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“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
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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)
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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
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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
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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 info@theexperimentpublishing.com.
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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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