6.9 — The Meditation He Actually Taught

Two things, and they are usually confused: samatha, calming, and vipassana, seeing clearly. They are not competing schools; they are two functions, and the tradition holds you need both.

Calming settles the mind so it can hold still. Seeing clearly is what you do with a mind that can hold still. A calm mind that never looks at anything is Alara Kalama's problem (6.3). An unsettled mind that tries to look sees nothing.

Anapanasati — attention to breathing

The practice he taught most often, and the one he said he used himself. The instruction is given in sixteen steps in four groups of four, and here it is in plain English.

The setup: sit, spine upright, attention established in front.

The first four: the body

One. Breathing in long, know that you are breathing in long. Breathing out long, know it.

Two. Breathing in short, know it. Breathing out short, know it.

Notice what this is not. You are not controlling the breath. The instruction is to know what the breath is doing, not to make it do anything. This is the most commonly broken instruction in meditation — people immediately start regulating, and then wonder why sitting is effortful.

Three. Breathing in, experiencing the whole body.

Four. Breathing in, calming the bodily formation — letting the body settle.

The second four: feeling

Five and six. Breathing in, experiencing joy. Breathing in, experiencing pleasure.

This surprises people and it should be dwelt on. The instruction explicitly includes pleasure, and 6.3 explains why: the breakthrough came when he stopped being afraid of a pleasure that harms nothing. The meditation is not supposed to be grim.

Seven and eight. Experiencing the mental formation, then calming it.

The third four: the mind

Nine. Experiencing the mind — noticing what state it is in.

Ten. Gladdening the mind. Eleven. Concentrating it. Twelve. Releasing it.

Item ten is the one nobody expects. You are permitted, and instructed, to deliberately cheer yourself up during meditation. The traditional methods are recollecting something good you have done, or bringing goodwill to mind. This is a technique, not a distraction.

The last four: seeing

Thirteen. Contemplating impermanence. Fourteen. Contemplating fading away. Fifteen. Contemplating cessation. Sixteen. Contemplating letting go.

This is where samatha becomes vipassana. The settled attention is now turned on the nature of what it is observing — that every breath arises and passes, that every state does, that nothing being observed stays.

The four foundations of mindfulness

The larger framework, from the Satipatthana Sutta, which is the most important practical text in early Buddhism. Four things to be attentive to.

The body. Breathing, posture, the movements of the day, the parts of the body, and — the famous one — the stages of a corpse's decay, which monks were sent to charnel grounds to observe. The purpose is not morbidity; it is to make the fact of the body's impermanence concrete rather than theoretical (6.2).

Feelings. Pleasant, unpleasant, neutral. Just the tone, tracked continuously. This is the link from 6.8 where all the leverage is.

States of mind. Noticing the state as a state: mind with craving, mind without craving; mind with aversion, without; contracted, distracted; concentrated, unconcentrated.

And the contents of experience — the hindrances, the aggregates (6.7), the senses, and the factors of awakening.

The refrain that repeats after every section is the important part: contemplate internally and externally, contemplate arising and passing, and abide independent, not clinging to anything in the world.

The five hindrances

The five things that stop it working, named specifically, with the antidote for each. This is the most practically useful list in Buddhist meditation instruction.

Sensual desire. The mind going repeatedly to something it wants. Antidote: look at the object's impermanence, and notice the wanting itself as an event.

Ill will. Anger, resentment, rehearsing an argument. Antidote: goodwill practice, deliberately — and this is why loving-kindness meditation exists as a technique rather than a sentiment.

Sloth and torpor. Dullness, heaviness, sleepiness. Antidote: open the eyes, straighten the posture, stand up, get more light. Physical, not mental — which is the same instruction 5.8 gives for tamas.

Restlessness and worry. Antidote: calming, longer out-breaths, and — specifically for worry — attending to conduct, because a great deal of restlessness is unfinished business with something you did.

Doubt. Not intellectual questioning, which is encouraged, but the corrosive uncertainty about whether any of this works. Antidote: clarify the instruction, and remember previous results.

Notice that four of the five have physical or behavioural antidotes, not mental ones. The tradition's answer to a stuck mind is very rarely to think harder about it.

The jhanas

The absorptions, which are stages of increasingly unified attention. Described concretely, with a simile for each.

First jhana: applied and sustained attention, with joy and pleasure born of seclusion. Like a bath-powder ball soaked through with moisture — thoroughly permeated.

Second: the applied attention drops away; the mind is unified, with joy and pleasure. Like a lake fed by a spring from below, with no inflow from outside.

Third: joy fades, leaving pleasure and clear awareness. Like lotuses growing entirely underwater, saturated.

Fourth: pleasure and pain both gone, leaving pure equanimity and clarity. Like a man wrapped head to foot in a white cloth.

Two honest things about the jhanas.

They are real and attainable, and there are people alive who enter them reliably. They also take substantial dedicated practice — typically retreat conditions — and most people practising meditation will never reach them, which is fine.

And they are not the goal. 6.3 is the warning: he attained the deepest available absorptions under two teachers and left both, because the state passes and the person is unchanged. The jhanas are a tool. What they are for is item sixteen of the breathing instruction — a mind steady enough to look at something and actually see it.

Metta

Loving-kindness, and it is a technique with a specific procedure rather than a general benevolence.

You generate goodwill in a fixed order. Yourself first. Then someone you love. Then someone neutral — a person you genuinely have no feelings about. Then someone difficult. Then everybody.

The order is the method. Starting with someone easy establishes what the state actually feels like, so you know what you are aiming for when you get to the hard one. Jumping straight to the difficult person produces nothing, which is why people conclude it does not work.

The phrases are simple and traditional: may you be safe, may you be well, may you be at ease, may you be happy.

And its function is precise: it is the antidote to the second hindrance, and it is the direct training for the second item of the path (6.6), goodwill as intention. Volume VI Part 7 has the full guided version.

A practice that fits a real week

Ten minutes, and it uses everything above.

Two minutes: settle. Posture, three long out-breaths, then stop controlling. Just know the breath.

Five minutes: know the breath, and when the mind wanders, note where it went in one word — planning, remembering, wanting, worrying — and return. The noting is the training; the wandering is not failure (5.6).

Two minutes: check the state. Which hindrance is present? Apply its antidote rather than pushing through.

One minute: metta. Yourself, one person you love, one person who is difficult today.

And once, at any point in the day, the two-second version from 6.8: notice a feeling-tone before it becomes a story. That single move is worth more than the ten minutes.

What to carry from this page

Know the breath, do not manage it. The most commonly broken instruction.

You are allowed to be glad in meditation. Item ten is deliberate.

Learn the five hindrances by name, because a named obstacle has an antidote and an unnamed one has only effort. And notice that four of the five antidotes are physical or behavioural.

Metta works in order — easy first — or it does not work at all.

And the deep states are a tool, not a destination. He reached the deepest ones available and walked away from both teachers.

Next: 6.10 — what he actually built, how it was governed, and what happened when his own cousin tried to take it over.