SuttaCentral
And if one breathes aware of delight, how does that fit into this given that delight is the root of suffering?
Neither nandi or delight show up in MN118, but DO awareness of delight/suffering has proven quite useful and centering. Since it is not mentioned, there is some concern that such meditation might lead astray.
Satipatthana is primarily samatha; i.e. the basic purpose of it is to get into jhana. This is not an inference: it is stated explicitly in the suttas. (MN 44: "the four satipatthanas are the basis for samadhi = cattāro satipaṭṭhānā samādhinimittā)
Is not Samma Samadhi the eighth step in the Noble Eightfold Path? MN 44 verse simply says that the four satipatthana are the way to cultivate the Noble Eightfold Path. That involves mainly vipassana, not just samatha.
most of the frequently used pali words associated with happiness,
can have a positive or negative usage. For example, kāma-chanda is lustful-desire, but chandha-samadhi-padhana (desire fabrication exertion in samadhi development) is one of the 4 iddhi pada. Similarly kāma-sukha is bad, but sukha in 4 jhanas is wholesome. So don’t get hung up thinking a certain word has only a positive or negative connation. Even kāma and rāga, have rare instances where they’re used in a wholesome sense.
There is a Sutta to support that Buddha allowed monks to be deleight in meditation.
I too am very confused. Should we put our energy on studying the Anapanasati sutta instead?
The best way to handle this is to compare your own experience with all the Sutta.
I generally read everything and listen to every body but make up my own mind.
When you have concrete ideas about the teaching you form views then you clinging to your view.
Unable to read printed matter, I was very grateful to find Bhante Sujato’s videos on the
Mahāsatipaṭṭhānasutta.
Distress ceased, practice continues.
.
That dhammawheel thread has been troubling me since I read it. I am still distressed. 
Listening to Bhante Sujato’s talks, it dawned on me that all these suttas are helpful both in their own right as well as together in their collective diversity. What had distressed me was the imagined existence of a single canonical source 
, when in fact all of these suttas comprise common canonical atomic elements arranged and collected in a process that evolved contextually according to the needs of different cultures. Bhante Sujato’s joke about “Greatest Hits” summed it up quite nicely and provided a healing perspective for practice. It became a potato po-tah-toh thing for heeding but not distressing.
Others could probably answer better, but my take anyway is that, with all the satipatthana-related suttas and parallels, it’s pretty likely there was an original satipattana sutta, but just probably a bit more slimmed down than the current Pali version with less body techniques (anatomical parts meditation seems common to all and corpse and elements meditations seem common enough in the sources too). It isn’t as if the extra further techniques are pulled out of thin air anyway; they are from elsewhere in the canon and there’s a certain logic to their inclusion (the first tetrad of breath meditation does make a lot of sense). I’m not sure it’s all that big a deal if some of these techniques are in or out (all seem perfectly good to me, included or not; maybe the original was simply a fairly terse satipatthana summary, maybe a bit too terse, which some of those later couldn’t resist fleshing out a bit).
Maybe there’s significance in the dhammas section being likely a fair bit slimmer as well (with just the seven enlightenment factors and probably hindrances also). However, the seven enlightenment factors are very prominent in the anapanasati sutta also (developing these seem to be a core purpose of anapanasati) so their prominence cannot be controversial here either. My take would the fact that the seven enlightenment factors are shared in all versions and the hindrances by most makes a good case that these are the most central initial dhammas to focus on. Maybe once a good level of samadhi has been cultivated (6th enlightenment factor), some of the other dhammas (aggregrates, sense-spheres, 4 noble truths) are more liable to be penetrated (on a satipatthana second round 
).
On solidity of the canonical texts, Buddhism is fortunate compared to many other religions. The Jains seem to have lost a lot of their early texts. Christians have to make a lot of inferences from rather a small amount of text (mostly the four gospels and Acts). The Buddhist EBTs are big and there’s a lot of shared overlap between the various parallels (so there’s a lot we can fairly confidently trace back to fairly early). On the downside, it would have been nice if there were some really early meditation and practice manuals (not really a written culture I suppose and the emphasis seems to have been on preserving the Buddha’s word rather than techniques of the time). But I guess we are still lucky to have some meditation manuals from some centuries afterwards.
Considering most Buddhist practices I have followed base them selves off this sutta it is rather disappointing. It felt like a punch to the face to read that about the Satipatthana sutta.
Just think the Suttas are the finger ponting to the moon.
Don’t look at the finger (Sutta) look at the moon (Nibbana)
Don’t take anything lieterally even this post.
Personally, I have found that when I’m feeling like this, it is useful to explore - why one is feeling the distress. Really working backwards/inwards through thoughts and feelings 
A marvellous tool to work through attachments that are otherwise invisible.
with metta 
Consider that the material that was added at a later period is still consistent with other EBT materials. So its really a matter of editing, its not like mindfulness of breathing or the four noble truths are later inventions.
I don’t think we should look down on practices that might have been developed and perfected later than the earliest period. The suttas often seem to describe states to be cultivated without a lot of detail about how to cultivate them.
If the Satipathana is not an authentic sutta, What are groups like Goenka or Mahasi going to do now? They can’t keep on preaching this sutta. I feel like I wasted my time attending all these retreats following the steps of the Satipathana.
Hi Luisito,
Just see it as part of the path and learn from it
When I started reading the suttas I was blown away and elated but I also got disillusioned by all the books I read previously that seem so far from the suttas! To be honest I still have some negative views about the whole vipasanna/satipathana/Mahasi/Goenka movement, but I’ve started to soften a bit 
One thing that helped me was to understand it in its historical context. The history of the Sangha and meditation is full of reform movements, followed by domestication of these reformist groups and the cycle continues. These changes also seem to be accompanied by temporary favoured techniques or approaches. They seem to ebb and flow spatially and temporally. The Vipasana movement arised and spread like wild-fire for some specific reasons, but it has to be understood in its historical context. I now recognize that some good things emerged from it, such as easier access to meditation teachings for lay people (previously it was not common at all), access to monasteries for long retreats (e.g. the typical 10-days retreat), and also a method that seem to work quite well for many people.
Another thing that helped is to realize that a lot of the misunderstandings come from having different definitions of words and using different framework of analysis (e.g. EBTs vs commentaries vs secular Buddhism etc). When reading a book from a certain tradition, I now try to understand their writing using their own analysis framework (so if I were to read a Mahasi technique book, I would try to understand their words using the framework provided by the commentaries, not the EBTs). But I have limited time and energy so I prefer to focus on the EBTs mostly nowadays.
If you have time, try to read about the history of Buddhism in SEA and the West during the 19th & 20th century, it helps a lot to understand why we are here today.
Bets of luck
Though samadhi ( concentration ) involves insight. See for example SN35.99:
“Bhikkhus, develop concentration. A bhikkhu who is concentrated understands things as they really are.
“And what does he understand as they really are? He understands as it really is: ‘The eye is impermanent.’ He understands as it really is: ‘Forms are impermanent.’… ‘Eye-consciousness is impermanent. ’… ‘Eye-contact is impermanent.’… ‘Whatever feeling arises with eye-contact as condition—whether pleasant or painful or neither-painful-nor-pleasant—that too is impermanent.’…"
Not so much a comparison (given this is, I think, true to some extent for all the techniques) but more a bemoaning of this gap, but, yes, sure, I agree. Or maybe even the Buddha wasn’t big on technique specifics in the first place (students having to figure it out for themselves or perhaps there was a well-known pre-existing suite of sramana techniques that just needed to be adapted and drawn on somewhat at the time).
Just the same.
What Mahasi taught was not according with Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta even for many of burmese scholars.
Experience is what has demonstrated the authenticity of what the sutta contains and the particular Mahasi approach.
Which parts of Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta do you consider fake?