Re: An Anapanasati Question
another post noting that the parimukha instruction also appears before instructions to do metta and brahmaviharas
Re: An Anapanasati Question
So you're saying brahma gods, who don't need to eat food or breathe, suddenly grow a nose, lungs, and start watching a breath at their nose when they do metta and brahma viharas?
case closed
parimukha is not literal, but figurative here. This is absolutely certain, because that term is used in these other meditations that have nothing to do with the nostril.
Do you need to watch the breath at the nose to abandon 5 hindrances? Or do metta? Or watch defilements vanish?
https://lucid24.org/tped/p/parimukha/book/index.html
excerpt
Scriptural evidence; all of the practices below cannot be undertaken when mindfulness is affixed at mouth-nose:
EA17.1, the practice of contemplating on the inconstancy of the five aggregates is described, prefaced by the parimukham expression: “專精一心，念色無常，念痛、想、行、識無常”; “He diligently collects his mind, and contemplates on/brings to his mind that form, feeling, perception, fabrications, and consciousness are inconstant.”
DN25 (iii49), MN39, AN9.40, speaks of the expression “parimukhaṃ satim upatthapeti” as in “overcoming hindrances”
AN3.63, as in the “divine abodes”
AN3.63, as in realizing that one’s defilements have been eradicated
MN91, as in setting the mind on the welfare of oneself and others.
SN54.7: Mahā-kappina was practicing anapanasati, with “parimukhaṃ satim upatthapeti.” He experienced the quaking, or spontaneous tremor of the body as a disturbance. The Buddha instructed him to practice “anapanasati: the contemplation on abandoning, with parimukhaṃ satim upatthapeti”
Ud5.10: “And on that occasion Ven. Cūḷa Panthaka was sitting not far from the Blessed One, his legs crossed, his body held erect, with mindfulness established to the fore…With steady body, steady awareness—whether standing, sitting, or lying down—a monk determined on mindfulness gains one distinction after another. ”
None of the above can be undertaken when attention is affixed at nose-mouth.
Another interesting point: the “early of the early” seem to not include this “parimukha” instruction in the standard meditation formula altogether (Ud21, 42, 43, 46, 60, 71, 77)
Mindfulness is not attention. Mindfulness is remembrance of one’s purpose, directionality, task…:
AN7.63: “Just as the royal frontier fortress has a gate-keeper — wise, experienced, intelligent — to keep out those he doesn't know and to let in those he does, for the protection of those within and to ward off those without…In the same way a disciple of the noble ones is mindful, highly meticulous, remembering & able to call to mind even things that were done & said long ago. With mindfulness as his gate-keeper, the disciple of the ones abandons what is unskillful, develops what is skillful, abandons what is blameworthy, develops what is blameless, and looks after himself with purity. With this sixth true quality is he endowed.”
To say that one should direct one’s mindfulness to a spatial location simply doesn’t make sense. Practitioners have to put the Teaching in front (mukha), i.e. invoke it in mind; It is akin to “gatekeeping” because the act of remembering the Dhamma is both to preserve it and to be preserved by it (śrutidharā). When one does mindfulness of the body, what one does is really not simply directing attention and affixing it to the body, but rather being mindful of body-related issues within the context of appropriate attention (e.g. practicing it with the purpose of preserving bodily ease, preventing bodily fever, and of inducing disenchantment…).
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