This is the beginning excerpt of the full paper found HERE.
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The seminal Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta is today one of the most studied discourses of the entire Pali canon. It serves to verify, investigate, intuit and internalize Dhamma through through contemplation of direct experience, that we may attain knowledge and vision of the way things are, and it is the historical basis of modern insight or vipassanā meditation. I intend here to show here what is rarely recognized, that the primary Dhamma teaching of concern in the first three of the four themes of satipaṭṭhāna (body, feeling, mind and dhammas) is that pivotal and most challenging teaching: non-self.
Briefly, the first three satipaṭṭānas correspond to three facets of the self as it is presumed to exist as a substantial, fixed thing. Each of the exercises within this scope challenges this presumption by demonstrating that bodily, percipient and mental evidence for the presumption is lacking, primarily through recognition the impermanence of the evidence in contrast with the presumption. It is the distinction between evidence and presumption that gives us the dichotomies referred to in “internal and external” and in “body in body.”
We will initially set aside the wide-ranging fourth satipaṭṭāna, each exercise of which takes up a recognized dhamma (Dhamma teaching) for experiential investigation and internalization. The exercises of the first three satipaṭṭhānas are quite different in that they make little or no reference to Dhamma in the exercises themselves, but rely on the common formulaic refrain that is, nonetheless rich in Dhamma. The refrain uniformly conveys the critical teaching of the three characteristics (tilakkhaṇa) of non-self, impermanence and suffering. To get a sense of the logic of the refrain, consider this passage from the Mahānidāna Suta:
*Now, Ānanda, one who says: “feeling is my self” should be told: “There are three kinds of feelings, friend: pleasant, painful, and neither pleasant not painful. Which of the three do you consider to be your self?” When a pleasant feeling is felt, no painful or neither pleasant not painful feelings is felt, but only pleasant feelings. When a painful feelings is felt, no pleasant or neither pleasant not painful feeling is felt, but only a painful feeling. And when a neither pleasant not painful feeling is felt, no pleasant or painful feeling.
*A pleasant feeling is impermanent, conditioned, dependently arisen, bound to decay, to vanish, to fade away, to cease – and so too is a painful feeling and a neither pleasant not painful feeling. So anyone who, on experiencing a pleasant feeling, thinks, “This is my self,” must, at the cessation of that pleasant feeling think: “My self has gone!” and the same with a painful and a neither pleasant not painful feeling. Thus whoever thinks: “feeling is my self” is contemplating something in this present life that is impermanent, a mixture of happiness and unhappiness, subject to arising and passing away. Therefore it is not fitting to maintain: “feeling is my self.” (DN 15 ii66-7).
We notice that this Mahānidāna passage considers the prospect that feeling is equivalent to the self, and argues that this is unsubstantiated. The teaching of non-self is that we presume the existence of a substantial, fixed self as an abstraction which is unsupported by the evidence, and which furthermore results in suffering. It is just as reasonable to consider that either body or mind is equivalent to the self. This explains the particular themes the first three satipaṭṭhānas: the body, feeling and the mind are three facets of this self that we presume to our detriment.
The Mahānidāna passage then considers the evidence for feeling being this presumed self and finds it wanting, primarily because whatever it is we experience as feeling is always fragmentary, situation-specific, and ever changing, that is, impermanent and lacking the substantial fixedness we presume the self to have. We could argue the same way about the body and the mind.
Now, let’s compare the Mahānidāna passage with the Satipaṭṭhāna refrain:
(1) In this way he abides contemplating body in the body internally, or he abides contemplating body in the body externally, or he abides contemplating body in the body both internally and externally.
( 2) He abides contemplating in body the nature of arising, or he abides contemplating in body the nature of vanishing, or he abides contemplating in body the nature of both arising and vanishing.
(3) Recollection that “the body exists” is simply established in him to the extent necessary for bare knowledge and proficiency.1
(4) He abides independent. He doesn’t cling to anything in the world.
… That is how a bhikkhu abides contemplating body in the body. (MN 10)
I submit that the logic of the two passages is substantially the same:
In paragraph (1), what we contemplate “internally” is the observable bodily “evidence,” based on the instructions of the preceding exercise itself. I will call this contemplation “internal analysis.” What we contemplate “externally” is the body as a facet of the self, which is a “presumption” of a substantial, fixed thing. When we contemplate both “internally and externally,” we are asking, Are these the same? We discover that we cannot reconcile the presumption with the evidence. I will call these final two contemplations “external analysis.”
Paragraph (2) brings the dhamma of impermanence into internal analysis, for the fragmentary, contingent and ephemeral nature of the internal evidence undermines uniquely well the presumption of the substantial, fixed self.
Paragraph (3) recognizes the practical usefulness of the external body, feeling and mind, that is, of the self, for instance, to cross the street without getting run over by an ox cart. But we dare not take them as more than conveniences, we take care to acknowledge their emptiness. This is a subtle point, and I’m glad to see it here.
Paragraph (4) is the sole (albeit oblique) reference in the refrain to the characteristic (lakkhaṇa) of suffering, but taking an optimistic perspective, as something abandoned along with clinging by means of this practice.
This dichotomy of evidence and presumption makes sense of the expression ‘contemplating body in the body,’ and of ‘internal’ and ‘external’ in the refrain. “Internal body” (which I translate grammatically into English as an indefinite collective) is bodily “evidence,” fragmentary, situation-specific, observable and ever changing. “The external body” (a singular definite) is one’s body “presumed” to exist as a substantial, fixed thing, since it is a facet of “the self.”2 “Contemplating both internally and externally” is to search for the external body/self on the basis of the evidence, failing, thereby “quelling” (subduing or pacifying) the presumption that it is there.
Since the refrain does not mention “self” or “no-self” directly, it is easy to miss the degree to which the satipaṭṭhāna is about non-self.3 The critically important teaching of non-self is somewhat unique among the dhammas and requires a distinct method of analysis, for we cannot directly verify a negative in experience. Each individual exercise in the first three satipaṭṭhānas is a kind of thought experiment that represents yet another way to deconstruct the presumption of the self, largely in terms of impermanence. This is virtually the sole function of the first three satipaṭṭānas, not as an intellectual exercise, but through repeatedly encountering the incompatability between the external body, feeling or mind and its internal evidence, to produce an intuitive, internalized understanding of non-self.4
Some readers may be scratching their heads or raising their eyebrows, wondering why anyone would want presumptively to equate feeling with the self. This role in the case of the body and of the mind seem clear: famously “I think, therefore I am,” and analogously “I physically occupy space, therefore I am!” Consciousness also fits well as a facet of self: recall the “pernicious view” of the bhikkhu Sāti, for instance, that it is consciousness that is reborn. 5 I surmise that, due to a close association between feeling and consciousness, feeling serves as a stand-in for consciousness. Together the body, consciousness and the mind give us a neatly construed self whose facets are a solid container, a space inside in which thoughts and emotions play our, and a window to the world outside.6
The kinship of feeling with consciousness can be appreciated if we first note that vedanā ‘feeling’ is in fact a gerund of the verb vedeti ‘sense, know, experience,’ and hence effectively literally means ‘being conscious of.’ Although the examples of vedanā repeated in the Pali formulas seem to be limited to immediate simple valuations of suffering, pleasure, or simply “mattering,” this factor is, in fact, the basis from which the entire world we are conscious of unfolds. For the Buddha:
All things … come together in feeling. (AN 9.14)
The causal influence of vedanā is described as follows:
With contact as condition there is feeling. What one feels, that one perceives. What one perceives, that one thinks about. What one thinks about, that one mentally proliferates. With what one has mentally proliferated as the source, perceptions and notions [born of] mental proliferation beset a man … (MN 18, i112-3)
Through feeling, leading to perception and proliferation of thought, we imagine the world that we are conscious of.
About this, the Buddha said,
In this fathom-long living body, along with its perceptions and thoughts, lies the world, the arising of the world, and the cessation of the world. (AN 4.45)
The Pali word for ‘world’ (loka) is equated with consciousness, since it is consistently used in the sense of world we are conscious of, not some “objective” world largely beyond experience.7 This gives us the following facets, which correspond to the first three satipaṭṭhānas:
(1) the self as the body,
(2) the self as consciousness, and
(3) the self as the mind.
The way one presumes the self seem likely to include all three facets, but there are there are doubtlessly variations. In fact, the Mahānidāna Sutta also considers two alternatives to equating feeling with the self.
In what ways, Ānanda, do people regard the self? They equate the self with feeling:
1. “Feeling is my self,” or
2. “Feeling is not my self, my self is impercipient,” or
3. “Feeling is not my self, but my self is not impercipient, it is of a nature to feel.” (DN 15 ii66)
The first option is that self is simply equivalent to feeling. The second is that the self is equivalent to body, the facet which cannot perceive. The third is that the self is equivalent to mind, the facet that can perceive and emote, and from which feeling and consciousness arise. This gives us the first three satipaṭṭhānas as alternatives: body, feelings and mind, as reflecting these three facets of self.
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I deliberately avoid translating sati as ‘mindfulness,’ because this term has lost the original intention of Rhys David’s once apt translation. See my associated paper, How “mindfulness” got mislabeled. ‘Proficiency’ is my attempt to restore that intention.
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‘Contemplating body in the body’ translates kāye kāyānupassī. Translating the locative kāye requires choice of a specific English preposition and either a definite or indefinite article; I choose ‘in the body’ for consistency with the present account of the external (or “whole”) body. kāyānupassī is a compound kāya+anupassī, literally ‘body-contemplating.’ I choose to translate kāya here as a noun, but without an article, to convey the collective sense of internal body as an unspecified range of bodily evidence.
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The “internally/externally/both” formula is attested in all parallel versions of the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta and found repeated in other correlates, but is more commonly part of the introduction (Sujāto 2012, 205).
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In the related paper The miracle of samādhi I show how samādhi facilitates such internalization through disrupting conceptualization.
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MN 38 i256-8.
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This is also roughly what your car gives you, which might explain why many of us identify with out cars.
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Hamilton (2000) is largely concerned with the implications of this point. She states (p. 140) that forgetting that the focus of Dhamma is the world of experience, leads to a lot of misunderstandings. See also Cintita (2021, 5-9).
