sutta.  This time though, instead of focusing on academic questions of textual scholarship, or comparing the Chinese and Pali version of the sutta, Analayo has written a book to help us put the instructions in the sutta into practice.  The book is tremendously helpful in doing this.  The Satipatthana-sutta itself talks about various components of mindfulness, or various things one can be mindful of, but it doesn't really make clear how they are linked and why these are the particularly important ones.  In addition, like other suttas, the terminology used can be a bit arcane.  In other words, there's quite a distance to cover between the text and a set of meditation instructions.   

Since I haven't read them, I can't compare Analayo's success in covering this distance to older and more traditional approaches.  For me though, this book really brought a fairly obscure text alive.  Analayo turns the sutta into a connected set of meditation instructions that build upon one another as they go.  The instructions are clear and easy to follow, especially if you use the guided meditations that accompany the book.  There's also a lot of wisdom and experience contained in the book's extended reflections on what the various meditations are meant to offer us.  For example, meditating on the body as simply composed of skin, flesh, and bones can help us avoid becoming obsessed with our physical appearance.  Meditating on what becomes of the body after we die can help us face our own mortality.  Focusing on feeling can help us see how transitory all our reactions are.  Etc ... 

As the book progresses, we move into more and more abstract contemplations, and as an inevitable result, deeper and deeper into the Buddhist interpretation of meditative experience.  In fact, by the end, we are really getting a crash course in Buddhist philosophy or religious doctrine by contemplating the five hindrances and the seven factors of awakening.  Of course, as one one of the world's great spiritual traditions, Buddhism has a lot to offer.  In fact, for me at least, it pretty clearly has the most to offer.  And Analayo's explanations of the way the various lists that so obsess orthodox Buddhism complement one another is very insightful.  But I still believe that we should be mindful of our movement along a continuum from observation to interpretation.  That our feelings change and our body is composed of the same stuff as everything else seems to belong as firmly on the side of observation as anything could.  That a certain five or seven states of mind form the on and off ramps of the road to a fairly mysterious endpoint called awakening seems to me to belong equally firmly on the side of religious interpretation.  Which ultimately makes this one of the most explicitly religious meditation books I've read.  This is not meant to be a critique, but an observation.  Analayo is upfront about the establishment of mindfulness being only one aspect of the soteriological path to awakening.  In other words, he is guiding us towards establishing a specific type of mindfulness, focused on specific aspects of our experience, that will lead us towards specific moral and philosophical conclusions.  We have to remember to evaluate this practice and its fruit based on our own experience of it, just as we evaluate everything else in life.  

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

After reading The Good Lord Bird, I felt inspired to go back and read the classic it reminded me of.  Or perhaps it was re-read; I don't have any memory of this book from high school, and perhaps they had stopped assigning it by the time I got there (towards the end of the neolithic revolution). It's a thoroughly entertaining read.  There are some spots (mosty the parts with Tom Sawyer) where it drags things out for longer than I would have thought necessary.  Though maybe this pacing is appropriate for a novel about floating down the Mississippi on a raft?  I also really enjoyed the vernacular language of it and plan to incorporate "warn't" into my daily speech.

The basic story is simple.  A 14 year old Huck Finn runs away from his drunken and dangerous Pap near Hannibal, Missouri.  In his escape, he crosses paths with Jim, a negro slave who has run away from the family who took Huck in when his father proved to be a drunk.  Together, the two of them float down the big river 1,100 miles to somewhere near Point Coupee Parish, Lousianna, on a homemade raft, having various adventures along the way.  At the end of this journey the two stumble upon the family farm of Huck's good friend Tom Sawyer, and Jim is recaptured.  Since Tom arrives soon after for a visit with his Aunt, he and Huck lay a plan to free Jim and let him escape to the North.  The plan is an epic and hilarious failure, and leads to Jim's recapture, but it turns out that he is actually not a runaway slave after all.  His former owner declared him a free man when she recently passed away, a fact which Tom knew all along.

Thematically, the novel is one long sardonic take on the idiocy of antebellum South.  The characters Huck and Jim come across in their travels range from narrow-minded to mendacious.  And while some of them may mean well and even help them out, there are no heroes along the way.  Which observation indirectly brings us to the central controversy that today surrounds this once banned classic -- is it a racist book?  

To begin with, true to its vernacular, it features the N word prominently.  Since that alone will keep you off the college cheer squad these days, we're not off to a good start.  In addition, the few slaves depicted in the book are uniformly portrayed as uneducated and superstitious, often with a tinge of a mocking or comic element to them.  Of course, some of this can be defended as Twain accurately picturing the realities of the language and culture he grew up in.  But using black characters as comic relief is harder not to see as anything except playing off and reinforcing every stereotype of the era -- minstrelsy!  However, when you consider in addition that most white characters in the novel often see even less flattering, and equally stereotypical, portrayals, you might be willing to say that the novel depicts a racist world, but is not itself racist.  

However, this lukewarm defense seems to miss a key point.  The central tension that holds the whole book together is the 'sivilization' of young Huck Finn.  At the outset, Huck chafes at the strictures imposed by his guardian the widow.  Under her roof, he can't cuss, has to use a knife and fork, wear shoes, and go to church.  His escape down the river with Jim liberates him from all of these rules that just seem like nonsense to a 14 year old boy who loves to be in the backwoods.  At the end of the journey though, it seems likely that Tom's aunt will end up adopting Huck and finishing what the widow started.  Set within this context, all the Huck's many reflections on what to do about Jim take on a special significance.  On the one hand, Huck knows that he's supposed to follow the moral rules these women lay down.  These include not lying, and not stealing, both of which he is contravening by not turning in a runaway slave.  So Huck constantly feels guilty for helping Jim.  On the other hand, he and Jim have a great time together, and Huck knows he's a true friend who has bailed him out many times over during their adventures.  In other words, his first hand experience of Jim finds a full human being, and not a piece of property.  So throughout the whole novel, Huck has to struggle against what he sees as the morally correct thing to do -- turn Jim in -- which constantly wraps his teenage conscience in a knot.  He can't ever bring himself to quite do it, but he knows it's wrong and attributes this moral failure to his terrible upbringing.  

I think it's impossible not to see Huck's journey as gradually moving away from the absurd rules of 'sivilization' and towards an appreciation of the humanity of Jim.  Huck is taught to be a racist, but he fails at it.  And we see the entire process by which a young mind wrestles with and overcomes the stereotypes it began with.  This culminates in the tension of the final jailbreak.  Tom Sawyer concocts an elaborate and almost quixotic plan for freeing Jim.  It takes weeks to prepare.  But of course, for him it's all fun and games, since he knows that Jim is already free.  Huck, Jim, and the reader, however, don't know what Tom knows.  Which makes the ridiculous plan, and the too many pages spilled on its comic execution, a double edged sword.  It's funny and absurd and makes an adult Jim seem crazy for going along with some adolescent fantasy.  But you, Huck, and Jim can also all feel the frustration with this absurd plan build into a panic -- stop fucking around or they're going to sell Jim down the river tomorrow dammit!  So in the end, you get to really feel the commitment of Huck Finn.  He's going to lie, cheat, and steal from people who have treated him well.  He's even going to risk getting himself killed.  Now that he's made up his mind, he is going to do whatever it takes to free his friend Jim, 'sivilization' be damned.  It's hard to see how Twain could have more thoroughly dramatized the process of overcoming of the racial attitudes of the day.

Anatomy of Breathing

About six months ago I started to explore non-dual awareness by using Michael Taft's collection of guided meditations.  Each of these videos starts with an initial period of deep belly breathing where you focus on making the exhale longer than the inhale.  Initially, manipulating the breath in this way felt effortful, but once I got the hang of it, I found it shockingly and viscerally relaxing.  The effect was powerful enough that just about every morning I found myself wondering what the hell was going on and remembering that I had seen physical therapist and shoulder guru Eric Cressey recommend a book about the anatomy of breathing.  

So finally my curiosity got the better of me and I picked up Blandine Calais-Germain's book.  It is just exactly what it says it is.  She goes through all the terminology that a physical therapist or voice coach would use to describe types of breathing (tidal volume, inhale and exhale reserve volume) and then goes on to describe and provide an anatomical sketch for every muscle and bone that has any role in the process of breathing.  Since I knew next to nothing about this stuff, I found it surprising and enlightening -- it's amazing how much is involved in this simple motion that we take for granted.  The book ends with a series of exercises you can do that allow you to actually feel the action of each of the muscles involved.  

Overall, I found it well worth reading.  If you're a physical therapist or have already studied this anatomy for some other reason, I imagine that it would mostly be just a review.  My only disappointment was that there weren't more exercises that describe specific breathing techniques from various traditions -- meditation, yoga, opera, martial arts.  She mentions these traditions in passing during her anatomical explanations, but it would have been great to see a survey of those techniques linked directly to the anatomy they use.  

The Lion in the Living Room

We just got cats, so I thought I'd read journalist Abigail Tucker's history of the domestication of felis lybica.  It's a quick and breezy read with a lot of interesting anecdotes and some science tossed in along the way.  While she only has partial success in making the argument of the subtitle: How House Cats Tamed Us and Took Over The World, that's kinda beside the point for a book that just wants to humorously explore our relationship with our feline friends.  There are chapters on what we know about the history of cat domestication, the effects of cats on the natural environment (not good) as they've propagated around the world, toxoplasmosis, the effects of modern cat breeding, and finally, on cat's conquest of the intertubes.  Generally recommended if you are a cat person.  And if you are a dog person, what's your problem?

The Gateless Gate

It seems that the only good way to write about a koan is to produce another koan.  At least, this is what you might conclude from the format of this classic collection of Zen koans and commentary.  Obviously I'm not up to that task, so you'll have to settle for some more standard Western conceptual fare here.

Mumokan composed The Gateless Gate in 1228.  He collected 48 koans from various sources that he was using as a teaching aid and added a bit of his own cryptic commentary and a short poem to each.  I'd imagine there are many translations of this base work into English, but the one I read was made in 1979 by Yamada Koun.  Like Mumokan, since he was using the series of koans as a means of instruction, he added his own commentary.  It's a lot less cryptic than Mumokan's, but of course he is still faced with the same basic problem that the core goal is to use words to go beyond words.  

Despite this, I learned a ton about the particularities of the Zen mindset from the book.  In fact, I find myself drawn to this type of mystical non-dual practice.  It has a much looser feel than other Buddhist sects' obsession with lists and precepts.  As a result, it comes off as much more philosophical as well, probably in part because it resonates with the anti-systematic style of my favorite Western philosophers like Deleuze, Nietzsche, and Spinoza.  The ongoing question is always how to conceive everything as one, and one as everything.  In some sense, the "non-dual" probably refers as much to the duality of the one and the many as it does to the subject and the object, so it's important to read that formula both forwards and backwards.  Yamada begins to make clear that if all the varied events of the phenomenal world share an essential nature, this unity also spontaneously expresses itself as every phenomenal instance.  It's a tricky and paradoxical idea that never lets you rest because it inherently involves a sort of circulation or movement.  Presumably this goes a ways towards accounting for Zen's artistic and literary fecundity.

I haven't really spent much time trying to use the koans as an actual meditation technique.  But I have felt a hint of how this might work by following the advice he gives to simply bring a koan to mind during meditation or even as you go about daily life.  

 

A monk asked Joshu in all earnestness, 'Does a dog have Buddha nature or not?'  Joshu replied, 'Mu!'  

The more I noodle that one, the more I feel it open up like a flower whose beauty I hadn't noticed at first.  Does the funny looking dog sitting in the doorway at Med Mix have Buddha nature right now?  Can you have Buddha nature, or is it something that you are?  How am I different from the dog?  What exactly does negation have to do with emptiness?  Maybe I'll have to update this review when I've got it all figured out.

 

#reread

The Name of the Wind

The first volume of Patrick Rothfuss's Kingkiller Chronicles was an entertaining action adventure story.  The writing is a cut (or several) above the typical fantasy fare about magic and dragons and damsels in distress.  In fact, it has all of these, but it manages to put a slightly ironic distance between itself and the worn out tropes of the genre by using a frame story -- the main character relates his own autobiography to a scribe in grandiose and yet self-deprecating fashion.  It also sets itself apart by treating magic as if it were a fully explainable science.  Most of volume 1 is set in The University, the sole institution of higher learning in a superstitious medieval world.  There they teach various arcane disciplines like naming and alchemy and such.  This gives Rothfuss the chance to elaborate on how magic and dragons actually work instead of settling for the usual mysteriousness of the genre.

All that said, it's a bit long-winded as action adventure books go, and doesn't really seem to have any of the novel ideas I love in science fiction or fantasy.  So I don't think I'm going to read volume 2.