The Anapanasati Sutta: The Buddha's Guide to Breath Meditation

So much writing about breath meditation in the West is simple: watch your breath. Thoughts will come. Notice them, let them go. Return. The Anapanasati Sutta is more than that.

Sometimes called the Breath-Mindfulness Sutta or Mindfulness of Breathing Sutta, this is one of the most detailed meditation guides in the Pali Canon. It presents sixteen steps, arranged across four stages, culminating in the seven factors of awakening.

You watch your breath throughout, of course, but it’s a structured journey from your body to letting go.

What’s the Anapanasati Sutta?

The sutta comes from the Majjhima Nikaya, the Middle Length Discourses, which is part of the Pali Canon. The Buddha delivered it to an assembly of monks at Savatthi, laying out a path of breath meditation from the first conscious inhale to the final letting go.

It’s demanding, it’s clear and it’s thorough: the path is the point.

Because of that depth, the Anapanasati Sutta has remained one of the most practised teachings in Buddhism across Theravada lineages (and it influenced the Mahayana and Zen traditions that developed later).

If you’ve ever done sitting practice, you’ve probably worked with aspects of the Anapanasati Sutta.

The sixteen steps across four stages

The sutta’s sixteen steps of meditation are set in groups of four (also called tetrads). They cover different domains of awareness, each building on the last.

1. Form

The first four steps work with physical experience:

1. The breath coming in and going out.
2. Whether the breath is long or short.
3. Observe the whole body breathing.
4. Calm your body.

A lot of meditation practice starts and stops here. And with good reason, really: it’s a helpful, grounding process. But the Anapanasati Sutta is just getting started.

2. Feelings

The next four steps shift from the body to feeling:

1. Experience joy.
2. Experience happiness.
3. Experience mental formations.
4. Calm your mental formations.

This section is about the kind of feelings Buddhists call vedana: pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral sensations. It teaches you to experience joy, for example, rising and moving into ease. You observe how feelings arise and pass. You calm the mind’s agitation around them.

A lot of Western meditation teaching skips this flavour of breath work but it’s incredibly helpful. It helps you find joy and happiness in any moment – and it teaches you to not grasp onto them (or any other feeling).

As the Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh said in his book Awakening of the Heart:

Those who practice meditation should know how to nourish themselves with the joy and happiness of meditative concentration in order to touch real maturity and help the world.

3. Mental formations

The third group turns to the mind directly, what the Pali calls citta:

1. Become aware of your mind,
2. Make your mind happy.
3. Concentrate your mind.
4. Liberate your mind.

You observe the mind and all its functions. You help make it happy. You concentrate it. You liberate it.

By focusing our attention on our minds themselves, we can learn to identify our traits and bias – some positive, some negative – and help nurture the positive ones. This group of exercises helps build the deftness we need to start untying all the mental knots we bound ourselves with.

4. Perceptions

The final four steps work with our perception of, well, everything:

1. Observe the impermanence of all things.
2. Observe the fading away of desire.
3. Observe ending.
4. Observe letting go.

You observe impermanence. You observe the fading of craving. You observe cessation. And then you observe the letting go.

This section is tricky because it’s also about that “everything” manifests in our awareness. Here’s Nhat Hanh in Awakening of the Heart again:

The mind cannot be separated from its object. The mind is consciousness, feeling, attachment, aversion, and so on. Consciousness must always be conscious of something. The mind is, at one and the same time, the subject of consciousness and the object of consciousness. All physiological phenomena, such as the breath, the nervous system, and the sense organs; all psychological phenomena , such as feelings, thoughts, and consciousness; and all physical phenomena, such as the earth, water, grass, trees, mountains, and rivers, are objects of the mind, and therefore all are the mind.

We are awareness. We are whatever happens to the objects of our minds. And all those things are impermanent.

This section is about understanding, in your bones, the nature of that impermanence and the liberation that comes with letting go.

It’s not about giving up, though, or surrendering things in an act of piety. It’s acknowledging that giving some things up is part of growth.

In his book Breath By Breath, the American Buddhist teacher Larry Rosenberg says that this “relinquishment [isn’t] a giving up of anything we really owned, just a clear seeing of the way things are.”

In the process, we can feel a sense of liberation – rather than “feeling deprived on something we thought was ours”.

So that’s where we land: with letting go.

What are the four foundations of mindfulness?

The Anapanasati Sutta also teaches what are known as the four foundations of mindfulness (which are covered in-depth in the Satipatthana Sutta).

These map directly onto the four stages above:

1. Observing the body in the body.
2. Observing the feelings in the feelings.
3. Observing the mind in the mind.
4. Observing the objects of the mind in the mind.

That phrasing is tricky: “the body in the body.” It’s an invitation to observe from within experience itself, moving beyond a more traditional “subject/object” relationship.

Most of us spend most of our time observing experience via our commentary about it: we see something, we think about it, we yap about it. We build out our preferences and beliefs about how things should be.

We get stuck in our own biases. This instruction helps us put our ideas aside so we can become more aware, more mindful of what’s truly happening.

The seven factors of awakening

The sutta teaches that sustained practice across the four stages cultivates the seven factors of awakening (the satta bojjhanga in Pali):

1. Mindfulness.
2. Investigation.
3. Energy.
4. Joy.
5. Ease.
6. Concentration.
7. Letting go.

Much of the meditation instruction I’ve seen presents mindfulness as the goal. Here, it’s step one.

And a lot of mindfulness practice in the West frames it as something akin to concentration – something to help you focus better. This sutta puts a whole lot between those two points.

Energy, joy and ease flow on from a mindful curiosity. Only then can you achieve a sustainable, pleasant concentration. And it ends, again, with letting go.

You don’t move through the seven factors of awakening, tick a box and say “Yup, I’ve awakened.” Like everything else, they arise and cease; they develop and deepen.

But they’re there, inside you, ready when you are.

The Anapanasati Sutta and Zen

The Anapanasati Sutta is a Theravada text. Zen arrived in Japan centuries after the Pali Canon was compiled. Zazen, the sitting meditation practice at the heart of Japanese Zen, developed its own form and lineage.

But breath awareness is central to zazen. The basic act of sitting, attending to the breath, returning when the mind moves away, has roots in what the Anapanasati Sutta teaches (even if Zen doesn’t follow the sixteen steps explicitly).

Dogen Zenji, the 13th-century Japanese Zen master who founded Soto Zen, wrote about breath and sitting at length. His instruction on zazen and the Anapanasati Sutta’s instruction on mindfulness of breathing cover similar territories.

If you’re drawn to Zen practice and you want to understand the underlying logic of what happens when you sit and follow the breath, check out the Anapanasati Sutta. It’s not a replacement for Zen teaching but, personally, I find it a helpful partner.

(If nothing else, it’s a terrific structure to follow.)

Putting the Anapanasati Sutta into practice

Thankfully, the Sutta is its own instruction. All there is to do now is to sit, breath and practice.

That said, we can make things a bit easier to take that first step.

First, you don’t have to do all 16 exercises every time. It’s worth going through all the steps first (and then again every so often). But you can work through one line, one pair or one group at your leisure.

In Awakening of the Heart, Nhat Hanh provides seven exercises to practice the Anapanasati Sutta, each one a different collection of the Sutta’s 16 steps:

1. Following the breath: observe your breath, note if it’s a long breath or short one (step 1 and 2).
2. Awareness of the body: observing your whole body (step 3).
3. Unity of mind and body: calming your whole body (step 4).
4. Nourishing yourself: feeling joy, feeling happy (steps 5 and 6).
5. Observing your feelings: become aware of and calming your mental formations (steps 7 and 8).
6. Caring for your mind: becoming aware of your mind, making it happy, concentrating and then liberating your mind (steps 9 through 12).
7. Looking deeply: observing impermanence and letting go (steps 13 through 16).

Hanh recommends doing exercises one and four whenever you sit to meditate: the combination of stopping and feeling happiness help focus your concentration.

But, even then, you don’t have to follow the sutta’s exercises in any order. The goal is practice, right?

Take exercise four. Think of all the ways you can apply that. Hanh provides an example: bring your awareness to different parts of your body, from your eyes to your liver, breath in and note they’re there working for you, breath out and feel joy.

That alone can be transformative.

As you practice, you’ll find your own way through the sutta. Upasika Kee Nanayon, a Thai Buddhist layperson, had her own version where she condensed the process so she could practice all four groups of the Anapanasati Sutta at once:

What we need is a way of gathering our awareness at the breath long enough to make the mind firm, and then go straight to examining how all formations are inconstant, stressful, and not-self, so that we can see the truth of all formations with each in-and-out breath. If you can keep at this without break, your mindfulness will become firm and snug enough for you to give rise to the discernment that will enable clear knowledge and vision.

And doesn’t a snug and firm mindfulness sound nice?

Welcome to the path

The Anapanasati Sutta is sometimes described as a complete path in itself. Practice the sutta and you’re also practicing the four foundations of mindfulness and the seven factors of awakening.

With depth comes difficulty. It takes work to understand everything the sutta has to offer. But there are landmarks along the way. The more you practice calming your mental formations as you sit, the easier it’ll be to during the day. The more you practice bringing joy to mind, the more readily it’ll come to you in any given moment.

In her book When Things Fall Apart, the Buddhist nun Pema Chodron describes how the benefits of meditation move from the cushion to daily life:

This is something that evolves gradually, patiently, over time. How long does this process take? I would say it takes the rest of our lives.

Good thing we don’t have anything better to do, eh?

Pair this article with a breakdown of the Satipatthana Sutta – the Buddha’s Guide to Mindfulness – to continue your journey. Together, they’re a great intro to Buddhist practice.

You can also check out this list of Key Zen and Buddhist Sutras if you’d like to see what else is out there for you.