The Satipatthana Sutta: The Buddha's Guide to Mindfulness
Mindfulness is everywhere now. Apps, flyers taped above the sink at work, podcasts by guys who view sleep as optimisation. Most of it traces back, some way some how, to the Satipatthana Sutta.
Based on that description, you’d be forgiven for guessing it’s a sutta about productivity. Alas, no.
The Satipatthana Sutta is a major text in the Pali Canon. Sometimes called the Discourse on the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, it lays out a guide to awareness, taking us from the body to the functions of our minds. Along the way, it helps us understand how to, maybe, just maybe, stop suffering.
So the sutta is demanding. It has to be – how else could it achieve its goals? But, thankfully, it makes those demands simple to follow if you’re up for the challenge.
What’s the Satipatthana Sutta?
Like the Anapanasati Sutta, the Satipatthana Sutta comes from the Majjhima Nikaya, the Middle Length Discourses – part of the Pali Canon.
It’s all in the title:
- Sati is mindfulness.
- Patthana means foundation, or establishing.
Thus, Satipatthana is the setting up of mindfulness.
The Buddha had a flair for the dramatic. Here’s how the sutta opens, as translated by the monk Bhikkhu Analayo in his book Satipatthana:
Monks, this is the direct path for the purification of beings, for the surmounting of sorrow and lamentation, for the disappearance of dukkha and discontent, for acquiring the true method.
Not much ambiguity there. Want to be free of suffering (that’s dukkha)? This is the path.
The four foundations of mindfulness
The sutta organises practice around four objects of awareness:
- Body.
- Feelings.
- Mind.
- Perceptions.
They build on each other, with instruction along the way.
1. Body
Body contemplation is the longest section in the sutta and the most uncomfortable. (It kinda gave me the willies on my first read.)
It opens with breath, of course, specifically the kind of that the Anapanasati Sutta develops. That’s followed by awareness of postures: standing, sitting, walking, lying down. Then clear comprehension of daily activities: coming and going, bending and stretching, eating, drinking, speaking, keeping silent.
No wukkaz, right? Well.
You’re then instructed to contemplate the anatomical parts of the body: hair, nails, teeth, skin, flesh, sinews, bones, bone marrow, kidneys, heart, liver, pleura, spleen, lungs, intestines, stomach, faeces, bile, phlegm, pus, blood, sweat, fat, tears, grease, saliva, snot, urine.
Which is fine. It’s about embracing the body in all its bit, bobs and blots. Manageable stuff. But it’s the cemetery meditations that get you.
The Buddha tells you to imagine the body in stages of decay – and it detail. Your corpse fresh, your corpse blue and bloated, your corpse rotting and beset by maggots. Your bones, your bones turned to dust.
But you don’t just imagine it. You meditate on it, on each step, with your total awareness. And I’m someone who gets genuinely upset when I see a critter dead on the side of the road.
It’s a lot. But it’s a lot with a point: the sutta wants you to understand your body for what it is – stripped of concepts and assumptions.
And your body is mortal. It will rot.
2. Feelings
The second foundation of mindfulness is feelings, or vedana: the felt sensation of every experience.
Everything we encounter has a vedana. A sensation arises and is judged as:
- Pleasant: we lean toward it.
- Unpleasant: we pull back.
- Neutral: we zone out.
Most of us go through our lives driven by these three responses without noticing them. Time to change that – but we need to do it without adding yet more judgement or interpretation.
For example, there’s a rich vein of thought that presents negative feelings as ennobling or productive: the whole “the obstacle is the opportunity” type deal. That’s not the point of acknowledging negative feelings here.
The goal, as Analayo puts it, is the consequences of those feelings:
The Buddha did not categorically reject all pleasant feelings, nor did he categorically recommend unpleasant experiences for their supposedly purifying effect. Instead, he placed emphasis on the mental and ethical consequences of all types of feeling.
Rather than foraging our feelings for growth opportunities, we’re trying to become more aware of the very things that shape us.
Analayo argues that, by contemplating our feelings, we discover
the fact that feelings decisively influence and colour subsequent thoughts and reactions… Logic and thought often serve merely to rationalize already existing likes and dislikes, which in turn are conditioned by the arising of either pleasant or unpleasant feelings.
By becoming aware of our feelings in and of themselves, this background hum of conditioning becomes conscious. We start to uncover the attitudes that underpin the various views and preferences we hold.
3. Mind
The third foundation turns to the mind and the overall quality of awareness in any given moment. Contracted or expansive? Scattered or concentrated? Liberated or grasping?
The sutta lists possible states – with and without lust, with and without hatred, with and without delusion, concentrated, distracted, exalted, liberated, unliberated – and instructs you to know each one for what it is.
Not fix or judge or mine for meaning. Just know.
This is where practice can stall. We arrive on the cushion wanting a calm, concentrated, liberated mind. We get scattered, restless, and irritable and then we argue with it. We feel like we’re somehow failing at meditation.
Trust me, you’re not failing. Whatever state of mind is present is the object of practice. If you’re noticing it, you’re doing it.
4. Perceptions
The fourth foundation is the most expansive: perception, or dhammas.
Dhammas here means our perceptions of phenomena, both physical and mental, as they arise in awareness. So the sutta covers a lot of ground.
This section breaks our perceptions into a few categories: hindrances, aggregates, senses and the factors of awakening.
The five hindrances hold us back from liberation:
- Desire.
- Aversion.
- Sloth and torpor.
- Restlessness and worry.
- Doubt.
The five aggregates shape who we are in the moment:
- Form.
- Feeling.
- Perception.
- Mental formations.
- Consciousness.
The six sense bases – and their corresponding objects – are how we interface with the world:
- Eyes.
- Ears.
- Nose.
- Tongue.
- Body.
- Mind.
The seven factors of awakening are the qualities that, when developed, help you maintain the calm, clarity and wisdom you need to find liberation:
- Mindfulness.
- Investigation.
- Energy (including effort and enthusiasm).
- Joy.
- Tranquillity.
- Concentration.
- Equanimity.
The Four Noble Truths are the foundation of the Buddha’s teaching:
- Life involves suffering (or dukkha).
- Suffering is caused by craving or attachment to impermanent things.
- You can end suffering by overcoming this craving.
- The Noble Eightfold Path is the way overcome craving.
As you practice, you’ll contemplate each of these. They’re all mental objects for you to peruse. As you do, you’ll learn to recognise the structures that build your experiences.
That means you’re learning about craving and attachment. You’re getting to know suffering. And you’re learning about your liberation and the liberation of others.
An aside: even though this sutta is about the four foundations of mindfulness, you’ll have noticed that mindfulness is also just one of the seven factors of awakening. Part of that is because Buddhism loves a self-referential list; part of it is that mindfulness is someone that comes and goes, that arises and grows.
It’s not something you just achieve, right? That’s kinda the lie behind “mindfulness as a product”. There, it’s something you can dip into for a minute and, hey presto, goodness achieved, back to work we go.
Here, it’s part of a practice that – if you work at it – will contribute to you being liberated.
The refrain
There’s a refrain in the Satipatthana Sutta that’s easy to overlook (even though it gets repeated constantly).
Here it is, as translated by the Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh in his book Awakening of the Heart, referring to the body:
This is how a practitioner observes the body in the body. He observes the body from within or from without, of from both within and without. He observes the process of coming-to-be in the body or the process of dissolution in the body or both the process of coming-to-be and the process of dissolution. Or he is mindful of the fact, ‘There is a body here’, until understanding and full awareness come about. He maintains the observation, free, not caught up in any worldly consideration. This is how to practice observation of the body in the body, O bhikkus.
This refrain appears after each instruction, body, feelings, mind and perceptions. It’s the practice.
Be with whatever arises and observe that it passes – not intellectually, but as direct experience. And then notice that observing itself is also impermanent. Nothing holds; everything moves.
You could apply this simple refrain to every part of your life, really. It’s worth a try.
The Satipatthana Sutta and the Anapanasati Sutta
These suttas are closely related and worth reading together.
The Anapanasati Sutta’s sixteen steps of breath meditation develop the four foundations of mindfulness, bit by bit.
The Anapanasati Sutta is clear: sustained breath practice, developed fully, fulfils satipatthana. If you’re working with one, you’re working with both.
Think of them this way: the Satipatthana Sutta lays out a road, the Anapanasati Sutta offers you a bike. Now you have the path and a way to travel. Off you pop.
Putting the Satipatthana Sutta into practice
Satipatthana isn’t limited to the cushion. The sutta’s instructions on posture and daily activities make this explicit: coming and going, bending and stretching, eating, speaking, keeping silent. Life is the practice.
That said, formal sitting practice is a nice place to start. It’s easier to catch the arising and passing of vedana when you’re not also trying sort out dinner.
So start simple: pick one foundation and work with it.
Go with your body first, if you’re unsure. Sit and notice the breath, the posture, the physical sensations. You’re looking to know them, not change them. I like to say something like “I see you” whenever I notice a niggle or ache – it helps me concentrate on the feeling without judgement.
When the mind wanders (and it will), return to your body. At some point, without forcing it, you’ll start to notice vedana: a pleasant sensation, an unpleasant one. Note it. Watch it move.
That’s the refrain in action. Eventually, you start experiencing life before your assumptions, projections and reflections get in the way of things.
That takes time. It doesn’t arrive after one sit, or one month, or one year. But you notice things along the way. You catch a thought before you believe it, you feel a moment of happiness and let it run its course, you feel a pang of pain without fear.
You live now, just now, and what a fine now it is. One noticing at a time.
The road and the journey
The Satipatthana Sutta is wide ranging. The body, feelings, mind states, the deep structures of how suffering arises and can end. It’s almost a complete path unto itself.
That can be intimidating. But you don’t travel it all at once. You go, bit by bit, and the further you go, the more moments of liberation you encounter. Awareness gets that little bit easier and craving has less space to hold.
The Australian-German Buddhist teacher Ayya Khema put it well in her book Being Nobody, Going Nowhere:
When we concentrate, the five hindrances, our defilements, don’t get a chance to arise because the mind can only do one thing at a time. And as we get better at enlarging our periods of concentration, the mind gets cleansed of its rough spots.
The benefits are real. But you have to do the work. The Satipatthana Sutta offers you a road. The ride is yours.
The Satipatthana Sutta is just one text from the Buddhist canon. Deepen your practice with this list of Key Zen and Buddhist Sutras.