清淨道論 義疏通講 · 冊8Visuddhimagga · Exposition Throughout · Vol. 8

Eight Modes: A Practice That Dismantles “I Still Have Time,” Piece by Piece

The Big Picture — The First Blade: Dismantling “I Still Have Time”

This chapter (Chapter 8) contains four recollections: mindfulness of breathing is the workhorse, mindfulness of death and mindfulness of the body are two blades that cut attachment, and recollection of peace is the compass 〔Reading: this division of functions is the decoder’s organization; see the chapter Overview for an overview of all four units〕. This unit is the first blade—mindfulness of death. It dismantles the fantasy, “I think I still have plenty of time; I think these things are mine.” Its axis is the eight modes (Vernacular §1.3–§1.10), its point of departure is proper attention equipped with mindfulness, urgency, and knowledge (§1.2), and its ceiling is access (§1.11). What it gives is not depression but lucidity.

§01 Defining Death—Which “Death” Is the Object? → Vernacular §1.1

First establish the object precisely. “Death” means the cutting off of the life faculty in a single existence. The author first excludes three senses that are not intended: an arahant’s “death-as-final-cutting-off” (the cutting off of the suffering of the round), formations’ “momentary death,” and “conventional death” in statements such as “the tree died” or “the metal died.” The intended death is divided in two: timely death (by exhaustion of merit, exhaustion of life-span, or exhaustion of both) and untimely death (caused by life-cutting kamma—as with Dūsīmāra and King Kalābu, or through an assault such as a weapon attack). The distinctions are exact: death by exhaustion of merit occurs when the result of the rebirth-producing kamma has fully ripened although the conditions supporting life remain; death by exhaustion of life-span is the exhaustion of the roughly hundred-year life span of people today. This section is an exercise in definition: before recollecting death, know which death you are recollecting.

§02 Proper Attention—The Correct Way to Begin Mindfulness of Death → Vernacular §1.2

The opening method matches Chapter 7: go to a secluded place, withdraw alone, and attend to “Death will come; the life faculty will be cut off,” or simply “Death, death.” But the author immediately lists four incorrect beginnings. A person attending improperly feels sorrow when recollecting the death of someone dear (like a mother remembering her beloved child), gladness when recollecting the death of someone disliked (like enemies thinking of an enemy), no urgency when recollecting the death of someone neutral (like a cremator seeing a corpse), and terror when recollecting their own death (like a timid person seeing an executioner with an upraised sword). All four failures arise from the lack of mindfulness, urgency, and knowledge. The correct method is to observe people who have been killed or have died in various places, remember those once seen prospering who are now dead, and direct attention with mindfulness, urgency, and knowledge joined together. Through this alone, some practitioners suppress the hindrances, establish mindfulness, and bring the meditation subject to access. This is the chapter’s first demonstration that “method takes priority over emotion”: mindfulness of death is not an emotional exercise but a procedure assembled from three parts—mindfulness, urgency, and knowledge.

§03 The Eight Modes (First Half)—Executioner, Fortune-Failure, Comparison → Vernacular §1.3–§1.5

〔Reading〕Mindfulness of death is not morbid pessimism. Each of the eight modes dismantles the same fantasy: “I think I still have plenty of time; I think these things are mine.” Its purpose is not to produce depression but urgency (saṃvega)—a lucid pressure that says, “Time is short; stop postponing.” Death is the most thorough practice of stripping away “mine,” piece by piece: fame, merit, strength, and body cannot be carried away. Seeing this brings an immediate loosening, because you stop straining to keep what cannot be retained.

For practitioners not brought to success by the opening method alone, the author gives the eight modes (the list in Vernacular §1.3): by way of [death’s] presentation as executioner, fortune-failure, comparison, the body’s being shared with many, the weakness of life, signlessness, the limit of duration, and the brevity of the moment.

(1) The executioner stands present (§1.3): death is like an executioner holding a sword at your neck—because it is born together with you (as a mushroom bud rises with soil on its cap; as soon as rebirth consciousness arises it proceeds to aging and death like a rock falling from a mountain peak) and because it necessarily takes life. A living being never takes a backward step: like the risen sun heading only toward its setting, or a swift mountain stream that does not return. Four verse-similes follow in succession—a small river dried by summer heat, fruit with its stem soaked in sap certain to fall at dawn, vessels large or small all ending in breakage, and a dewdrop on a blade of grass vanishing toward the sun. “On the first night a person dwells in the womb, they set out on the journey, going on without return.”

(2) Fortune-failure (§1.4): fortune appears splendid only while failure has not overcome it, and no fortune can remain beyond failure. A ruler who enjoyed the whole earth and gave away a hundred crores ended as master of only half an āmalaka fruit; even the “Sorrowless,” when merit was exhausted, fell into sorrow. Health ends in illness, youth in aging, and life in death. Aging and death resemble vast mountains rolling inward from the four sides: from khattiyas down to caṇḍālas none is spared, and elephant troops, chariots, infantry, spells, and wealth all find no place to act.

(3) Comparison (§1.5): compare yourself with seven classes of great figures—those of great fame (Mahāsammata, Mandhātu, and others), great merit (Jotika, Jaṭila, Ugga, Meṇḍaka, and Puṇṇaka), great strength (Vāsudeva and the other wrestlers), great psychic power (the second chief disciple who shook Vejayanta Palace with his great toe and “entered death’s dreadful mouth together with his powers, like a deer entering a lion’s mouth”), great wisdom (Sāriputta, whose wisdom all beings apart from the Protector of the World do not equal even in a sixteenth part), the paccekabuddhas (self-awakened wanderers living alone like the rhinoceros horn), and finally the Sammāsambuddha. Even the Blessed One, whose physical body was adorned with the eighty minor characteristics and thirty-two marks and whose Dhamma body was filled with the aggregate of virtue and other qualities, “like a great mass of fire quenched by a downpour, was immediately stilled.” The seven comparisons rise step by step to the same conclusion: “What can be said of someone like me?” Through the commonality of death, this comparison brings the meditation subject to access.

§04 The Eight Modes (Second Half)—Shared Body, Fragile Life, Signlessness, Duration, Moment → Vernacular §1.6–§1.10

(4) The body is shared with many (§1.6): this body is “shared”—with eighty families of worms (those dependent on skin eat skin, those dependent on flesh eat flesh, and so on; there they are born, age, die, and relieve themselves, so the body is their birthing room, infirmary, cemetery, latrine, and urine trough), with hundreds of internal illnesses, and with external conditions for death such as snakes and scorpions. It resembles a target set at a crossroads upon which arrows, spears, and stones fall from all directions. The Blessed One’s instruction is blunt enough to enumerate them: snakebite, scorpion sting, centipede bite, stumbling and falling, undigested food, flaring bile, flaring phlegm, and knife-like winds—“through that I might die.”

(5) The weakness of life (§1.7): life depends on balance among five things—breathing, posture, cold and heat, the four elements, and food. If an out-breath does not return, the person dies; if any posture becomes excessive, the life formations are cut off; excessive cold or heat destroys; disturbance of an element makes even a strong person rigid, sodden, fevered, or broken at the joints; without physical food, life is exhausted. Life is a balance that may tip at any moment, not wealth deposited in an account.

(6) Signlessness (§1.8): five things have no knowable fixed rule—life (death occurs in the kalala stage, in each month of gestation, at birth, and before or after a hundred years), illness (the fatal illness is unfixed), time (the time of death is unfixed), the place where the body is laid down (a person born inside a village falls outside; a land-born being falls in water), and destination (a deva dies and is born human, a human dies and is born a deva). The world circles among the five destinations like an ox yoked to a machine.

(7) The limit of duration (§1.9): for people today, “a person who lives long lives a hundred years, or a little more.” The Blessed One teaches, “Act as if your head were on fire”; the discourse of the teacher Araka adorned with seven similes is to be expanded. Then comes the well-known grading: to hope to live for a day and a night, a day, the time needed for a bowl of food, or the time needed for four or five morsels in order to attend to the teaching is still called heedlessness; to hope to live for the time needed for a single morsel or the time needed for a single out-breath and in-breath is to be called heedful and keen in cultivating mindfulness of death. “The duration of life is only the time needed to chew four or five morsels.”

(8) The brevity of the moment (§1.10): in the ultimate sense, life is only a single mind-moment—like a chariot wheel touching the ground at only a single point of its rim. “In the past mind-moment, the being lived, does not live, and will not live; in the future mind-moment, the being did not live, does not live, and will live; in the present mind-moment, the being did not live, lives, and will not live.” The verse says, “With the mind’s breakup, the world is dead: this designation is made in the ultimate sense.” The eight modes have now moved from the most concrete image, an executioner, to the most abstract, a moment—the same fact at eight magnifications.

§05 The Ceiling and Benefits of Mindfulness of Death → Vernacular §1.11

With any of the eight modes, the mind grows familiar, mindfulness becomes established, the hindrances are suppressed, and the jhāna factors appear—but the jhāna does not reach absorption and reaches only access. The author gives the precise reason: the object is a phenomenon with its own nature (an ultimately real phenomenon rather than a conceptual sign), and it arouses urgency. He then raises an objection: supramundane jhāna and the second and fourth immaterial jhānas also have phenomena with their own nature as objects; why do they reach absorption? The answer is that the supramundane reaches it through the sequence of purification cultivation, while the immaterial reaches it through cultivation that transcends the object. Mindfulness of death has neither condition and therefore reaches access alone. (This question and answer is apparatus-level precision placed by the author in the body, showing the kind of reader he anticipated.)

The benefits must not be overlooked: constant heedfulness, the perception of non-delight in all existences, abandoning attachment to life, censuring evil, not accumulating much, and freedom from greed regarding requisites; the perception of impermanence becomes familiar, followed by perceptions of suffering and not-self; and death comes without fear or confusion. “Beings who have not cultivated mindfulness of death meet death as if suddenly confronted by a wild beast, yakkha, snake, thief, or executioner.” Even without attaining the deathless, the practitioner is destined for a good rebirth after the body’s breakup. The closing verse says: “In this mindfulness of death, so mighty in power, continually practice heedfulness.”

§06 Breaking Attachment — Two Blades and Each Blade’s Near Enemy 〔The decoder’s reading〕 → Vernacular §1.2·§1.11

Mindfulness of death and mindfulness of the body are the earliest practices of subtraction on the concentration side; they rehearse the sharper measure of the wisdom section: dismantling mistaken perceptions of permanence, self, and purity. But each blade has a near enemy that must be recognized:

• The near enemy of mindfulness of death is falling into depression, fear, or numbness—that is not urgency but being crushed by death. True mindfulness of death is lucid urgency followed by loosening, not sinking.
• The near enemy of mindfulness of the body is falling into self-loathing or world-weariness—turning “see the body as components” into “I hate my body.” True mindfulness of the body is neutral clear seeing without hatred.

This returns to the measure used in this exposition: subtraction does not mean “manufacturing disgust”; it means seeing through a projection (the body as a lovable whole, the assumption that I will not die) and then letting go. After the projection is seen through, the mind is light, not pained. The author has already built the guardrail into the text: the proper attention of mindfulness of death combines mindfulness, urgency, and knowledge (Vernacular §1.2). Without mindfulness, emotion breaks loose; without knowledge, the practitioner sinks. The four incorrect beginnings—sorrow, gladness, indifference, and terror—are a catalogue of the near enemies.

(For the blade of mindfulness of the body and its near enemy in detail, see this chapter’s 08-02, “Mindfulness of the Body.”)

For the General Reader — Use Recollection of Death Gently

Occasionally reflect, “Time is limited; stop postponing what matters”—take the lucidity produced by urgency, not the weight. The important caution is that mindfulness of death is a powerful but heavy practice. If you have recently felt low or are prone to fear, do not cultivate it deeply on your own (see the caution for general readers in 08-02; first settle with breathing [08-03] and loving-kindness [Chapter 9]).

To read this unit in full: Vernacular §1.1–§1.11 gives the complete paragraph-by-paragraph rendering of mindfulness of death.

Thirty-Two Parts of the Body: Dismantling the “Attractive Whole” into Components

The Big Picture — The Second Blade: Dismantling the “Attractive Whole”

Within the division of functions among the four recollections (for an overview, see this chapter’s Overview and the larger view in 08-01), this unit is the second blade—mindfulness of the body (the thirty-two parts). It dismantles the fantasy that “the body is an attractive, unified, enduring whole.” This is the chapter’s most heavily supported section in scripture (it arises only when a Buddha has appeared and lies beyond the reach of all outside systems, Vernacular §2.1). Its entry consists of seven kinds of skill in learning and ten kinds of skill in attention (§2.2–§2.4), its main body is the individual determination of the thirty-two parts (§2.5–§2.10), and its exit is the first jhāna, even thirty-two first jhānas (§2.11).

§01 Mindfulness of the Body—A Meditation Subject That Arises Only When a Buddha Appears → Vernacular §2.1

〔Reading〕Mindfulness of the body through the thirty-two parts directly answers the remedy prescribed for the “greedy temperament” in Chapter 3. Its mechanism is removing projection: desire depends on viewing the body as an “attractive, unified, enduring” whole. When you divide it into thirty-two distinct parts—head-hairs, body-hairs, nails, teeth, and the rest, the illusion of a unified attraction disperses.

The crucial point is that this does not mean hating the body; it means seeing clearly. Turning the practice into self-loathing means slipping into this blade’s near enemy (see 08-01 §06, Breaking Attachment). It uses the same engine as contemplation of foulness, but changes the object from a corpse to the living structure of your own body.

The author gives the opening its full weight (Vernacular §2.1): this meditation subject never arises apart from the appearance of a Buddha and lies beyond the reach of all outside systems. The Blessed One praises it as “a single quality that, when cultivated and repeatedly practiced, leads to great urgency, great benefit, great security, great mindfulness and clear comprehension, the acquisition of knowledge and vision, a pleasant abiding here and now, and realization of the fruit of knowledge and liberation”; even, “those who enjoy mindfulness of the body enjoy the deathless.” In the discourse, mindfulness of the body has fourteen sections (breathing, postures, four kinds of clear comprehension, attention to repulsiveness, attention to elements, and nine charnel grounds). The author assigns each: the postures, four kinds of clear comprehension, and attention to elements belong to insight; the nine charnel grounds belong to contemplation of danger; concentration based on the foul sign was already explained under the foul meditation subjects; and the section on breathing constitutes mindfulness of breathing as an independent subject. Only the section on attention to repulsiveness is cultivated here—the thirty-two aspects, with the brain included under marrow. The ensuing word-by-word explanation fixes the statement “in this very body, upward from the soles of the feet, downward from the tips of the head-hairs, bounded by the skin, filled with many kinds of impurity”: within this fathom-long body, no pure thing such as pearl, gem, or agarwood can be found, only thirty-two extremely foul and repulsive kinds. The name kāya (“body”) comes from its being an accumulation of impurities and a place of origin for repulsive head-hairs and the rest.

§02 Learning and Attention—Seven Skills and Ten Skills → Vernacular §2.2–§2.4

The entry consists of two lists. The seven kinds of skill in learning (§2.2) are by speech, by mind, by color, by shape, by direction, by location, and by delimitation. “By speech” comes first and receives the greatest emphasis: even a person who knows the Tipiṭaka should begin with verbal recitation. The two elders who studied under Mahādeva of Malaya, although proficient in two or three Nikāyas, were instructed to “recite only the thirty-two aspects for four months”; through that recitation they became stream-enterers. The recitation follows a strict procedure: the skin pentad forward and backward, then the kidney pentad forward and backward with cumulative extension, group after group folding back, “a hundred times, a thousand times, a hundred thousand times,” until the parts stand out “like a string of hand-chain links and a row of fence posts.” Mental recitation follows verbal recitation; color, shape, direction (above the navel is upward, below it downward), location, and delimitation (homogeneous delimitation means the boundaries below, above, and across; heterogeneous delimitation means non-mixture—“head-hairs are not body-hairs, nor are body-hairs head-hairs”) are each determined in turn. The author then adds a doctrinally decisive reminder: this meditation subject is taught by way of repulsiveness in the Mahāsatipaṭṭhāna Sutta, by way of elements in the Mahāhatthipadopama, Mahārāhulovāda, and Dhātuvibhaṅga discourses, and by way of the appearance of color in the Kāyagatāsati Sutta, where four jhānas are distinguished. Teaching it by way of elements makes it an insight meditation subject; teaching it by way of repulsiveness makes it a serenity meditation subject; only the latter is intended here.

The ten kinds of skill in attention (§2.3) are in sequence (skipping parts resembles climbing every other rung of a thirty-two-rung ladder, growing weary, and falling), not too quickly (like running a three-league road back and forth a hundred times without noticing the turns, completing the road yet not knowing it), not too slowly (like lingering everywhere on the way and taking two or three days), by warding off distraction (like looking from side to side on a single-plank path over a precipice and falling into a chasm a hundred persons deep), by transcending the concept (the names “head-hairs” and “body-hairs” resemble a palm-leaf marker tied beside a well in a waterless forest—after the route becomes familiar, the marker is no longer needed and the mind rests only on repulsiveness), by successive release (drop each part that does not appear, work only with those that do, contract until the final clearest part remains, and cause absorption to arise—the hunter and monkey simile: a monkey driven through thirty-two palm trees finally clasps the needle of the unopened palm leaf at the heart of a single tree; and the alms-going bhikkhu simile: daily contraction through a thirty-two-house village until his bowl is filled at the first house), by absorption (absorption is available in each individual part, anticipating the thirty-two first jhānas of Mallaka in §04), and through the three discourses (§2.4). The discourse on the higher mind uses the goldsmith’s refinement of gold: attend in turn to the sign of concentration, the sign of exertion, and the sign of equanimity; attending exclusively to any single sign leads respectively to slackness, agitation, or failure to become rightly concentrated, just as the goldsmith alternates blowing, sprinkling with water, and watching. The discourse on supreme coolness gives six qualities: restrain when restraint is needed, exert when exertion is needed, gladden when gladdening is needed, look on when looking on is needed, be resolved on the sublime, and delight in Nibbāna. Skill in awakening factors is the teaching already quoted under skill in absorption in Chapter 4—for example, that when the mind is sluggish it is not the time to cultivate the tranquillity awakening factor. The three discourses all teach the joining of energy and concentration.

§03 How to Contemplate the Thirty-Two Parts—Taking the Sign and Fivefold Repulsiveness → Vernacular §2.5–§2.10

Actual practice begins with taking the sign through direct sight (§2.5): pluck one or two head-hairs and distinguish their color on the palm, or observe hair where it has been cut off or in a water bowl or rice-gruel bowl. Attend to black as “black,” to white as “white,” and to a mixture according to the predominant color—the entire skin pentad should be seen directly before its sign is taken. Each part is then determined in five respects—color, shape, direction, location, and delimitation—and its repulsiveness is determined fivefold—by color, shape, odor, support, and location. The author gives the complete demonstration with head-hairs: finding a hair in rice gruel or cooked rice prompts the cry “Take it away!” (repulsiveness by color); touching a hair-shaped fiber while eating at night brings disgust (shape); untreated hair smells repulsive, still more when burned—as a child’s feces may resemble turmeric in color and shape, and a bloated black dog on a rubbish heap may resemble ripe palm fruit, yet even if color and shape are not repulsive, odor certainly is (odor); hair grows from the drainage of pus, blood, urine, feces, bile, and phlegm, like vegetables grown in sewage (support); and it grows upon the heap of the other thirty-one parts, like a mushroom on a dung heap, wild greens in a charnel ground or rubbish dump, or a lotus in a ditch (location).

Sections §2.5–§2.10 then pass through every part: body-hairs (brownish black, shaped like palm roots, entering the skin to the depth of a nit), nails (twenty pieces shaped like fish scales), teeth (thirty-two: the four lower central teeth like gourd seeds in a lump of clay, the adjacent single-rooted and single-pointed teeth like jasmine buds, the next like supports of a cart, and so on up to four roots and four points), skin (scraped outer skin makes a lump only the size of a jujube seed; the skin itself is only white; fourteen regional shapes are described—the toes like silkworm cocoons, the calves like packets of rice in palm leaves, the face like a worm’s nest full of holes; the sequence for apprehending it begins at the upper lip, like inserting a hand between a bag and what it contains to separate skin from bone), flesh (nine hundred pieces coating three hundred and twenty bones; calf flesh like rice wrapped in a palm leaf, breast flesh like a rounded lump of clay thrown down), sinews (nine hundred; sixty great body-supporting sinews descend from the neck, five each along front, back, right, and left; finer kinds resemble strings, rotten creepers, and lute strings; those on the hands and feet resemble birds’ feet, those on the head a child’s head-net), bones (the complete inventory of three hundred bones—sixty-four in each hand and foot, sixty-four soft bones supported by flesh, eighteen vertebrae, twenty-four ribs, and so on; toe-tip bones like kataka seeds, vertebrae from within like superimposed rolls of headcloth, ribs like the spread wings of a white fowl, the crown bone like a curved coconut with its mouth cut off, skull bones like stitched pieces of a broken gourd shell; the statement of location links the whole frame: skull bones rest on neck bones, neck bones on the spine, and so on to the ankles resting on the bones of the feet), marrow (inside the large bones like steamed shoots of a great cane), kidneys (two lumps of flesh joined at a single stem like paired play balls, bound by a thick sinew that leaves the base of the throat and divides in two), heart (like an inverted lotus bud, with a hollow the size of a puṇṇāga seed holding half a handful of blood, supporting the occurrence of the mind element and mind-consciousness element; the blood’s color differs with the six temperaments—red for greed, black for hate, like meat-washing water for delusion, like bean broth for the speculative temperament, like a flower for faith, and brilliant like a jewel for wisdom), liver (single at the root and double at its tip like a kovilāra leaf; large and single in a dull person, small and divided into two or three in a wise person), membranes (concealed and unconcealed), spleen (blue like a niggundi flower and shaped like a black calf’s tongue; if a blow forces it out, the being dies), lungs (thirty-two pieces, scorched by the heat of kamma-produced fire when there is no food, “like a chewed lump of straw”), bowels (thirty-two cubits in a man and twenty-eight in a woman, coiled at twenty-one places, like a decapitated snake coiled in a trough of blood), mesentery (binding the coils like a machine cord securing boards), stomach-contents (like loosely wrapped rice in a water-strainer; the stomach resembles a swelling in the middle of a wet cloth twisted at both ends and houses thirty-two families of worms, which leap, cry, and strike the heart when there is no food, then raise their heads and seize the first two or three mouthfuls when food is swallowed—the stomach is their birthing room, latrine, infirmary, and charnel ground; there follows the long simile of the sewage pit at the entrance to a caṇḍāla village: food loses color, smell, and taste as soon as it enters the mouth, becoming “like a weaver’s paste trough, like a dog’s vomit”; food reaching the stomach divides into five parts—worms eat one, fire burns one, one becomes urine, one feces, and one becomes nutritive essence that sustains blood and flesh), feces (in the receptacle for digested food, below the navel and base of the spine, about eight fingers high and shaped like a bamboo tube, as rainwater running down from high ground fills a low place), brain (four masses placed together like lumps of dough, resembling spoiled milk not yet curdled), bile (bound and unbound; the unbound permeates the body like oil drops in water and, when disturbed, yellows the eyes and makes the body shake; the bound remains in the gall bladder and, when disturbed, causes the being to go mad, become deranged, and abandon shame and moral dread), phlegm (about a bowlful on the stomach lining, like duckweed on water—it parts when something falls through, then closes again; when thin, the stomach smells like a ripe sore or rotten egg and people say, “Go away! You stink”; when thick, it seals in the corpse-smell like the cover of a latrine), pus (with no fixed location, formed where blood stagnates in an injury), blood (accumulated blood, a bowlful beneath the liver, moistens the kidneys, heart, liver, and lungs; without that moisture thirst arises), sweat (emerging from pores like a bundle of unevenly cut lotus stalks just pulled from water), fat (in a stout body like a turmeric-colored strip of cloth between skin and flesh), tears (not constantly accumulated, but arising through joy, sorrow, unsuitable food, or season and filling the eye sockets), grease (like oil drops spreading across clear bathwater), spittle (running down from the sides of both cheeks and resting on the tongue, thin at the tip and thick at the root, moistening food without being exhausted like water from a little well dug in riverbank sand), snot (like curds wrapped in a lotus leaf and flowing through a puncture, descending through an opening in the roof of the palate), oil-of-the-joints (lubricating one hundred and eighty joints; when deficient, bones crack like finger snaps and after walking a league or two the wind element is disturbed and the limbs hurt), and urine (like a mouthless pot thrown into a sewage pit: the route by which liquid enters is unseen, while its route out is evident).

The way to read this long catalogue is that the author is not writing an anatomy atlas; he is dismantling the concept “body” until it can no longer be reassembled as an “attractive whole.” Each part receives a color, shape, direction, location, and boundary, then five modes of repulsiveness. The precision of the terminology supplies the force of the deprojection.

§04 The Absorption and Benefits of Mindfulness of the Body—Thirty-Two First Jhānas → Vernacular §2.11

When the work matures, as thirty-two differently colored flowers strung on a single thread all appear at once to a person with sight, all the parts appear together, neither first nor last. When attention is directed outward, walking humans and animals “give up the appearance of beings and appear only as heaps of parts,” while the food they swallow appears as though thrown into a heap of parts. Through successive release and contraction, absorption arises in sequence—absorption is possible in every individual part. What appears in terms of color, shape, direction, location, and delimitation is the learning sign; what appears as repulsive in every mode is the counterpart sign. As with the foul meditation subjects, only the first jhāna arises. A practitioner for whom a single part is clear gains a single jhāna; a practitioner for whom many parts are clear resembles Mallaka Thera, who gained thirty-two first jhānas in the thirty-two parts—entering a single attainment by night and another by day, he completed a cycle in a little over half a month; entering a single attainment per day, in a little over a month. The full anecdote in Vernacular §2.11 begins with Mallaka taking the hand of the reciter of the Dīgha Nikāya, Abhaya Thera, and saying, “Friend Abhaya, first learn this question.” Although the meditation subject succeeds through the first jhāna, it is called “mindfulness of the body” because it succeeds through the power of mindfulness applied to color, shape, and the rest.

The benefits, drawn from the Kāyagatāsati Sutta, are these: the practitioner endures non-delight and delight, and endures fear and dread—neither overcomes him, and he repeatedly conquers them and dwells; he endures cold, heat, and painful feelings even to the point of taking life; through differences in the colors of head-hairs and the rest he gains the four jhānas and penetrates the six direct knowledges. The closing verse follows the established form.

§05 Correspondence — The Chinese Buddhist “Contemplation of Impurity” 〔The decoder’s reading〕 → Vernacular §2.5–§2.10

Mindfulness of the body ↔ the Chinese Buddhist contemplation of impurity. This chapter’s contemplation of the thirty-two parts and the Chinese Buddhist contemplation of impurity (one of the five meditations for stilling the mind) use the same engine: analysis of the body to break attachment to it; here the correspondence is congruent. For readers formed by the Chinese tradition, the contemplation of impurity already familiar to you is this unit’s close relative; the difference is only that the object changes from a corpse to the living structure of your own body. (For the correspondence between mindfulness of breathing and the Six Subtle Dharma Gates, see 08-03.)

For the General Reader — One Essential Caution

Mindfulness of the body through the thirty-two parts and mindfulness of death are powerful but heavy practices. If you have recently felt low or are prone to self-loathing or fear, do not cultivate either deeply on your own—their near enemies, depression and world-weariness, can be magnified by your present condition. First settle through breathing (08-03) and loving-kindness (Chapter 9); approach these contemplations after the mind has become steady, preferably with guidance.

To read this unit in full: Vernacular §2.1–§2.11 gives the complete paragraph-by-paragraph rendering of mindfulness of the body.

Sixteen themes and eight stages: from counting breaths to the fourth jhāna, then handing over to insight

The Big Picture — The Working Engine

Within the division of labor among the four recollections (see the chapter overview and 08-01 Larger View), this unit is the working engine—mindfulness of breathing: the most widely applicable, with the highest ceiling (reaching the fourth jhāna), while its sixteen themes and four establishments of mindfulness carry it onward into insight. This is the chapter’s longest unit: the sixteen themes are the warp (Vernacular §3.1 and §§3.4–3.11), the eight stages of attention are the weft (§§3.6–3.7), and the middle contains the treatise’s most finely detailed, step-by-step “breath-counting craft.”

§01 Mindfulness of Breathing—The Place of the Working Engine → Vernacular §§3.1–3.3

〔How to read〕If you could learn only a single meditation subject, this would most likely be it. The eight stages form a gradual ladder: first count the breaths (giving the scattered mind a rope to grasp—the very medicine Chapter 3 prescribes for the “discursive temperament”); once the count is stable, follow (follow the breaths in and out without counting); then proceed through touching and settling into concentration. It reaches the fourth jhāna, the highest ceiling; and the sixteen themes and four establishments of mindfulness carry it onward into insight.

The foremost discipline to keep is: do not hurry or control the breathing. Your task is to “know” the breath, not to “manage” it. The breath grows subtle on its own and the counterpart sign emerges on its own—the moment you strain to seize it, it recedes.

The commentator’s opening (Vernacular §3.1) first establishes scriptural authority: “concentration through mindfulness of breathing, when cultivated and practiced much, is truly peaceful, sublime, an unmixed pleasant abiding, and makes arisen evil unwholesome states vanish and become still on the spot”; he immediately quotes the entire discourse of the sixteen themes. The word-by-word explanation (§3.2) makes every term matter: “peaceful and sublime” bears a double restriction—the meditation on foulness is peaceful and sublime only as penetration, while its object is gross and repulsive; this meditation subject, by contrast, is peaceful and sublime in both its object and its factors. “Unmixed” (asecanaka) means admitting no admixture, not awaiting preliminary work or access, “peaceful and sublime by its own nature from the very first attention.” The word “here” restricts the teaching—“Only here is there an ascetic; the doctrines of outsiders are empty of ascetics.” The teaching on lodging (§§3.2–3.3) gives three famous similes: the calf tethered to a post (the mind is like a refractory calf raised on the milk of a refractory cow; tethered to the post of the breaths, it struggles without escape and at last lies beside the post); the master of site-lore (the Blessed One, like a master who surveys the site for a city, identifies the place for the practitioner—the wilderness, the foot of a tree, or an empty place); and the leopard in concealment (the bhikkhu hides amid the thickets of the wilderness and “takes” the four paths and four fruits). “Wilderness” follows the Vinaya-commentarial boundary (everything outside the boundary post; a wilderness lodging is at least five hundred bow-lengths away). Cross-legged posture and an erect body follow (the eighteen vertebrae aligned end to end, so skin, flesh, and sinews do not twist and feelings do not arise); “establishing mindfulness before him” is analyzed through three terms from the Paṭisambhidāmagga (parī, grasping; mukha, emergence; sati, manifestation).

§02 The Sixteen Themes (I)—Word-by-Word Explanation of the First Tetrad → Vernacular §§3.4–3.5

Long and short (§3.4): the length of an in-breath or out-breath is determined by its duration—the long bodies of elephants and snakes have long breaths, the short bodies of dogs and rabbits short breaths; both kinds occur among humans. The Vinaya Commentary defines out-breath as wind moving outward and in-breath as wind moving inward, while the Sutta Commentaries give the reverse order—the commentator adopts the Vinaya reading from the sequence at the birth of a womb-born being (the inner wind first goes out, then outer wind enters and strikes the palate before ceasing). The practice through nine modes proceeds from breathing a long breath in terms of duration, to the arising of zeal, a subtler breath, the arising of gladness, a still subtler breath, and the mind’s turning away as equanimity becomes established. The closing verse locates the “four modes” solely at the bhikkhu’s tip of the nose. The whole body: train while making the beginning, middle, and end of the entire body of the in-breath and out-breath known and clear—some discern only the beginning, others only the middle or only the end, and others all three; the practitioner should become someone who discerns them all. Calming the bodily formation (§3.5): make the gross bodily formation become still. The commentator lays out an extended scale of gross and subtle: before being grasped, body and mind are troubled and breath so gross that it passes through the mouth (as with a runner or burden-bearer); once grasped, it becomes subtle enough to require examination—“Is it still there?”—as with a person who lays down a burden, bathes and drinks, then lies in the shade. The tranquillity track grows subtler jhāna by jhāna (recording the divergent views of the Dīgha and Saṃyutta reciters and the Majjhima reciters); the insight track likewise grows progressively subtler (grasping the primary elements → derived matter → all materiality → immaterial states → materiality-and-immateriality → conditions → name-and-form → insight with characteristics as its object → powerful insight). The threefold-training reading of “trains” (sikkhati: higher virtue, higher mind, higher wisdom) also appears here. The Paṭisambhidāmagga is quoted in full with its objection and response: if the bodily formation is calmed, does awareness of wind cease to arise? The answer uses the cymbal simile: when the gross sound ceases, the sign of the subtle sound still continues; when the subtle sound ceases, the mind still continues with that sign as its object—the breaths are the same, and therefore the wise still enter and emerge from this attainment.

§03 Five Matters and Eight Stages—Counting, Following, Touching, Settling → Vernacular §§3.6–3.7

The first tetrad is a meditation subject for beginners; the other three are contemplation of feeling, mind, and phenomena for those who have attained jhāna (§3.5 end). A beginner should therefore learn the meditation subject’s five matters in the teacher’s presence: learning-grasp, inquiring, manifestation, absorption, and characterisation (§3.6); “have a little recited, recite it for a long time,” and then attend through eight stages: counting, following, touching, settling, observing, turning-away, purification, and looking-back (counting is counting; following is continuous pursuit; touching is the point touched; settling is absorption; observing is insight; turning-away is the path; purification is the fruit; looking-back is reviewing—the entire course is tied to path and fruit in a single sentence).

The craft of counting (§3.6) is concrete almost to the point of comedy: do not stop below five (the mind struggles in confinement like cattle in a narrow pen), do not go above ten (the mind depends only on the count), and do not leave a break in between (the mind wavers, “Has my meditation subject reached its peak?”). Begin with the grain-measurer’s slow count (the measure is filled, “one” is said, and it is poured out); once the breaths become clear, switch to the cowherd’s quick count (seated atop the gatepost, counting only each cow as it reaches the gate, “three, four, five, up to ten”). “With a meditation subject bound to counting, the mind becomes one-pointed precisely by the power of the count, as a pole braces a boat in a swift current.” The mind does not follow the inward wind inside (otherwise “the interior becomes as if struck by wind and filled with fat”), nor follow the outward wind outside (otherwise it scatters among external objects); mindfulness stays only at the point of contact. How long is the counting kept up? “Until mindfulness can remain on the object of the in-breaths and out-breaths without counting.” Counting serves only to cut off discursive thoughts that scatter outward.

Following (§3.7): put counting aside and follow the in-breaths and out-breaths continuously with mindfulness—but do not follow their beginning, middle, and end. For an out-breath, the navel is the beginning, the heart the middle, and the tip of the nose the end; for an in-breath, the order is reversed. Following an out-breath’s beginning, middle, and end with mindfulness, when the mind is distracted internally, body and mind are strained, agitated, and trembling; following an in-breath’s beginning, middle, and end with mindfulness, when the mind is distracted externally, body and mind are strained, agitated, and trembling. Attend by touching and settling. Three similes unfold in sequence: the lame person (after pushing the swing, the person sits at the foot of its post; its ends and middle pass before the eyes without being chased); the gatekeeper (does not question people inside or outside the city, only those who have reached the gate); and the saw (the Paṭisambhidāmagga: mindfulness is present at the saw-teeth touching the tree, without attending to the teeth coming or going, though they are not unknown—“effort appears, endeavor is accomplished, distinction is attained”; effort means body and mind are serviceable, endeavor means defilements are abandoned and applied thoughts stilled, distinction means fetters are abandoned and latent tendencies exhausted). “The sign, the out-breath, and the in-breath are not the objects of a single mind; only for a person who knows these three states is cultivation obtainable”—this verse appears in both §3.7 and §3.8 and is the pivotal statement of the passage.

§04 The Breath Grows Subtle and the Counterpart Sign → Vernacular §§3.8–3.9

As practice advances the breath grows ever subtler, “even ceasing to become manifest” (§3.8)—other meditation subjects grow clearer at higher stages, but this meditation subject does the reverse. The rule when the breath is no longer manifest: do not rise, shake out the leather sitting-mat, and leave (for a person who rises, “the meditation subject becomes something begun anew again and again”). Remain seated and recover it by examining: “Where are these breaths absent?”—there are no breaths in the womb, for a submerged person, an unconscious being, a dead person, someone entered into the fourth jhāna, someone existing in the form or formless realm, or someone entered into the attainment of cessation. “Wise person! You are none of these—your breaths certainly exist; dullness of wisdom alone prevents you from grasping them.” Then set the mind at the usual point of contact (the nose-wing for a long-nosed person, the upper lip for a short-nosed person) and let attention proceed. The Blessed One’s words confirm this: “Bhikkhus, I do not teach cultivation of mindfulness of breathing for someone who has lost mindfulness and clear comprehension.” This meditation subject is “weighty and to be cultivated weightily,” an arena of attention only for great persons—Buddhas, Paccekabuddhas, and children of the Buddha—not something shallow beings can frequent. As when sewing fine cloth, the needle must be fine and the implement that threads its eye still finer; mindfulness is like the needle, wisdom like the threading implement, and both must be strong. The farmer simile closes the passage: cattle enter the forest, and the skilled farmer does not trace their tracks but waits with rope and goad at the watering place; the cattle return by themselves. A bhikkhu does not seek breaths away from the usual point of contact, but waits there with the rope of mindfulness and the goad of wisdom, and they soon reappear.

The form of the sign (the counterpart sign) differs among people (§3.8 end): like a star, jewel, or pearl; a coarse touch like cottonseed or a heartwood needle; a long garland-string, flower garland, or plume of smoke; an outspread spider’s web, cloud bank, lotus, cartwheel, disk of the moon, or disk of the sun. As bhikkhus reciting the same discourse see it differently—a great mountain river, a forest, a shady tree—the sign appears differently because perception differs. Once the sign has appeared (§3.9), follow the rule for reporting to the teacher. The Dīgha reciters say that the teacher should say neither “It is a sign” nor “It is not a sign,” but only, “Friend, that is how it is; keep attending to it” (calling it a sign might make the practitioner stop, denying it might make them despair and sink). The Majjhima reciters permit the direct statement, “This is the sign.” The mind is then placed on the sign, and “from this point forward cultivation proceeds by way of absorption.” The hindrances are suppressed, mindfulness is established, and the mind is concentrated by access; do not attend to color or examine a characteristic, but guard the sign as a warrior-noble’s chief queen guards the embryo of a wheel-turning monarch and a farmer guards the embryo of rice and barley, avoiding seven unsuitable conditions and frequenting seven suitable conditions. Accomplish the tenfold absorption-skill and balance energy, and following the earth-kasiṇa sequence produce the jhānas of the fourfold and fivefold systems on this sign. Having attained jhāna and wishing to advance: master it in the five ways → define name-and-form (the arising of the breaths is the kamma-born body and mind—as the wind of a bellows depends on its leather bag and a person’s effort; breaths and body are matter, mind and associated states immaterial) → seek conditions and cross beyond doubt → apply the three characteristics through comprehension by groups → abandon the ten imperfections of insight, such as illumination, that arise in the former part of contemplation of rise and fall → determine knowledge of the way as the path → reach contemplation of dissolution → see all formations as dissolution, becoming disenchanted, fading away from lust, and freed → attain the four noble paths in sequence → the fruit of arahantship → the limit of the nineteenfold reviewing knowledge—becoming “the foremost recipient of gifts in the world with its deities.”

§05 The Remaining Three Tetrads and the Great Benefits → Vernacular §§3.10–3.11

The remaining three tetrads have no separately established method of cultivation and are explained phrase by phrase (§3.10). Experiencing rapture occurs in two modes: by object (entering the two jhānas accompanied by rapture, so that rapture is experienced through the object at the moment of attainment) and by non-delusion (after emerging, examining the jhāna-associated rapture as exhaustion and dissolution, and penetrating the characteristics in the moment of insight). The Paṭisambhidāmagga gives the complete tenfold series: through adverting, knowing, seeing, examining, resolving the mind, resolving by faith, arousing energy, establishing mindfulness, concentrating the mind, and understanding with wisdom, through directly knowing what should be directly known, fully knowing what should be fully known, abandoning what should be abandoned, cultivating what should be cultivated, and realizing what should be realized. Experiencing pleasure is understood through the first three jhānas; experiencing the mental formation through all four. The mental formation is the two aggregates of feeling and perception: the rapture phrase speaks of feeling under the head of rapture, the pleasure phrase of feeling in its own form, and the two mental-formation phrases of feeling associated with perception—this tetrad is spoken as contemplation of feeling. In the third tetrad, experiencing the mind is understood through all four jhānas. Gladdening the mind occurs by concentration (in the two jhānas with rapture, the associated rapture gladdens the mind) and by insight (after emerging, contemplating that rapture). Concentrating the mind occurs through placement in the jhānas or through momentary one-pointedness of mind arisen in a moment of insight. Liberating the mind means that the first jhāna frees it from the hindrances, the second from applied and sustained thought, the third from rapture, and the fourth from pleasure and pain. At the moment of insight, contemplation of impermanence frees it from the perception of permanence, contemplation of suffering from the perception of pleasure, contemplation of not-self from the perception of self, contemplation of disenchantment from delight, contemplation of fading-away from greed, contemplation of cessation from arising, and contemplation of relinquishment from grasping—this tetrad is spoken as contemplation of mind. The fourth tetrad (§3.11) is purely insight: impermanence in four levels (the impermanent means the five aggregates; impermanence is their arising, passing, and alteration, or the nonexistence of what has arisen; contemplation of impermanence; the contemplator of impermanence); two kinds of fading-away (exhaustion-fading-away is the exhaustion and dissolution of formations, ultimate fading-away is Nibbāna); cessation follows the same method; and two kinds of relinquishment (relinquishment as abandoning and relinquishment as entering—insight abandons defilements by the substitution of opposites and inclines toward Nibbāna; the path abandons them by eradication and enters Nibbāna as its object).

The great benefits are threefold (§3.11): cutting off applied thought (this concentration, peaceful, sublime, unmixed, and pleasant, cuts off the mind’s racing to and fro); being the root of the fulfillment of true knowledge and deliverance (the chain mindfulness of breathing → four establishments of mindfulness → seven awakening factors → true knowledge and deliverance); and making the final in-breaths and out-breaths known. There are three finalities through cessation: final in an existence (the breaths occur in sense-sphere existence, not in form or formless existence); final in jhāna (they occur in the first three jhānas, not in the fourth); and final at death (arising with the sixteenth mind before the death-mind and ceasing with the death-mind). For a practitioner of this meditation subject, “the lifespan is definitely delimited”: knowing that the life formations are about to end, the arahant completes every duty—caring for the body, dressing, and so forth—and only then closes the eyes. After examples of four elders comes the chapter’s most moving story: one of two brother elders recites the Pātimokkha on the full-moon observance day, surveys the life formations in the moonlight, and asks the community, “How have you seen bhikkhus attain final Nibbāna?” “I shall now show you final Nibbāna while walking meditation.” He draws a line on the walking path, goes to its far end, turns back, and attains final Nibbāna the instant a foot touches the line. The unit closes with the prescribed verse.

§06 Correspondence — With Tiantai’s “Six Subtle Gates” 〔A Decoder’s Reading〕 → Vernacular §§3.6–3.7

This chapter offers a beautiful point of contact (unlike the divergences in Chapters 14 and 17, what appears here is largely congruence).

Mindfulness of breathing ↔ Tiantai’s Six Subtle Gates. Zhiyi’s Six Subtle Dharma Gates establishes six stages: counting, following, calming, contemplating, turning, and purifying. This chapter’s eight stages of mindfulness of breathing (counting → following → touching → settling → observing → turning-away → purification → looking-back) correspond almost term for term—counting and following are the same, while observing, turning, and purification also correspond. This is no coincidence: it is the crystallization, in two traditions, of a shared heritage of breath meditation. The difference lies in the framework: the Six Subtle Gates is situated within Tiantai calm-and-insight and the threefold contemplation in a single mind; this chapter’s eight stages are situated within the sequence from jhāna to insight knowledge.

Reading approach: use this rare correspondence well, as a bridge for readers formed in the Chinese tradition—the breath-counting contemplation or Six Subtle Gates you already know is a close relative of this unit.

For the General Reader — Begin with the Breath

Whenever the mind scatters, return to “knowing the breath coming in, knowing the breath going out,” beginning with counting. This is the safest and most widely applicable practice〔Vernacular §3.6〕. The foremost discipline is: do not hurry or control the breathing—your task is to “know” the breath, not to “manage” it.

To read this unit in full: Vernacular §§3.1–3.11 is the full, paragraph-by-paragraph translation of the entire mindfulness-of-breathing section.

The Object Is the Destination: Eight Names of Nibbāna and a Gentle First Glimpse

The Big Picture — The Compass

Within the division of labor among the four recollections (see the chapter overview and 08-01 Larger View), this unit is the compass—recollection of peace: alone among the four, its object is itself the destination (the qualities of Nibbāna). A single section brings the chapter to its close.

§01 Recollection of Peace—First Glimpse the Destination → Vernacular §4

〔How to read〕Among the four recollections, only recollection of peace takes as its object the destination itself: the qualities of Nibbāna (the ending of thirst, the ending of greed, aversion, and delusion, and the ending of suffering). It stops at access; its purpose is not to make you “enter concentration,” but to let you orient yourself toward the destination first—to know that the whole path of virtue, concentration, and wisdom ultimately runs toward “peace.” It is an early, gentle glimpse of the goal of the wisdom division.

The text (Vernacular §4) takes the Discourse on Fading-Away in the Aṅguttara Nikāya as its object: “Among all states, whether conditioned or unconditioned, fading-away is declared the foremost.” It then explains eight names individually: the crushing of vanity, the removal of thirst, the uprooting of attachment, the cutting-off of the round, the destruction of craving, fading-away, cessation, and Nibbāna. “Fading-away” is not merely the absence of greed, but the unconditioned state itself that bears these names. The etymological explanation of “Nibbāna” (nibbāna) closes the sequence: because craving “weaves, binds, and sews” beings into repeated becoming among the four wombs, five destinies, seven stations of consciousness, and nine abodes of beings, it is called “weaving” (vāna); going forth from weaving is Nibbāna, “the un-weaving.” Other discourses’ qualities—the truth, the far shore, the deathless, the island, the shelter, the refuge, and the rest—may likewise be recollected. The hindrances are suppressed and the jhāna factors arise; yet because the qualities of peace are profound and the mind resolves upon qualities of many kinds, the jhāna reaches only access. As with the six recollections, it succeeds only for the noble disciple; yet an ordinary person who esteems peace should also attend to it—for the mind becomes serene in peace even by mere hearing. Its benefits are sleeping and waking happily, peaceful faculties and a peaceful mind, conscience and moral shame, inspiring confidence, resolve upon the sublime, and the respect of companions in the holy life; without higher penetration, the practitioner is still bound for a happy destination.

For the General Reader — First Glimpse the Destination

Recollection of peace is not meant to make you “enter concentration,” but to let you orient yourself toward the destination—from time to time, bring to mind “the crushing of vanity, the removal of thirst, the stilling of suffering,” and the whole path of virtue, concentration, and wisdom knows where it is going. Even by mere hearing, the mind becomes serene in peace—the commentator expressly says that this door stands open.

To read this unit in full: Vernacular §4 is the complete paragraph-by-paragraph translation of recollection of peace (the chapter’s full vernacular comprises the four unit vernaculars 08-01 through 08-04, tr. mine, translated from the public-domain PTS text).

The chapter in a single sentence: this chapter gives you a working engine (breath, 08-03) and two blades (death, 08-01; body, 08-02)—the blades are for seeing through projection and then letting go, not for manufacturing aversion; if the mind is low, take up the engine first and set the blades aside; the compass (this unit) tells you where all of it is going.