Product Code Database
Ānāpānasati (Pali; Sanskrit: ānāpānasmṛti), meaning "mindfulness of breathing" (sati means mindfulness; ānāpāna refers to inhalation and exhalation), is the act of paying attention to the breath. It is the quintessential form of Buddhist meditation, attributed to Gautama Buddha, and described in several suttas, most notably the Ānāpānasati Sutta (MN 118).
Derivations of anāpānasati are common to Tibetan Buddhism, Zen, Tiantai, and Theravada Buddhism as well as Western-based mindfulness programs.
Derivations of anāpānasati are a core meditation practice in Theravada, Tiantai, and Chan traditions of Buddhism as well as a part of Western-based mindfulness programs. According to Anālayo, in both ancient and modern times anāpānasati by itself is likely the most widely used Buddhist method for contemplating bodily phenomena.
While inhaling and exhaling, the meditator practises:
If this practice is pursued and well developed, it is said by the Buddha to bring great benefit, aiding the development of mindfulness as one of the factors of awakening:
Counting the breath is attributed by the Theravada tradition to Buddhaghosa's commentary the Visuddhimagga, but Vasubandhu's Abhidharmakośakārikā also teaches the counting of breaths to ten. The dhyāna sutras, based on Sarvastivada practices and translated into Chinese by An Shigao, also recommends counting the breath, and forms the basis of Zen practices. In the dhyana sutras his is organized into a teaching called "the six aspects" or "the six means" in which, according to Florin Deleanu:
According to John Dunne, for the practice to be successful, one should dedicate to the practice, and set out the goal of the meditation session.John Dunne talks on Buddhist phenomenology from the Indo-Tibetan textual point of view at According to Philip Kapleau, in Zen practice one may decide to either practice anāpānasati while seated or standing or lying down or kinhin, or while alternating seated, standing, lying down, and walking meditation. Then one may concentrate on the breath going through one's nose: the pressure in the nostrils on each inhalation, and the feeling of the breath moving along the upper lip on each exhalation. Other times practitioners are advised to attend to the breath at the dantian, a point slightly below the navel and beneath the surface of the body. Practitioners may choose to Ganana each inhalation, "1, 2, 3,..." and so on, up to 10, and then begin from 1 again. Alternatively people sometimes also count the exhalation: "1, 2, 3,...", on both the inhalation and exhalation. If the count is lost then one should start again from the beginning.
The type of practice recommended in The Three Pillars of Zen is for one to count "1, 2, 3,..." on the inhalation for a while, then to eventually switch to counting on the exhalation, then eventually, once one has more consistent success in keeping track of the count, to begin to pay attention to the breath without counting. There are practitioners who count the breath all their lives as well. Beginning students are often advised to keep a brief daily practice of around 10 or 15 minutes a day. Also, a teacher or guide of some sort is often considered to be essential in Buddhist practice, as well as the sangha, or community of Buddhists, for support.
When one becomes distracted from the breath, which happens to both beginning and adept practitioners, either by a thought or something else, then one simply returns one’s attention back to the breath. Philippe Goldin has said that important "learning" occurs at the moment when practitioners turn their attention back to the object of focus, the breath.Philippe Goldin in
Cognitive Neuroscience of Mindfulness Meditation, 11:00 mark
In the Overtone singing prevalent amongst the Buddhist monks of Tibet and Mongolia, the long and slow outbreath during chanting is the core of the practice. The sound of the chant also serves to focus the mind in one-pointed concentration ( samadhi), while the sense of self dissolves as awareness becomes absorbed into a realm of pure sound.
In some Japanese Zen meditation, the emphasis is upon maintaining "strength in the abdominal area" (Chinese: dantian; Japanese: tanden) and slow deep breathing during the long outbreath, again to assist the attainment of a mental state of one-pointed concentration. There is also a "bamboo method", during which time one inhales and exhales in punctuated bits, as if running one's hand along the stalk of a bamboo tree.
Pranayama, or Yogic breath control, is very popular in traditional and modern forms of Yoga.
Meditators experienced in focused attention meditation (of which ānāpānasati is one type) showed a decrease in habitual responding in a 20-minute Stroop effect, which, as suggested by Richard Davidson and colleagues, may illustrate a lessening of emotionally reactive and automatic responding behavior. It has been scientifically demonstrated that ānāpānasati enhances connectivity in the brain.
Any anapanasati meditation session should progress through the stages in order, beginning at the first, whether the practitioner has performed all stages in a previous session or not.
| First Tetrad |
| 2. Breathing short (Knowing Breath) |
| 3. Experiencing the whole body |
| 4. Tranquillising the bodily activities |
| Second Tetrad |
| 6. Experiencing bliss |
| 7. Experiencing mental activities |
| 8. Tranquillising mental activities |
| Third Tetrad |
| 10. Gladdening the mind |
| 11. Centering the mind in samadhi |
| 12. Releasing the mind |
| Fourth Tetrad |
| 14. Contemplating fading of lust |
| 15. Contemplating cessation |
| 16. Contemplating relinquishment |
Anapanasati can also be practised with other traditional meditation subjects including the satipatthana and mettā bhāvanā, as is done in modern Theravadan Buddhism.
At a later date, Buddhacinga, more commonly known as Fotudeng (佛圖澄) (231–349 CE), came from Central Asia to China in 310 and propagated Buddhism widely. He is said to have demonstrated many Iddhi, and was able to convert the warlords in this region of China over to Buddhism. He is well known for teaching methods of meditation, and especially ānāpānasmṛti. Fotudeng widely taught ānāpānasmṛti through methods of counting breaths, so as to temper to the breathing, simultaneously focusing the mind into a state of peaceful meditative concentration. By teaching meditation methods as well as doctrine, Fotudeng popularized Buddhism quickly. According to Nan Huaijin, "Besides all its theoretical accounts of emptiness and existence, Buddhism also offered methods for genuine realization of spiritual powers and meditative concentration that could be relied upon. This is the reason that Buddhism began to develop so vigorously in China with Fotudeng."
As more monks such as Kumārajīva, Dharmanandi, Gautama Saṃghadeva, and Buddhabhadra came to the East, translations of meditation texts did as well, which often taught various methods of ānāpānasmṛti that were being used in India. These became integrated in various Buddhist traditions, as well as into non-Buddhist traditions such as Taoism.
In the sixth century, the Tiantai school was formed, teaching the One Vehicle (), the vehicle of attaining Buddhahood, as the main principle, and three forms of śamatha-vipaśyanā correlated with the meditative perspectives of emptiness, provisional existence, and the mean, as the method of cultivating realization. The Tiantai school places emphasis on ānāpānasmṛti in accordance with the principles of śamatha and vipaśyanā. In China, the Tiantai understanding of meditation has had the reputation of being the most systematic and comprehensive of all. The founder of the Tiantai school, Zhiyi, wrote many commentaries and treatises on meditation. Of these texts, Zhiyi's Concise Śamatha-vipaśyanā (p=Xiǎo Zhǐguān), his Mohe Zhiguan (labels=no), and his Six Subtle Dharma Gates (labels=no) are the most widely read in China. Zhiyi classifies breathing into four main categories: panting (labels=no), unhurried breathing (labels=no), deep and quiet breathing (labels=no), and stillness or rest (labels=no). Zhiyi holds that the first three kinds of breathing are incorrect, while the fourth is correct, and that the breathing should reach stillness and rest. Venerable Hsuan Hua, who taught Chan Buddhism and Pure Land Buddhism, also taught that the external breathing reaches a state of stillness in correct meditation:
Two of the most important Mahāyāna philosophers, Asaṅga and Vasubandhu, in the Śrāvakabhūmi chapters of the Yogācārabhūmi-śāstra and the Abhidharma-kośa, respectively, make it clear that they consider ānāpānasmṛti a profound practice leading to vipaśyanā (in accordance with the teachings of the Buddha in the Sutta Piṭaka). However, as scholar Leah Zahler has demonstrated, "the practice traditions related to Vasubandhu's or Asaṅga's presentations of breath meditation were probably not transmitted to Tibet." Asaṅga correlates the sixteen stages of ānāpānasmṛti with the four smṛtyupasthānas in the same way that the Ānāpānasmṛti Sutra does, but because he does not make this explicit the point was lost on later Tibetan commentators.
As a result, the largest Tibetan lineage, the Gelug, came to view ānāpānasmṛti as a mere preparatory practice useful for settling the mind but nothing more. Zahler writes:
Zahler continues,
Stephen Batchelor, who for years was a monk in the Gelukpa lineage, experienced this firsthand. He writes, "such systematic practice of mindfulness was not preserved in the Tibetan traditions. The Gelugpa lamas know about such methods and can point to long descriptions of mindfulness in their Abhidharma works, but the living application of the practice has largely been lost. (Only in dzog-chen, with the idea of 'awareness' rig do we find something similar.) For many Tibetans the very term 'mindfulness' (sati in Pali, rendered in Tibetan by dran pa'') has come to be understood almost exclusively as 'memory' or 'recollection'."
As Batchelor noted, however, in other traditions, particularly the Kagyu and Nyingma, mindfulness based on ānāpānasmṛti practice is considered to be quite profound means of calming the mind to prepare it for the higher practices of Dzogchen and Mahamudra. For the Kagyupa, in the context of mahāmudrā, ānāpānasmṛti is thought to be the ideal way for the meditator to transition into taking the mind itself as the object of meditation and generating vipaśyanā on that basis. The prominent contemporary Kagyu/Nyingma master Chogyam Trungpa, echoing the Kagyu Mahāmudrā view, wrote, "your breathing is the closest you can come to a picture of your mind. It is the portrait of your mind in some sense... The traditional recommendation in the lineage of meditators that developed in the Kagyu-Nyingma tradition is based on the idea of mixing mind and breath." The Path is the Goal, in The Collected Works of Chogyam Trungpa, Vol Two. Shambhala Publications. pgs 49, 51. The Gelukpa allow that it is possible to take the mind itself as the object of meditation, however, Zahler reports, the Gelukpa discourage it with "what seems to be thinly disguised sectarian polemics against the Nyingma Great Completeness Dzogchen and Kagyu Great Seal mahāmudrā meditations."
In the Pañcakrama tantric tradition ascribed to (the Vajrayana) Nagarjuna, ānāpānasmṛti counting breaths is said to be sufficient to provoke an experience of vipaśyanā (although it occurs in the context of "formal tantric practice of the completion stage in highest yogatantra").
|
|
