“Mindfulness,” the translation of Pāli sāti, is a crucial skill for following Gotama’s teachings. Key suttas such as the Satipaṭṭhāna give detailed instructions for practicing to develop this skill, best described by contemporary teacher John Peacock as “remembering to pay attention.” Seeing our experience clearly as it arises is the main goal; we must develop the muscle of attention needed to see experience at the right scale. Some skill in sāti allows us to begin to see the characteristics of our experience: impermanence of mental phenomena, absence of any unchanging self, & the resulting suffering. We see how the mind constructs experience from pleasant or unpleasant sensation (vedana) through habits that color our reactivity, & leading to tangles of thoughts, feelings & worries.
Unfortunately, in popular culture, “mindfulness” has come to mean simply using breath awareness to calm down. The Pāli word for that is samatha, “calming.” Sāti is much more than that; it is a balancing factor when the mind is either too energetic or too calm for concentration.1 For Gotama, “correct mindfulness” (sammā sāti) also includes the roles of ethics & intention. It is too often presented without these & other important parts of Gotama’s ideas & practices.
free will • kamma • practice • scale • sīla
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- See the many texts on satipaṭṭhāna, bojjhaṅgā ↩