Skip to main content

Vism. 16APS breath meditation step 3 crime

The translation of the sutta passage for 16 APS breath meditation instruction is correct, in that they translate kāya as 'body'.
He trains thus: “I shall breathe in … I shall breathe out experiencing the whole body”: 

The crime is in redefining the meaning of 'body' to mean something completely different than what it means in all the other kaya anupassana exercises (see MN 10 and MN 119), where kaya is always the anatomical body.

Vism. 16APS breath meditation step 3 


171.(iii)  He trains thus: “I shall breathe in … I shall breathe out experiencing the whole body”: he trains thus: “I shall breathe in making known, making plain, the beginning, middle and end (footnote 48) of the entire in-breath body. I shall breathe out making known, making plain, the beginning, middle and end of the entire out- breath body,” thus he trains. Making them known, making them plain, in this way he both breathes in and breathes out with consciousness associated with knowledge. That is why it is said, “He trains thus: ‘I shall breathe in … shall breathe out …’”

172. To one bhikkhu the beginning of the in-breath body or the out-breath body, distributed in particles, [that is to say, regarded as successive arisings (see note 45)] is plain, but not the middle or the end; he is only able to discern the beginning and has difficulty with the middle and the end. To another the middle is plain, not the beginning or the end; he is only able to discern the middle and has difficulty with the beginning and the end. To another the end is plain, not the beginning or the middle; he is only able to discern the end [274] and has difficulty with the beginning and the middle. To yet another all stages are plain; he is able to discern them all and has no difficulty with any of them. Pointing out that one should be like the last-mentioned bhikkhu, he said: “He trains thus: ‘I shall breathe in … shall breathe out experiencing the whole body.’”
173. Herein, he trains: he strives, he endeavours in this way. Or else the restraint here in one such as this is training in the higher virtue, his consciousness is training in the higher consciousness, and his understanding is training in the higher understanding (see Paṭis I 184). So he trains in, repeats, develops, repeatedly practices, these three kinds of training, on that object, by means of that mindfulness, by means of that attention. This is how the meaning should be regarded here.

footnote 48. 

The beginning, middle and end are described in §197, and the way they should be treated is given in §199–201. What is meant is that the meditator should know what they are and be aware of them without his mindfulness leaving the tip of the nose to follow after the breaths inside the body or outside it, speculating on what becomes of them.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Advice to younger meditators on jhāna, sex, porn, masturbation

Someone asked: Is porn considered harmful sexual.activity? I don't have a sex life because I don't have a partner and I don't wish to engage in casual sex so I use porn to quench the biological urge to orgasm. I can't see that's it's harmful because nobody is being forced into it. The actors are all paid well and claim to enjoy it etc. The only harm I can see is that it's so accessible these days on smart devices and so children may access it but I believe that this is the parents responsibility to not allow unsupervised use of devices etc. Views? Frankk response: In another thread, you asked about pleasant sensations and jhāna.  I'm guessing you're young, so here's some important advice you won't get from suttas   if you're serious about jhāna.  (since monastics are already celibate by rule)   If you want to attain stable and higher jhānas,   celibacy and noble silence to the best of your ability are the feedstock and prerequiste to tha

SN 48.40 Ven. Thanissaro comments on Ven. Sunyo's analysis

This was Ven. Sunyo's analysis of SN 48.40: https://notesonthedhamma.blogspot.com/2024/05/exciting-news-honest-ebt-scholars-like.html And here is Ven. Thanissaro's response to that analysis: I think there’s a better way to tackle the issue of SN 48:40 than by appealing to the oldest layers of commentarial literature. That way is to point out that SN 48:40, as we have it, doesn’t pass the test in DN 16 for determining what’s genuine Dhamma and what’s not. There the standard is, not the authority of the person who’s claiming to report the Buddha’s teachings, but whether the teachings he’s reporting are actually in accordance with the principles of the Dhamma that you know. So the simple fact that those who have passed the Buddha’s teachings down to us say that a particular passage is what the Buddha actually taught is not sufficient grounds for accepting it. In the case of the jhānas—the point at issue here— we have to take as our guide the standard formula for the jhānas, a

1min. video: Dalai Lama kissing boy and asking him to suck his tongue

To give more context, this is a public event,  * everyone knows cameras are rolling  *  it's a room full of children * the boy's mom is standing off camera a few feet away watching all of this * the boy initiated contact, he had already had a hug with Dalai Lama earlier and then asked Dalai Lama for another hug which triggered this segment  17 min. video showing what happened before that 1 min. clip and after, with some explanation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bT0qey5Ts78 16min talk from Ajahn Acalo with his thoughts on Dalai Lama kissing boy, relevance to Bhikkhu monastic code, sexual predators in religion in general, and how celibate monastics deal with sexual energy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uK2m0TcUib0 The child's comments about the incident in a filmed interview later https://www.marca.com/en/lifestyle/world-news/2023/04/18/643eba5d46163ffc078b457c.html The child: It's a great experience It was amazing to meet His Holiness and I think it's a great ex