Mindful of the Buddha

A recurring question in Western mindfulness circles runs like this: if a ten-minute secular breathing app can induce a measurable meditative state, should not a dozen repetitions of Itipi so — the Pāli formula for the nine epithets of the Buddha — do the same, or more?

The direct answer comes from a 5th-century Sri Lankan monk named Buddhaghosa, who in chapter VII of his Visuddhimagga states that buddha-recollection reaches only access concentration, not absorption — and that this is by design, not deficit. Anussati was engineered for the noise of daily life, not for the ideal conditions of retreat.

This volume traces the trajectory of that practice — from the Pāli texts where it first appears as one of six recollections, through its earliest Chinese reception in T0784 (the Sūtra in Forty-Two Sections), through the early Mahāyāna vision of seeing the buddha face-to-face, through the Three Pure Land Sūtras, through the eight great Mahāyāna sūtras of Part V, through the two-stream synthesis of Pure Land and Chan, and finally into the Flower Ornament Vision of Samantabhadra's Ten Great Vows.

The volume's claim, in one sentence: buddhānusmṛti is not one practice but a family of practices, sharing one engine and many objects, with each tradition inhabiting the engine differently.

Thirty-one papers. Eight Parts. Each paper stands alone as a technical analysis; read in sequence, they trace one continuous argument from Buddhaghosa's upacāra-samādhi to Samantabhadra's tenfold dedication.