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.
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