Brain-Training-with-Buddha_3P.indd Read online

  “A deeply engaging book that . . . mindfulness practitioners around the globe will find useful.”

  —Sharon Salzberg, author of Real Happiness

  Brain Training

  with

  the Buddha

  A Modern Path to Insight Based on the

  Ancient Foundations of Mindfulness

  E R I C H A R R I S O N

  Brain Training

  with

  the Buddha

  Brain-Training-with-Buddha_3P.indd 1

  10/24/19 15:35

  Also by Eric Harrison

  Books

  Teach Yourself to Meditate (1993)

  Meditation and Health (1999)

  The Naked Buddha (1999)

  Do You Want to Meditate? (2001)

  The 5-Minute Meditator (2005)

  The Art of Awareness (2007)

  CD ReCoRDings

  How to Meditate, Part 1 (2012)

  How to Meditate, Part 2 (2012)

  Short, Active Meditations (2012)

  Brain-Training-with-Buddha_3P.indd 2

  10/24/19 15:35

  Brain Training

  with

  the Buddha

  A Modern Path to Insight Based on the

  Ancient Foundations of Mindfulness

  E R I C H A R R I S O N

  N E W YO R K

  Brain-Training-with-Buddha_3P.indd 3

  10/24/19 15:35

  Brain Training with the Buddha: A Modern Path to Insight Based on the Ancient Foundations of Mindfulness

  Copyright © 2015, 2017, 2019 by Eric Harrison

  First published in North America as The Foundations of Mindfulness by The Experiment, LLC, in 2017. This paperback edition first published in 2019.

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or online reviews, no portion of this book may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  The Experiment, LLC | 220 East 23rd Street, Suite 600 | New York, NY 10010-4658

  theexperimentpublishing.com

  This book contains the opinions and ideas of its author. It is intended to provide helpful and informative material on the subjects addressed in the book. It is sold with the understanding that the author and publisher are not engaged in rendering medical, health, or any other kind of personal professional services in the book. The author and publisher specifically disclaim all responsibility for any liability, loss, or risk—personal or otherwise—that is incurred as a consequence, directly or indirectly, of the use and application of any of the contents of this book.

  THE EXPERIMENT and its colophon are registered trademarks of The Experiment, LLC.

  Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book and The Experiment was aware of a trademark claim, the designations have been capitalized.

  The Experiment’s books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk for premiums and sales promotions as well as for fund-raising or educational use.

  For details, contact us at [email protected].

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier edition as follows:

  Names: Harrison, Eric, author.

  Title: The foundations of mindfulness : how to cultivate attention,

  good judgment, and tranquility / Eric Harrison.

  Description: New York : Experiment, [2017] | Includes bibliographical

  references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016051345 | ISBN 9781615192564 (hardcover)

  Subjects: LCSH: Meditation--Buddhism. | Satipatthana (Buddhism) |

  Buddhism--Doctrines. | Attention--Religious aspects. | Emotions.

  Classification: LCC BQ5612 .H3697 2017 | DDC 158.1/2--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016051345

  ISBN 978-1-61519-619-7

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-61519-624-1

  Cover design by Beth Bugler

  Text design by Sarah Smith

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First paperback printing December 2019

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Brain-Training-with-Buddha_3P.indd 4

  10/24/19 15:35

  C O N T E N T S

  Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

  Some Useful Terms . . . . . . . . . . 15

  PA RT O N E : The First Foundation: Mindfulness of the Body

  1 The Standard Meditation Practice . . . . . . . . . . 19

  2 Anxiety and the Overactive Mind . . . . . . . . . . 27

  3 The Breath Meditation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34

  4 The Miraculous Sigh . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44

  5 The Body Scan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50

  6 Controlling Thought . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63

  7 Why Focus on the Body? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77

  8 To Sit or Not to Sit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91

  9 Mindful Action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101

  10 A Journey into Open Monitoring . . . . . . . . . . 113

  Brain-Training-with-Buddha_3P.indd 5

  10/24/19 15:35

  PA RT T WO : The Satipatthana Sutta

  11 An Overview of the Satipatthana Sutta . . . . . . 128

  12 The Foundations of Mindfulness . . . . . . . . . . . 133

  13 The History of Translation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138

  14 Sati: The Analysis of a Word. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148

  15 How the Sutta Works . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165

  PA RT T H R E E : Other Foundations: Mindfulness of Emotion,

  Mindfulness of States of Mind, and Mindfulness of Thought

  16 Emotion at the Atomic Level . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179

  17 Painful Emotion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193

  18 States of Mind . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202

  19 Optimizing Emotion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 216

  20 Embodied Thought . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 232

  21 Attention . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 246

  22 Good Judgment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261

  PA RT F O U R : Modern Applications of Mindfulness

  23 The Scientific Evidence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 277

  24 The Story of Modern Mindfulness . . . . . . . . . 288

  25 The Modern Definition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 299

  26 Using the Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 308

  Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 315

  References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 322

  Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325

  About the Author . . . . . . . . . . . . 330

  Brain-Training-with-Buddha_3P.indd 6

  10/24/19 15:35

  I N T R O D U C T I O N

  Meditation is a simple skill. Having a teacher can help, but

  meditators often figure it out for themselves. I taught

  myself to meditate when I was still a teenager, but in 1975 I

  stumbled on a remarkable twenty-five-hundred-year-old text.

  This was the Satipatthana Sutta, usually translated as The

  Foundations of Mindfulness. The word sati means “attention”

  or “mindfulness,” and the word sut
ta means “text.” From now

  on, I’ll refer to this text simply as the Sutta.1

  This text is the Buddha’s original, do-it-yourself, “how to

  meditate and be mindful” manual. If a Buddhist knows any

  original text it is likely to be the Sutta. It consists of thirteen groups of exercises and provides the authority for the popular ten-day Burmese-style “Vipassana” retreats. Vipassana, in

  turn, is the direct inspiration for the use of mindfulness in

  psychology.

  The Sutta is only a few pages long. Its great virtue for mod-

  ern purposes is that it is more about mindfulness practice

  than Buddhist dogma. The translation I read in 1975 came

  from the Victorian era, so I converted its outmoded language

  into modern English, and memorized it. It gave a clear shape

  Brain-Training-with-Buddha_3P.indd 1

  10/24/19 15:35

  to my existing meditation practice and mapped out possibilities I’d never imagined. The Sutta has been my touchstone

  ever since.

  Soon afterward I attended my first ten-day Vipassana

  retreat, led by a young and enthusiastic former monk,

  Christopher Titmuss. (He is still teaching, and I owe him my

  thanks.) Memorably, on the third day of that retreat, at 10:30

  in the morning, it came to me, with absolute certainty, that

  my life would revolve around meditation—and so it turned

  out. Over the next decade I spent a total of eighteen months

  doing Vipassana, Tibetan, Zen, and yoga retreats.

  In 1987 I opened the Perth Meditation Centre and was

  soon teaching a thousand people each year. From the start,

  the Sutta helped me avoid several pitfalls. For example, most

  people assume that to meditate we have to sit still with our

  eyes closed. However, the Buddha said that this is just the

  starting point. In fact, he regarded sitting meditation as noth-

  ing more than the first part of the first of the four “foundations” of mindfulness.

  The Buddha did not identify “mindfulness” with a formal

  sit-down meditation, as we tend to do nowadays. He viewed

  mindfulness as a quality of discriminating attention that

  should be cultivated all day long. In the Sutta, he explains how

  to meditate while sitting, walking, standing, and lying down.

  He saw this capacity for continual self-observation as essential

  for tranquility, clear understanding, and good judgment on

  the inner path. Over my years of teaching, I developed a rep-

  ertoire of what I call “spot meditations” based on this versatile

  approach. The Sutta was the inspiration for what became the

  forty-two exercises in my 2005 book, The 5-Minute Meditator.

  2 | B R A I N T R A I N I N G W I T H T H E B U D D H A

  Brain-Training-with-Buddha_3P.indd 2

  10/24/19 15:35

  Teaching meditation became my full-time career, and I’ve

  written seven books on the subject, but I never had any appe-

  tite for Buddhism itself. I dislike the monastic, world-denying

  values of traditional Buddhism, and its reliance on karma and

  reincarnation to explain suffering. Conversely, I found popu-

  lar Buddhism too sentimental and shallow to take seriously.

  As a meditation teacher, I made it clear that my values were

  not Buddhist, not yogic, and not New Age. I couldn’t abandon my Western lineage even if I tried. My spiritual heroes are

  Socrates, Aristotle, the natural philosophers of the Enlighten-

  ment, and their scientific descendants. When students ask me

  what I believe in, I usually say that I am a “critical thinker.”

  Fortunately, in the Sutta it is remarkably easy to distin-

  guish meditation practice from Buddhist dogma. Buddhism

  is not meditation. Meditation is not Buddhism. No one has to

  buy the Buddhist package, or any part of it, to meditate. We

  can easily extract the Buddha’s superb mind-training tech-

  niques from the Sutta, and use them for our own purposes.

  When I opened the Perth Meditation Centre, I was committed

  to teaching only what I genuinely believed in. So I extracted

  from the Sutta what I found practical for my students and

  myself and diplomatically neglected the rest.

  For most of my peers, however, the relationship between

  meditation and Buddhism remained problematic. In 1994

  I attended a four-day conference of 150 Western meditation

  teachers in San Francisco, hosted by Jack Kornfield. Most of

  us were noncelibate, unaffiliated teachers who had studied in

  Buddhist settings. We discussed the vexed question of how we

  could conscientiously integrate the Asian monastic tradition

  I N T R O D U C T I O N | 3

  Brain-Training-with-Buddha_3P.indd 3

  10/24/19 15:35

  with the demands and values of Western civilization. The simple answer seems to be: You can’t. They are antagonistic.

  En route to the conference, I shared the bus with a molec-

  ular biologist from the University of Massachusetts named

  Jon Kabat-Zinn. His book Wherever You Go, There You Are

  became a bestseller that year and is a landmark in the Mod-

  ern Mindfulness movement. We had an exciting conversa-

  tion about the aforementioned difficulties, and his parting

  words to me were: “Don’t give up on meditation just because

  the Buddhists are crazy!”

  Over the following years I pursued my own studies in sci-

  ence and psychology and hoped for the time when medita-

  tion could be regarded as scientifically sound. Two more big

  conferences and a decade later, I despaired that this would

  ever happen in my lifetime. My peers valued Buddhism much

  more than I did and were more likely to identify with it. As a

  meditation teacher who was trying to be as rational and non-

  mystical as possible, I felt very isolated.

  Then, around 2005, the situation started to change. The

  most telling sign was a change of name. As a teacher, I get

  phone calls every week from prospective students. Many

  callers used to say, “My psychologist [or doctor] has told me

  to learn meditation.” Now they were saying, “My psycholo-

  gist has told me to learn mindfulness.” The technique hadn’t

  changed, but “meditation” had mysteriously morphed into

  “mindfulness.” How did this happen?

  The explanation starts with the Sutta. Early last century

  in Burma, there was a revival of meditation practice which

  drew its methodology directly from the Sutta. As a lay, not monastic, movement it had no precedent in Buddhist history.

  4 | B R A I N T R A I N I N G W I T H T H E B U D D H A

  Brain-Training-with-Buddha_3P.indd 4

  10/24/19 15:35

  Its leader, the charismatic politician U Ba Khin, established the International Meditation Centre (IMC) in 1952 and authorized laymen and -women and Westerners as teachers. This

  secular movement was reinforced by the great reformer

  monk Mahasi Sayadaw, who was also an enthusiastic teacher

  of laypeople.

  IMC established the model of ten-day Vipassana retreats

  that have since swept the world. The retreats were known for

  being “just meditation, not Buddhism,” and it wasn’t long

  before many Westerners (including me) were lea
ding med-

  itation retreats for purposes far removed from the original

  Buddhist goals.

  One of these new purposes was pain management. In 1979

  Jon Kabat-Zinn faithfully adapted the format of the ten-day

  Vipassana retreat into an eight-week wellness program at the

  University of Massachusetts Medical School. He called the

  new therapy “mindfulness-based stress reduction” (MBSR).

  Originally designed for people in chronic pain, it was soon

  adapted for broader psychological use. Other therapies

  had independently promoted mindfulness, but MBSR, as a

  single-method discipline, quickly became the market leader.

  Mindfulness seemed to work. The research followed. Edu-

  cators, athletes, the self-help industry, corporate trainers,

  and even the military took it up. The wave of interest became

  a tsunami. In the popular press, “mindfulness” as a label

  more or less came to trump “meditation.” So was this just a

  fashion-driven change of name or is there a genuine difference?

  When I ask my students why they want to learn to medi-

  tate, they typically say something like “I’m too anxious. I can’t

  stop thinking and I have trouble sleeping.” Basic meditation

  I N T R O D U C T I O N | 5

  Brain-Training-with-Buddha_3P.indd 5

  10/24/19 15:35

  practice can be ideal for them. This involves two skills. The first is learning to relax quickly and consciously. The second

  is learning to pay attention, and so control runaway thought.

  Meditation is a perfect way to learn relaxation and attention at

  the same time. Focusing on the body relaxes it, and the act of

  focusing weakens our habitual thoughts and calms the mind.

  As sit-down practices, mindfulness and meditation are

  identical. No beginner could make any distinction between

  them. Same rootstock. Same benefits. Same skills: relaxation

  and attention. Very few people and very few therapies go

  beyond this point, and perhaps they don’t need to. The ben-

  efits of this alone can be life changing. So does it matter that

  popular writers now call this technique “mindfulness” rather

  than “meditation”?

  It does. “Mindfulness” and “meditation” are not naked,

  stand-alone concepts. “Meditation” comes from monastic tra-

  ditions based on withdrawal from the world. It is related to