Ānāpānasati -Mindfulness of Breathing

And how does all this fit with the Buddha’s teaching on mindfulness of breathing, Ānāpānasati?

Very well, I think.

In the Ānāpānasati Sutta, the Buddha begins with wonderfully simple instructions:

“A monk, having gone to the forest, to the foot of a tree, or to an empty hut, sits down; having folded his legs crosswise, set his body erect, and established mindfulness before him.”

That is where it begins.

The traditional posture is cross-legged, preferably something resembling the lotus position. But since many of us, myself included, are about as flexible as a garden rake, the important thing is simply to sit reasonably comfortably, in a position where you can remain still for a reasonably long time.

Then you establish mindfulness.

For me, this means moving from the thinking mind into the immediate experience of the present moment. One way is to move your attention through the body, simply feeling the different parts without thinking about them. Or you can listen for a while to the sounds around you — without naming them, analysing them or wondering where they come from. Just hearing.

And then you bring your attention to the breath.

You are mindful when you breathe in.

You are mindful when you breathe out.

That is basically it.

You sit still. You do nothing. You are mindful of the breath.

What follows in the Ānāpānasati Sutta is usually translated in formulations such as, “He trains thus: I shall breathe in calming the bodily formation,” followed by further descriptions of what happens with the body, feelings, mind and mental qualities.

Here my understanding differs from the usual interpretation.

When the Buddha says, “He trains thus,” I do not understand this to mean that the meditator now has to do something new — deliberately calm the body, manufacture joy, produce happiness, create tranquillity, or make the mind let go.

To my understanding, “he trains thus” continues to mean exactly the same practice with which he began: he sits still, does nothing, and remains mindful of the breath.

What changes is not what he is doing.

What changes is what begins to happen.

Meditation is not something we do. Meditation is something that happens when we stop doing.

The breathing becomes calmer. The body settles. Joy arises. Happiness appears. The mind becomes still. Equanimity deepens. And eventually insight begins to arise.

The sixteen steps of Ānāpānasati are therefore, in my understanding, not sixteen different things to do. They are a map of what naturally unfolds when we continue doing the one very simple thing with which we started.

Sit still.

Do nothing.

Be mindful of the breath.

I should emphasise that this is my own understanding of the sutta, based very much on what I have experienced in my own meditation. It may differ considerably from traditional commentarial or academic interpretations.

But for me this distinction is essential.

We don’t calm the mind.

The mind calms.

We don’t create joy.

Joy arises.

We don’t manufacture stillness.

Stillness appears when, for a moment, we stop interfering with it.

For some people this apparently happens rather easily. I was not one of them. My mind was extremely active and had a remarkable ability to be everywhere except where I happened to be. So it took me a very long time.

But I persisted.

Gradually something changes. Stillness deepens. Equanimity becomes stronger. And out of this stillness, insight begins to arise naturally — into impermanence (anicca), non-self (anattā), emptiness (suññatā), and the nature of our clinging and suffering.

So, in its simplest form:

Sit still. Do nothing. Be mindful of the breath.

That is the practice.

The rest is the gift you get for free.

And even this path is not something the Buddha claimed to have invented. In the Nagara Sutta he gives a beautiful image. A man wandering through a forest discovers an ancient path, an ancient road travelled by people long ago. He follows it and comes upon “an ancient city, an ancient capital” — with parks, groves, ponds and walls, a delightful place.

The Buddha then says that he too discovered an ancient path, travelled by the fully awakened Buddhas of the past. That ancient path is the Noble Eightfold Path. He followed it and came to direct knowledge of suffering, its arising and its cessation.

I like that image very much.

Perhaps meditation is something like this too.

We are not constructing something new. We are not trying to manufacture peace, happiness or wisdom. We are not even trying to become something special.

We simply rediscover an old, almost forgotten path beneath all our thinking, striving and becoming.

And we follow it.

Until, somewhere beyond the overgrown forest, we begin to glimpse the faint outlines of the ancient city, its walls catching the light.

The city was there all along.

Different spiritual traditions approach this in different ways. Some attend to the breath, some to silence, emptiness, prayer, God, a sacred image or a mantra. The language and methods may differ, but somewhere underneath them there seems to be a remarkably simple invitation:

Stop for a while.

Sit still.

Do nothing.

And see what happens when you stop trying to make something happen.