Notes from the Bhavana Program:

[The Bhavana Program is a seven-day vipassana retreat of sitting and walking practice which includes a textual study session each morning. This new model, unique to BCBS, allows for an in-depth investigation of the Dhamma using both intellectual and meditative tools of inquiry. It is usually co-taught by a meditation teacher and a scholar.]

One abides contemplating mental objects as mental objects, ardent, fully aware, mindful, having put away covetousness and grief for the world. –Satipatthana Sutta

The Fourth Foundation of Mindfulness

Gloria Taraniya Ambrosia

The fourth foundation of mindfulness has to do with “contemplating dhamma as dhamma,” and how this phrase is understood becomes pivotal to its practice. The word “dhamma” is often used in two very different senses, and I would like to suggest a way of using this ambiguity to great advantage when practicing insight meditation as a form of reflection on the nature of experience.

You are probably most familiar with the word Dhamma (with a capital D) as referring to the teaching of the Buddha, the Truth of the way things are. In the context of this text [the Satipatthana Sutta], however, it is usually taken with a small d and in the plural “dhammas” and translated as “mind objects” or “mental phenomena.” Hence a common translation of the fourth foundation of mindfulness is “contemplating mental phenomena as mental phenomena.”

However, the interpretation I find most effective involves putting these two meanings of the word together to get “contemplating the Dhamma in the dhammas.” This means we are endeavoring to be mindful of, to consider, the Dhamma or Truth in the phenomena of experience. This is contemplation of phenomena in such a way as to bring insight into the fundamental principles of the Buddhist teachings. It is reflection for the purpose of insight. We are directing the observing power of the mind in order to see for ourselves what the Buddha taught. We can actually learn to see the Dhamma (the truth of the teaching) in the dhammas (all arising and passing phenomena).

In this section of the Satipatthana Sutta there are five groupings for contemplation: the five hindrances that are to be overcome, the five aggregates of clinging, the six internal and external sense bases, the seven factors of enlightenment, and the four noble truths. These are the things the Buddha is inviting us to contemplate and to have insight into. He is pointing us in such a way that we can see these processes for ourselves, in our own unfolding experience. All four of the foundations of mindfulness actually do this, but here in the fourth we are clearly bringing in the factor of recollecting or reflecting. Moving beyond mere mindfulness, we are guided through a way of putting things together in our minds so that we make sense of what is going on.

Let’s look for a moment at the difference between the first three foundations of mindfulness and this fourth one. With the first three we are endeavoring to have a direct experience of body, of feeling and of mind without adding anything. We want to be able to just see these experiences as they are. This is no easy task. In order to do this we have to override an incredibly powerful propensity for thinking about things. We easily get caught up in our experience of sensation, feeling and thought, and we proliferate endlessly around our experience at these levels. So the effort is to back off and develop a new relationship with them. We develop the capacity to pull out of identification, to objectify or detach enough to be with the experience in and of itself. If we can do this, it is a huge step.

From this vantage point of greater non-attachment, we are well-positioned for insight. Now the fourth foundation of mindfulness introduces another level of sophistication. We no longer look at just what goes on in the body, just what feeling is occurring, or just at the various states of mind that arise—we actually begin to examine the whole process going on around these. We look at the process of getting caught up, a process of suffering.

With the fourth foundation of mindfulness we see more clearly how we get identified with experience. We derive first hand understanding of how states come up, what makes them stick around, how they go away, and how to keep them from coming up again. We notice what is skillful and what is not. We start to understand for ourselves when there is suffering, how it is that we suffer, and where that suffering is rooted.

This moves our investigation up a notch, to a higher order of discernment. One could say that with this fourth foundation of mindfulness we’re bringing reflective thought more fully into the picture and using it in the interest of our own understanding and freedom.

I find this fascinating. The mind has the capacity, and as far as we know it’s uniquely human, to turn around and observe itself. What are we doing when we’re sitting here meditating? The mind is looking at the mind. The body can’t do that. The eye can’t see itself. The ear can’t hear itself. But the mind can know itself.

In this teaching on the fourth foundation of mindfulness I hear the Buddha inviting us to recognize that we have this capacity, and to use it for the optimal purpose we possibly can, which is to get free. It’s as if the Buddha is saying, “Look and see and understand. Garner the wisdom from your own direct observation, so that you can learn what I learned.” And when we use this reflective capacity to discern things for ourselves, these “ah-ha” moments arise in our practice.

The ability to reflect upon experience is something we don’t really use as confidently or even as consciously as I think we could. Maybe we haven’t evolved enough yet, or maybe it has to do with some sort of cultural limitation. But it seems that this reflective capacity is often operating somewhere just below the level of our awareness, even if we do not acknowledge it. The mind is always putting things together, figuring things out, but we so often don’t notice it as the useful process that it is. I think with this instruction on the fourth foundation of mindfulness the Buddha is trying to get us to make this reflective capacity more conscious so that insights can be more forthcoming.

How do we allow reflective thought into practice? First, it is crucial to distinguish what I’m calling reflective thought from the more common discursive thought. Reflective thought actually has a slight investigative quality to it. The mind is reflecting on experience. It even pokes around at it. The mind is interested, cogitating. It’s wanting to figure out what is happening.

Discursive thinking operates in another, more chaotic way. It’s this tendency of the mind to just pick something up, play with it for a period of time, mull it about, and then put it down—either because something else more interesting comes along or because it’s gotten tired of playing with it. Then it will pick up something else. It has no discrimination or discernment in this regard, and the picking up and putting down is going on virtually all the time.

If we follow this stream of compulsive thinking, then it’s as if we’re living in a dream state. The mind is just moving from one thing to another to another to another to another, and not really discriminating in any way as to what is useful and what is not. These are just the voices inside our heads, chattering away when we sit in meditation or walk around throughout the day. And, as I’m sure you’ve seen, this discursive thought is usually free of any useful content. All the compulsive chatter could stop and we would not have lost much—except maybe a lot of agitation.

With the first three foundations of mindfulness we are trying to calm this activity and see things in-and-of themselves without all the commentary. We are trying to at least diminish if not suspend for a period of time this crazy way of being with sensation, feeling, and thought. If you are having a truly mindful experience of any of these, then thinking about the experience is not going on in the same moment.

The capacity for reflective or contemplative thought is the ability to look at things and reflect upon what is happening. It allows us to ponder our experience, to consider it, to look at things from different angles. The mind is trying to get at the nature of what it is that one is observing. We are using the capacity of mind that is constantly looking for patterns in things and trying to figure things out, to put things together, to understand. And as it is applied in this fourth foundation of mindfulness, it forms the basis of insight.

You probably see this a lot in sitting practice, or even just throughout the course of a day. The mind is constantly trying to find patterns in things, to find a certain order in things. This is natural. With the fourth foundation of mindfulness we are turning this capacity for discerning toward the things that are useful and important: toward understanding, toward our own freedom. We are using reflection to sort out the inner workings of the mind and, more precisely, how we get into suffering and how we get out of it. Really it is no less than that.

I love this aspect of the teaching. It’s as if the Buddha is saying, “Don’t be afraid of using the mind to develop wisdom.” What I find more unusual is that the use of reflective thought as it is being described here is not often included in meditation instructions. Rarely are we instructed to reflect on what’s happening. It’s as if there is a subtle implication that there is something wrong with thinking. Boy, if there’s something wrong with it we’re in big trouble, because we sure think a lot! And if we think there is something wrong with thought we are likely to go to war with thoughts—and this is not helpful. It just gets us more tangled.

Consider this: What if there is nothing wrong with thought? Just because some thoughts can be obsessive or shallow or can block the immediacy of mindful awareness, that does not mean that all thinking is to be shunned. We simply want to discern what kind of thought is helpful, and whether or not it’s being turned to a useful purpose. We want to relate appropriately to thought.

The fourth foundation of mindfulness is like an invitation to look when you’re sitting, to look and see: is there a part of your experience that knows what is happening and that is evaluating it and putting it together according to Dhamma? This is not an unfamiliar capacity at all. Everyone knows exactly what I’m talking about. The purpose of this foundation of mindfulness is to make us more aware that the mind is already reflecting, and to use this capacity more effectively. Let’s not put thought outside the meditation process. You are already thinking, so make it more conscious and turn it towards things that are useful. But be sure you know how to do it so you don’t get caught up in a lot of compulsive thinking. I would go so far as to say, if you’re hesitant or just unsure of this, dare to risk getting caught up in some discursive thought to figure out what it is that we’re talking about. Just dare to try that out.

But it is not like we are entirely without guidance in this process of reflecting upon experience. In the Satipatthana Sutta the instructions on the fourth foundation of mindfulness takes up more than half of the text! So it’s a very significant part of mind training. The Buddha is pointing us towards several things to contemplate, and guides us through it step by step. When we actually take the time to go through these instructions with care, no less than the entire Dhamma opens up to us in the contemplation of dhammas. And this is what we will spend the rest of the week doing—step by step. We will begin to see the Dhamma in the dhammas.

The Fourth Foundation of Mindfulness

Andrew Olendzki

In order to better understand what these foundations of mindfulness [discussed in the Satipatthana Sutta] are all about, let’s begin by going over the Buddha’s basic psychological model of perception and awareness. As you may recall, every moment of experience involves an organ of perception, an object of perception and also a moment of consciousness by means of which the organ is aware of the object. So whether we talk about a moment of seeing or hearing or tasting or smelling or feeling (bodily sensations), this triangulation always occurs. Thus, in every moment of sensory experience, consciousness is always present. If this consciousness were not present, you would be in deep sleep or a coma or you would be an inanimate object.

And the same is true for thinking: the organ is the mind, the object is a thought or memory or daydream, and there is a moment of mental consciousness through which we can say we are aware of the mental object. The fundamental awareness of cognizing an object—whether it be a sensory object or a mental object—is the very medium of all our experience and is thus always present. It manifests in six different modes, or six flavors, if you will, corresponding to the six doors of experience (eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind). Built upon this event and interdependent with it are a number of other factors such as feeling and perception and intention, yielding the notion of the aggregates of experience.

Mindfulness, that quality of mind we develop in vipassanà [insight] meditation, is not necessarily part of this equation. Mindfulness may or may not be manifesting in any given moment of consciousness. You might be totally lost in a reverie, or driven by incessant, compulsive thoughts, or deviously plotting the downfall of an enemy—there is no mindfulness in such states, even though they exist in the stream of consciousness.

So mindfulness is not referring to the foundational level of mental awareness, but to a mental factor that may or may not be present in any particular moment. It is considered one of the formations (sankhàras) rather than a form or a mode of consciousness. As such mindfulness is something constructed in the moment, something learned as a habit over time, something as ephemeral as all other arising and passing phenomena. A moment of experience might be organized around mindfulness, or it may not.

And even when mindfulness manifests in a moment’s constructed experience, it may or may not persist. It can come and go as much as anything else, and when it does so it is not stable, it is not well established. A few moments of mindfulness, dispersed among any number of moments of discombobulated association driven by the forces of conditioning, are not particularly helpful to the enterprise of seeing things clearly. In fact mindfulness is bound to arise from time to time in almost any set of conditions.

The whole enterprise of this text, the Satipatthana Sutta, is training the mind so that mindfulness is one of the factors constructed moment after moment in the mind. And that’s hard to do. Mindfulness is not so much about the quality of this particular moment as it is about the quality of the series of moments. The presence of mindfulness in one mind moment is good, but as soon as it arises it will pass away. What about the next mind moment, and the next one, and the next one? When mindfulness arises again and again, then mindfulness can be said to have become established. This is what the text is trying to train us to do.

And because the flow of experience involves a huge range of objects and all six of the organs, vipassana practice is not about fixing the mind in a certain mode. When the quality of experience involves the factor of mindfulness, the objects of experience become almost irrelevant. It does not matter whether one is hearing the sweet song of a bird or the raspy breathing of one’s fellow yogi; whether one is feeling the balm of pleasure pervading the body or the gnawing pain in the back; whether one is thinking a sublime thought of loving kindness or the harsh aversion of a moment’s jealousy. The practice is more about recalling the intention of being present with whatever is arising in an series uninterrupted by the shifting phenomena of mind and body.

From this perspective, let’s try to better understand what the foundations of mindfulness are all about. What exactly are these texts telling us to do?

The first foundation of mindfulness, mindfulness of the body, is basically trying to get us experientially into the fifth sense door, the door through which we experience the physical sensations of the body. Normally we are bopping all over the place all the time, cycling between the various sensory and mental gateways seemingly at random—though if we could look more closely we would see the subtle matrix of conditioning driving our attention from one door to another. In fact humans spend most of their time in the mind door. We tend to experience something directly very little of the time, and spend a vast amount of our time thinking at the mind door about what we experienced through a sense door.

The commentaries say that mindfulness of the body is a great antidote for too much thinking. Perhaps this is why it is so popular in modern America—so many of us think too much. Developing mindfulness of the body can be a great relief from this, and training in it has the effect of bringing some order, some discipline, to an otherwise chaotic experience. What we are actually being asked to do by our meditation teacher is to bring attention to a particular sliver of over-all experience: the physical sensations that arise and pass away in the sense door of the body. The eyes, ears, nose, tongue and mind are still active, but each time a experience presents itself thought these other avenues we are asked to gently let it go and attend rather to the physical sensations. As we gradually habituate ourselves to doing this, with the help of concentration, it becomes easier and gains some momentum.

The second foundation of mindfulness, mindfulness of feeling, invites us to shift attention away from the sense door of the body, and in fact away from any of the sense doors as such. Instead we focus on the feeling tone or affect tone of all experience, its manifestation as pleasant, unpleasant or neither. In classical terms, we have shifted here from a sense door to an aggregate, from the content of physical experience (pressure, burning, sharp, dull) to the quality of our response to all experience (liking, not liking, can’t tell). Insofar as this requires a shift from something quite concrete (a physical sensation) to something more mental (an evaluative, if intuitive, response) it can be considered a move to greater abstraction, from the physical to the mental.

The third foundation of mindfulness, mindfulness of mind, continues this movement and suggests we look at the quality of every mind state. The shift is back to a particular doorway of experience, this time the mind door. But the text does not speak of simply being aware of the object that presents itself at this door, but of becoming aware of the nature of the organ of perception itself—the mind. It is not just a matter of noticing “this thought of lunch” or “this memory of yesterday.” Rather the instruction requests that we notice whether the mind discerning the thought or memory is laced with attachment or not, pervaded by aversion or not, rooted in confusion or not. We are being guided from content (the physical sensation) to texture (feeling tone), and now to quality or to an intuitive assessment of the mind’s consistency. The training in awareness is becoming far more refined, and is moving towards a training in wisdom.

So given this model, what is happening in the fourth foundation of mindfulness, mindfulness of mental phenomena? Attention is being directed toward the content of the thinking process, to the “mental objects” that interface with the “mental organ” (mind) and “mental consciousness” (thinking) to reveal the details of our inner mental life. But crucial to this process is the recognition that it’s being done with a cultivated mind, and is being directed not to random thoughts but to the prime components of the Buddha’s teaching, the dhamma.

There is a huge difference between accessing the mental life on the near side of the training versus accessing the mental life on the far side of the training. Imagine going to a meditation retreat and having the teacher tell you to just focus on your thoughts: “Is that physical sensation of breathing in your abdomen interfering with your thinking about what is happening? Let go of that direct experience and gently return you awareness to the inner chatter of your mind.” That is not likely to happen. This would be attending to the miscellaneous conditioned activity of the uncultivated mind, which is not what the foundations of mindfulness are all about.

The reason we spent the entire day yesterday just doing mindfulness of the body was to quiet down some of that kind of thinking. And now we will be slowly opening up to a wider range of experience, especially mental experience; but it is a cultivated mind’s attention we will bring into contact with mental objects. And this is the kicker: these are not going to be random mental objects. The fourth foundation of mindfulness is not telling us to just be aware of thinking as thinking, to just be mindful when you are daydreaming or thinking about lunch or whatever. It is not just a matter of looking at whatever mental object happens to come up, notice that, let go of it, and move on the next mental object that happens to arise. That would not be transformative.

According to the text in front of us, the fourth foundation of mindfulness involves following a very detailed curriculum of regarding our experience in terms of hindrances, aggregates, sense spheres, factors of awakening, and noble truths. We will be doing a very disciplined mindfulness of mental objects, which is quite different from a free-for-all noticing of mental objects.

This is where I think some of our contemporary training in this practice might not go far enough. We often hear so much emphasis placed on mindfulness of the breath and of bodily sensations (the first foundation), but when we get to the third or fourth foundation the instructions become a bit fuzzy. “Thinking is part of experience too, so be mindful of thinking—but not in a conceptual way, of course, because the intellect is not good, not intuitive enough.” (I know this is a bit of a caricature.)

I just don’t think this approach is really telling us much. The teachings of the Buddha, i.e. the Dhamma, is a magnificently subtle and profound intellectual construction, and here we find its core components at the heart of the text giving instruction in vipassana meditation. I think this is because the practice is ultimately about wisdom. Mindfulness is not an end in itself but is a tool to be used to access that wisdom.

Here is an analogy that came up the other day in a discussion of the relationship between practice and study, between mindfulness meditation and penetration of the Dhamma. The Buddha often refers to greed, hatred and delusion like three great fires raging in our hearts and causing us much suffering. The goal is to put out these fires, and this can be taken as the most basic definition of nirvana—the extinguishing of the fires.

So picture a fireman standing with his hose, poised to fight these raging fires. The water that comes from the hose to extinguish the flames is mindfulness, and according to the Abhidhamma the unwholesome roots cannot co-exist in a mind moment suffused with mindfulness. But the flow of water must also be very skillfully directed, or all that water will have no effect. It is not enough to stand there with a lot of water coming out of the hose, if you don’t know where to point it. If you’re facing the wrong direction and watering the garden with that water, you’re not going to put out the fire. Neither does it do any good to stand aiming right at the fire with this hose with only a little dribble of water coming out. That’s not putting out the fire either.

I know this is an awkward analogy, but bear with me. In one case we have someone who may be intellectually very well trained in Buddhism, perhaps being able to say “Everything changes, is wrapped up in suffering, and is essentially without self” in four different ancient languages. They are pointed in the right direction, but without well-developed mindfulness it becomes a rather shallow conceptual object. That’s like a skillful firefighter standing there with no water coming out of his hose.

But equally unfortunate is having this powerful stream of mindful awareness that is not being carefully directed at the heart of the problem. If one remains forever mindful of whatever happens to be arising in one’s body or mind, without that mindfulness being skillfully guided to the underlying processes that fuel the fires, one is equally unlikely of attaining the desired end.

I think the Buddhist tradition clearly calls for a coupling of mindfulness with wisdom, and it does so most dramatically at this point in this text. The Satipatthana Sutta begins with mindfulness of the body and feelings, and without the establishment of this mental factor in the unfolding flow of experience one is unlikely to see much of what’s really going on. But with the third and especially the fourth foundation of mindfulness the meditator is being shown exactly where to direct that mindfulness.

And I also think in doing so we will discover that intelligence, a certain quality of intellectual intuition, is not an obstacle to mindfulness, but is its natural consummation. Only in the first two foundations of mindfulness are mental activities an interference from the primary object of meditation; in the third and fourth they become that very object, and it is through the skillful engagement of the intellect that wisdom begins to ripen.