I remember my Taiwanese teacher often reprimand those who teach
Anapanasati as counting breathe. And one of the first advices on
Anapanasati I received from Thusness many years ago is "don't count
breathe" (which I didn't) and only be aware of "the immediate
tactile sensations of the breathing itself".
Why? Counting is a conceptual activity. It will not truly lead
to any real awareness or insight. Furthermore, it is not what the
Buddha taught Anapanasati as.
Nonetheless some people employ this technique, which shoiuld be
understood as merely a stepping stone to be dropped ASAP... so this
is a sharing.
http://www.wildmind.org/blogs/on-practice/making-the-practice-your-own
Tejananda
Jan 04, 2012
When you first learn to meditate, it’s
appropriate and helpful to take on structured practices. There are
plenty of such practices available – ones for cultivating
absorption, such as mindfulness of breathing, or for ‘positive
emotion’, such as metta bhavana, or general overall mindfulness,
such as systematically cultivating awareness of the ‘four
foundations’ – body sensations, hedonic feeling-tone, mental
activities and dhammas or ‘ultimates’.
Structure is usually very helpful for learning the ropes. All
Buddhist practices are pragmatic – the main question to bear in
mind is ‘is this working’? Is it effective in cultivating the
quality that it’s intended to cultivate? If it is, then it makes
sense to continue pursuing this approach as long as it is
effective. If not, then it’s necessary to review our approach and
try another.
For example, we may have learned the mindfulness of breathing as
a way of settling the mind. If we’ve never tried anything like
meditation before, it’s very likely that the first thing we notice
is that the mind wants to do anything but settle! Pragmatically
speaking, it’s often useful to give the thinking mind a simple
‘task’ to do, so that there’s less likelihood of it getting carried
away with endless thoughts. Hence, it’s often recommended to start
the practice using counting of breaths – this can be very effective
in keeping the mind from wandering while focussed attention is
being paid to the sensations of the breathing itself.
Note that we’ve got two quite distinct things going on here.
First, there is the counting, which is a conceptual activity.
Second, there is the directing and settling of attention (i.e.
awareness) on the sensations of the breathing, which is
non-conceptual. Being unclear about this basic distinction is where
unhelpful views can appear. For instance, the thinking mind can
subtly take over and make it into ‘mindfulness of counting’ rather
than ‘mindfulness of breathing’. Or it could ‘usurp’ the function
of awareness so that we are attending to thoughts of the
breathing rather than the immediate tactile sensations of the
breathing itself.
These views may be unhelpful but nevertheless, if we recognise
them, they represent a great opportunity to learn something about
how the thinking mind functions. It functions by taking over!
That’s to say, it literally thinks that it is experiencing the
breath (and everything else that we experience through our senses).
In fact, all the mind can do is abstract from our direct
experience. We can think of the taste of a strawberry or an orange
and, in imagination at least, there is some ‘sense’ of what that
taste is like. This is presumably how we recognise the particular
flavours of those fruits when we eat them. However, the memory of a
taste is completely different to the immediate experience of the
taste when eating a juicy strawberry or orange right now.
Similarly, we can think of the sensation of the breathing without
realising that this is just a mental activity and not the actual
experience of the breath.
Clarifying this distinction between mental activities and
immediate sense impressions is crucial to learning to meditate. In
fact, it’s always crucial, however long we’ve been practising.
Attempting to focus on thoughts won’t lead to very much
real tranquillity or absorption because thoughts are, ultimately,
precisely what underlies our lack of tranquillity. All we have to
do is notice the difference – ‘this is a sensation’ and ‘this is
thinking’. We don’t have to eliminate thinking in order to
become more absorbed – all we need to do is to let it fall into the
background as we recognise the actual object – the immediate
tactile sensations of the breath arising in awareness.
Another unhelpful view comes from an attitude of ‘should-ism’,
e.g. ‘I’ve been taught the practice in this particular way, so I
should always do it in just this way’. This kind of view can be
insidious as there’s often a positive basis – e.g. respect for the
tradition, method or teacher. ‘lf thousands of people have
meditated in this way for thousands of years, who am I to do it
differently?’ Well, if such thoughts do arise, rest assured that
the only people who meditate according to exactly the same
structure for their whole ‘meditation career’ are those who give up
before very long! And they probably give up because they don’t seem
to be getting anywhere with their meditation.
Structure enables us to learn more effectively, but the implicit
question we always have to bear in mind is, as I mentioned above,
is this effective? We learn what’s effective by doing it, and by
making mistakes. ‘Mistakes’ is a misnomer really because we’re
simply learning from experience. This experiential and exploratory
attitude is fundamental to the Buddha’s teaching. According to one
sutta (discourse), he tells a group of lay followers not
to depend on what they’ve heard, or on tradition, or revered texts,
or views, or reasoning or what seems to work for someone else, or
what’s said by a respected teacher. Rather, he says, when you know
in direct experience that an approach is good, blameless
and wise, and leads to benefit and happiness, that’s self-evidently
how to practice.
So, with the mindfulness of breathing (though this applies to
any practice), there comes a point sooner or later when it’s
appropriate to diverge from the way it’s been taught. It’s not
indispensable always to start by counting the breaths. How the
practice goes is contingent upon many factors – you might be doing
the mindfulness of breathing before or after a busy and hectic day,
or you might be doing it in the middle of a meditation retreat. In
the first instance, counting breaths is likely to be helpful, in
the second, it could well be unnecessary as the mind is already
quite settled and tranquil. If your intention is to enter the
absorptions (jhanas), any structure will naturally drop
away. In fact, if you ‘religiously’ keep to the structure or cling
limpet-like to instructions like ‘cultivate one-pointed effort to
stay with the breathing continuously’, deeper absorption will be
prevented from arising even if the conditions are otherwise very
supportive.
Once the basic structured practice has been explored
sufficiently (what is ‘sufficient’? Adapt the Buddha’s advice
above!) you can make it more ‘your own’ by approaching the various
stages you’ve learned as ‘tools’ that you can use as appropriate,
rather than as an invariable format. Keeping to the basic practice
is a bit like a piano player never playing anything but scales – to
discover our potential we have become competent at the basics and
then be prepared to let go, explore, make ‘mistakes’, learn, and
eventually discover how to improvise, letting go of the form
altogether.