Eightfold Path: Wise Mindfulness

The Buddha once spoke a rather odd little parable (found in the Sedaka Sutta) that goes like this:

"Suppose, monks, that a large crowd of people comes thronging together, saying, 'The beauty queen! The beauty queen!' And suppose that the beauty queen is highly accomplished at singing and dancing, so that an even greater crowd comes thronging, saying, 'The beauty queen is singing! The beauty queen is dancing!' Then a man comes along, desiring life and shrinking from death, desiring pleasure and abhorring pain. They say to him, 'Now look here, mister. You must take this bowl filled to the brim with oil and carry it on your head in between the great crowd and the beauty queen. A man with a raised sword will follow right behind you, and wherever you spill even a drop of oil, right there will he cut off your head.' Now what do you think, monks: Will that man, not paying attention to the bowl of oil, let himself get distracted outside?

"I have given you this parable to convey a meaning. The meaning is this: The bowl filled to the brim with oil stands for mindfulness immersed in the body. Thus you should train yourselves: 'We will develop mindfulness immersed in the body. We will pursue it, hand it the reins and take it as a basis, give it a grounding, steady it, consolidate it, and undertake it well.' That is how you should train yourselves."

But why? Why would we take on such an arduous training? We could take the Buddha at his word and simply believe that there is some virtue in this. But the Buddha himself recommended against this path, exhorting us to find the worth of his teachings for ourselves and even to reject those in which we could find no meaning. So what worth is there is such mindfulness?

What the parable tells us is that mindfulness is nothing other than to be entirely in this moment and that the object of our attention is in fact far less important than the mindfulness itself. But why should this be? How can something as simple as full awareness of the breath, for instance, be the basis for anything other than fruitless naval-gazing? What could possible be the use of something so simple in such a complicated world?

In the Maha-satipatthana sutta, though, the Buddha says that "this is the direct path for the purification of beings, for the overcoming of sorrow and lamentation, for the disappearance of pain and distress, for the attainment of the right method, and for the realization of Unbinding".

A wise teacher, Ajahn Thanissaro, has described  the relationship of mindfulness to the Path in this way: Awakening is the ultimate destination, the peak of the mountain we are climbing. Mindfulness is the way we stay on the path rather than becoming distracted by all the other paths and byways we can travel, the taverns and inns we could visit along the way.

What is difficult for me is coming to grips with the idea that a practice so simple can be so powerful. Mindfulness is deceptively simple in description: it is nothing other than being fully and completely aware of whatever is within our awareness in this moment. This can be the breath, another person, a flower, a building, a bomb, a telephone—take your pick! Though it may seem odd that this can be such a powerful practice, we need only remind ourselves of the nature of suffering to see how helpful it can be. Since suffering is the seeking for things to be other than they are (and samsara, the world of suffering in which we live, is composed of only these impulses), one can easily accept that mindfulness in the present moment is the "anti-samsara" and will lead to the end of suffering, which is the ultimate "Unbinding" referred to above.

If there is any residual doubt that mindfulness of breath or mindfulness of any other object can lead to such ultimate Awareness, we need only think of these as exercises, as the development of the psychic muscles required to apply this to our everyday lives. Yet even this is only a partial truth. In the end, it doesn't really matter much how we develop our mindfulness, whether it be in contemplation of a flower or contemplation of death. The ultimate truth is contained in the fact of mindfulness rather than its object. Or, put another way, there really is no difference between mindfulness of a flower and mindfulness of death. One is not more (nor less) important than the other to contemplate. Mindfulness is a progressive conditioning and in the final analysis whether we practice on a banana to better understand God or on God to better understand a banana is irrelevant to the fruition of the path, which is to know with all our hearts that they are One and the same.

God

The next step on the path is here. Some more thoughts on mindfulness are here.