Just to throw out a few examples of later uses of the phrase, here are a few I thought might be accessible.
T 275, Sarvavaidalyasaṃgrahasūtra, Vinītaruci
爾時世尊
At that time, the Bhagavān
正念現前
with correct mindfulness before him,
從三昧起
arose from samādhi,
遍觀大眾
and observed the entire assembly [of humans and non-humans].
T 279, Buddhāvataṃsakasūtra, Śikṣānanda
念念明達
illuminating and penetrating each thought,
一切佛法
all buddha-dharmas,
正念現前
with correct mindfulness at the fore,
無所取著
without grasping or attachment.
In the 600-fascicle Mahāprajñāpāramitā Sūtra (T 220), it appears four times, always in the form:
端身正願住對面念
Adjust body, correct intention, abide with mindfulness at the fore.
In later Chinese Buddhist literature, the phrase also continued to be used. T 1972, Questions on the Pure Land, is one example. At the time of death, with a fearless mind, and “with mindfulness at the fore” (正念現前), one is able to see Amitābha Buddha and his noble saṃgha, and experience rebirth there, pulled from a golden lotus flower.
Thanks for bringing the Sanskrit and Chinese parallels into the picture. I tend towards an editorial artefact in Pali as well. If originally there really was a connection between parimukha and ānāpānassati, what would have been easier than “paṇidhāya parimukhaṃ ānāpānassatiṃ upaṭṭhapetvā”?
The passage in Sanskrit is indeed revealing, and I wonder if the following reasoning holds up to a literal translation of the Chinese as well…
The expression in Sanskrit goes: pratimukhāṃ sṃrtim upasthāpya
Please correct me if I’m wrong, but I read upasthāpya as a gerund of the causative of upastā with a meaning of “to be made stood near” and with upasthāpana having the connotation of “causing to remember”, upasthiti “the faculty of memory”.
So it might turn out that the passage goes “causing the to-be brought about remembering” of… pratimukhāṃ sṃrtim.
pratimukhā = pratimukha = towards / near / facing / in front
sṃrti = memory / the meditation subject
So my interpretation of the Sanskrit version is that this preparatory meditation passage describes the location (root of a tree etc.), posture (bent at the lap) and mental direction (recollecting what I want to do in the upcoming meditation session) of the meditation.
The Sanskrit doesn’t hint at anapanassati at all, neither by proximity nor by explaining parimukha. Obviously (some) Pali editors had something else in mind (as seen in AN 10.60, Iti 85, Pi Tv Bu Vb Pj 3 and the Vibhanga).
Now my question to the Chinese text would be if it goes along with the gerund/future-passive-participle interpretation of the Sanskrit. Meaning:
does the passage have the bhikkhu active in a form of ‘mindfulness’, already meditating?
or is he busy mentally preparing, “facing” the future/upcoming meditation?
Unfortunately Bh. Anālayo’s commentary doesn’t mention how literal his translation “establishing mindfulness” is.
Over the recent past I came to a satisfactory, admittedly personal, understanding on parimukha. I came to understand mukha as: opening, entry point. And hence parimukha as ‘around the opening/entry point’.
It came about when I read in ‘The Gospel of Ramakrishna’ that his disciple ‘M’ himself wrote/translated into English. There I found
Remain in bhavamukha, on the threshold of relative consciousness
I understood that mukha is still in use in a metaphorical sense as ‘opening, threshold, entry point’. And when I was looking for similar uses in pali they were not difficult to find…
AN 1.319 has “Just as a trap set at the mouth of a river” (nadīmukhe)
AN 4.198 mentions some ascetic practices and for the opening of a pot and bowl kumbhimukha and kaḷopimukha
So with the literal meanings as ‘mouth’ and other meanings as ‘face’, or ‘direction’ we also have very clear meanings as ‘opening…’. That to me makes sense now. I see that this is not a proof, but still going from here I see three possibilities of interpreting mukha in the context of parimukha and meditation:
mukha as ‘the opening of the mouth’
mukha as ‘the opening of the nose’
mukha as ‘the opening of the mind’
Of those three I see the third as the least probable. And the first two would speak for a very clear connection with anapanassati and indeed focusing on where the breath goes in and out, i.e. the nostrils.
@sujato, I’d be interested in your intuition here if you’d find a minute, knowing that in the end it cannot be definitely solved…
for the 16 steps of anapana and its prelude, where parimukha appears, i translated it literally as “near the mouth”.
it makes sense, with anapanasati being a kinaesthetic experience, and as one tries to stay continuously with the breath, the movement of wind and bodily tissue near the mouth, rise and fall of the front of the body.
it’s precisely because of the cool soothing kinaesthetic experience of in and out breathing that it works so effectively in its advertised benefit of cutting off thinking. By initiating the wholesome physical pleasure of breathing, described in SN 54.9 as peaceful, sublime, an ambrosial dwelling, how easy it is then to mindfully stay with that instead of running off with akusala thinking.
of course parimukham works metaphorically as well too, and we should consider the possibility that both the literal and metaphorical meanings may have been intended. i don’t know why people are always so quick to make things into an either-or situation, where you have to choose one or the other. the literal interpretation works very well as an entry level advise for beginners. just as the 3rd tetrad of 16 APS, vimutti can represent liberation (temporary) of 5 hindrances to enter first jhana, liberation from rupa to enter formless attainments, liberation from piiti to enter 3rd jhana, etc.
So just as vimutti in step 12 can apply to many stages of samadhi, parimukham could be intended to capture a wide range of possibilities as well.
unfortunately by translating parimukha as “near the mouth” in english would deprive us of the metaphorical dimension.
Ven. Thanissaro’s translation of “placing mindfulness to the fore” I’m guessing was intended to try to capture both.
even a literal translation stays cryptic. where do you find ‘near’ if I may ask?
for pari I find in pali ‘away from, off’ or ‘around’. Problem with ‘around the mouth’ is that it’s just not the primary experience in anapanassati. When you recall a cold where the nose is blocked you’ll know what I mean - when you breath through the mouth for a while the mouth gets completely dry, so an anapanassati-session is almost certainly through the nose, and since the Indics had a word for ‘nose’ it would be weird to use ‘around the mouth’.
That’s why it calls either for a metaphorical meaning, or we don’t understand what it means yet. I even played with the idea that the sati-recollection is subtely activated as unspoken words and hence the ‘mouth’, but the idea is too outlandish.
So it should be metaphorical, but I personally never understood what it’s supposed to mean ‘to establish mindfulness in front of me’ - so I started looking for other legitimate readings and am content now with the above ‘opening’.
i used “near” based on the “around” definition for “pari”.
since the openings of the nostrils and mouth are close together, I feel “mouth” is a more concise and unambiguous clue than “opening”, which could refer to many apertures of the body no where near the center of where breathing action is most easily detected at the coarse level.
even if our nose is plugged up from an illness, and breathing is difficult, there is still a physical kinaesthetic activity in which to focus our attention on, which serves the number purpose of cutting off unprofitable thinking and replacing it with something profitable, such as examining the causes of the unpleasant breathing experiences, and the ways to transcend it.
I don’t see why “mindfulness to the fore” is difficult to understand. Certainly, you can recognize a foreground and a background in your mental experience?
Just as the royal frontier fortress has a gate-keeper — wise, experienced, intelligent — to keep out those he doesn’t know and to let in those he does, for the protection of those within and to ward off those without; in the same way a disciple of the noble ones is mindful, highly meticulous, remembering & able to call to mind even things that were done & said long ago. With mindfulness as his gate-keeper, the disciple of the ones abandons what is unskillful, develops what is skillful, abandons what is blameworthy, develops what is blameless, and looks after himself with purity. With this sixth true quality is he endowed.
Of course I can read a meaning into it, but it’s not exactly self-explaining.
If taken as ‘in front’ parimukha doesn’t already mean ‘fore-ground’, so that even the metaphorical meaning would have to be streched. But even if we take it in that meaning, does it mean to say that my sati was in the background before? Again, of course it’s possible, but I think it doesn’t really stand Ockham’s razor?
Sorry, but I can’t see how parimukha or ‘foreground’ is similar to sati as the gatekeeper. Which similarity do you mean?
Monks in that time, had to remember a Teaching that was not written. Like the Brahmins had to remember their Vedas (or at least one of them - śrutidharā).
And in the practice of ānāpānāsati, for instance, (namely dwelling in the four tetrad,) they would remember it - because they had to apply the Teaching.
They had to put that Teaching in front (mukha); as a in “gatekeeping” the fortress of the body and its six senses. (Particularly when you deal with the “wise/yoniso” ānāpānāsati).
@yogakkhemi, I agree almost completely! For clarity’s sake, I would just add that although sati often refers to memory (nominalized sarati), it has another meaning of focusing awareness or presence of mind.
It is crucial that one must remember the teaching if one is to practice that teaching, yes; but it shouldn’t be overlooked that establishing presence of mind (focusing awareness) is the primary meaning for sati in a mindfulness meditation context.
i’m not trying to pin an exact anatomical part to associate with pari-mukha. the way i understand 16 steps of APS is as a kinaesthetic meditation. they say brahma realm devas (or should they properly be called brahmas and not devas?) can not do 16 APS because they don’t breath, and only have faculties of seeing and hearing compared the humans with 5 senses.
as the physical sensation of air entering near-the-mouth (pari-mukha), serves as a convenient, succinct, sufficiently precise starting location recommendation for being mindful of the kinaesthetic movement of air into our body, whether one wants to take that as mouth, nostril, throat, lungs, chest movement, abdomen movement, any of those could work.
i follow the ockham’s razor interpretation of step 3, in 16 APS, where “sabba kaaya patisamvedi” would then free the meditator to observe any type of breath sensation in any part of the body, whereas the initial recommendation of “pari-mukha” might be helpful just as a starting point, or possibly and optionally, a restricted zone to remain in during times when thinking-evualation is running wild and out of control.
i agree, it never would occur to me on my own that parimukha would have a metaphorical meaning as a prioritized foreground object to be mindful of. Only because some translators used an idiomatic “mindfulness to the fore” that gives the impression.
some of the agama parallels translated it in just that metaphorical sense though, so maybe the theravada “parimukha” could be something fishy.
Just found another reference for mukha as ‘opening’: in the pericope that lets us contemplate as a bag of grains, e.g. MN 119 .7
Seyyathāpi, bhikkhave, ubhatomukhā …putoḷi pūrā… nānāvihitassa dhaññassa
Just as…bhikkhus, a double-opening bag… full of various …grains (literally)
Here we cannot read mukha as ‘mouth’, nor as ‘fore’, ‘front’, ‘throat’ or anything else. We have a straightforward image of a bag with two openings. At least I lack the imagination to read anything else into mukha here.
In the same sutta btw in MN 119 .19 we have the image (for the 2nd jhana) of a “lake with no āyamukha from east, west, north or south” - again the simple solution is clearly to read it as
I just had an absurdly simple idea of how to unlock parimukha, namely that it’s an early typo, actually saying parimokkha.
The pericope would then simply be “… and establish mindfulness around liberation”
I know, I know, another weird theory, and there is no way to prove it, but for me it works better than the contrived ‘around the mouth / face / in front of him’…
Is the compound *parimokkha- otherwise attested in Pali? If so, what is the meaning?
The Sanskrit cognate parimokṣa- is attested with the meaning ‘final release’ (nirvāṇa-), so that’s nice. But, if we assume this meaning for the postulated *parimokkha the syntax of the original sentence changes (since the word no longer functions as an adverb). Would the new construction (with double accusatives?) be acceptable in Pali?
It is not, but nor is parimukha attested in the anatomical meaning, or as ‘in front of’. So the traditional reading has no advantage in that respect
Hopefully some Pali pros just in… As you said, it’s a double accusative anyway, the adverbial meaning being an interpretation to begin with. The verbal function comes from upaṭṭhapetvā - ‘having created/caused to be’. I don’t see why the syntax shouldn’t allow ‘having created liberation-mindfulness’.
It would be very interesting to know of any parallels in Pali of sati- essentially functioning with verbal rection over an object in the accusative, i.e. constructions with: Verb [establish/set up] + satim + acc. object.
If such a corruption did occur, it presumably did so at a very early stage in the text’s transmission. I don’t know much about the written history of EBTs, and would welcome informed speculation.
