Question: Could Ajahn explain about Satipaṭṭhāna?
Than Ajahn: Ok. The Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta teaches step by step Dhamma practice. The first step is to develop mindfulness and samādhi, for example by going into the forest and sit under a tree where it’s quiet. You use mindfulness of breathing to calm your mind to enter into samādhi.
If you succeed with the first step, then you go to the next step. When I say that this is the first step, it doesn’t mean that you do it and you’ll get it right away. For some people, it might take years for them to get into the real samādhi where they can stay in there for a long time, like 40 minutes or one hour. When you are in samādhi, your mind becomes calm and peaceful. It has upekkhā. This is the first step. You want to develop mindfulness and samādhi, so that your mind can be strong to study the nature of the body, feelings, and the mind.
First you study the body, because it is the most obvious object to study. You see your body all the time but you don’t see it according to the truth. You are not seeing it getting old, getting sick and dying. Hence, you want to force your mind to look at this truth, so that you will eventually accept the truth. When you accept the truth, you won’t get hurt when the body gets old, gets sick or dies. You’re willing to let it be because you know that you can’t control your body. Then, you will stop preventing your body from getting old, getting sick or dying. You’ll tell your mind to stop clinging to your body, if you don’t want to get hurt, if you don’t want to have dukkha.
You have to see the anicca and the anattā of the body. The body is anicca – keep changing, rising and ceasing. The body is anattā – you can’t control it. Once you see this truth, the anicca and anattā of the body, you won’t have dukkha. Dukkha only arises when you resist the truth. You don’t see the truth. You want the body to continue on living. So, you have dukkha when the body has to die. This is the first step – to study the nature of the body. The body is anicca (not permanent). The body is anattā. It’s not you. You are the mind.
The body is made up of the 4 elements. It’s a gift from your father and your mother. You just happen to be the recipient of the gift. That’s all. The mind is the recipient of the gift. Then, you use the 4 elements to raise the body by giving the body the requisites – taking in the air to breathe, drinking the water, taking the food which is the earth element, taking the heat from the sun, and also the heat generated by the body itself. These are composition of the 4 elements. Eventually, when the body dies, each of the 4 elements will go separate ways.
When you die, the first thing that disappears is the air element, then follow by the fire element; and, the water element. Eventually, what is left is the earth element, the solid part of the body. So, this is something you have to study. You have to tell yourself that there is no ‘you’ in the body. You can dissect the body and look at each different parts of the body and ask yourself, ‘Is this part me? Is the hair me? Is the bone me? Is the teeth me?’ You will then come to see that there isn’t any part of the body that is ‘you’. It’s your own delusion claiming that it’s ‘you’. Once you’ve seen it, then you won’t be attached to your body. You’ll know that you come from the mind. The mind is the one who knows, who thinks. It’s not the body.
If you want to get rid of your sexual desire, you have to look at the unpleasant parts of the body like the inner parts of the body or look at the body when it becomes a corpse, the different stages of a corpse. Then, you can lessen your sexual desire. You have sexual desire because you see the body as pleasant or good-looking. Therefore, you have to counter this perception by seeing the unpleasant side of the body. So, every time when you see a body, you won’t see it as pleasant or good looking. Because what you see is the asubha, the unpleasant aspect of the body. By doing that, you can get rid of your sexual desire. This is the contemplation of the body. It’s to get rid of your attachment to your body and to other people’s bodies.
As for feelings, you have feelings that come from the body. The body generates feelings from what you see, what you hear and what you touch. Sometimes, you’ll get good feelings from what you see, hear or touch. Sometimes, you’ll get bad feelings. Sometimes, you’ll get neutral feelings. You can’t manage these feelings all the time. Sometimes, you can’t get rid of the bad feelings. Like when you’re sick or have a fever. The body becomes painful all over. If you have the desire to get rid of the pain, you’re creating dukkha in your mind.
But if you see that feelings are anicca (changing) and feelings are anattā (you can’t manage them), then you just have to accept feelings as they come whether they are good feelings, bad feelings or neutral feelings. You teach your mind to accept them for what they are. Once the mind can accept them, the mind will not have any dukkha (suffering). Suffering arises because you want to get rid of the bad feelings or you want to have good feelings but you can’t get it.
Thirdly – the mind. The mind has emotions in it. The mind keeps changing. Some days, the mind has good emotions. Some days, it has bad emotions. Sometimes, you have anger. Sometimes, you have sadness. Sometimes, you have happiness. They are considered to be the emotions in the mind which are different from the feelings (which come from your body). Sometimes, you think good because of something that you think about create good feelings in your mind. Sometimes, you’ll come to a certain situation that generates good emotion or bad emotion. The mind keeps on doing this. And sometimes, you can’t control it. When you can’t control it, then you just have to teach your mind to accept it for what it is. If you can accept the changing nature of things in your mind, in your feelings, and in your body, then you won’t have any dukkha in the mind.
As far as the Dhamma, you want to see whether you have the Dhamma inside your mind or not. You have to see the four noble truths inside your mind, not the four noble truths that you read in a book. To see that the real ‘four noble truths’ is in your mind. You have to see, ‘Do you have wisdom? Do you have mindfulness?’ These are the Dhamma that you need to develop if you don’t have them. If you find that you’re still lacking mindfulness, then you have to keep developing more mindfulness. If you don’t have samādhi, you have to develop more samādhi. If you don’t have wisdom, you have to develop wisdom. Because you need these Dhamma to be the tools to teach your mind to get rid of sufferings, to get rid of your cravings in your mind.
So, this is basically what the four Foundations of Mindfulness is about. It’s about developing mindfulness, developing samādhi, and developing paññā (insight or wisdom).
Dhamma in English, Jul 8, 2020.
By Ajahn Suchart Abhijāto
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