The Eightfold Path, Part 7: Right Mindfulness

Six posts into this introduction to the Buddha’s Eightfold Path (as part of our broader attempt to hold Buddhism up as a mirror to help us better understand our own Christian faith), and some of the things we immediately think about Buddhism have barely been mentioned: meditation, enlightenment, and that wonderful 2010s buzzword, mindfulness. Well that that starts to change today with the seventh part of the path: right mindfulness.

Right Mindfulness in Buddhism

At its core, mindfulness is all about awareness: active attention to one’s body (movements, sensations, and feelings) and mind (emotions, thoughts, and opinions). According to Walpola Sri Rahula:

With regard to sensations and feelings, one should be clearly aware of all forms of feelings and sensations, pleasant, unpleasant and neutral, of how they appear and disappear within oneself. Concerning the activities of mind, one should be aware whether one’s mind is lustful or not, given to hatred or not, deluded or not, distracted or concentrated, etc. In this way one should be aware of all movements of mind, how they arise and disappear.

The goal of right mindfulness is to “clear up the cognitive field,” gain awareness of “experience in its pure immediacy … before it has been plastered over with conceptual paint, overlaid with interpretations” (Bhukku Bodhi).

In a lot of ways, mindfulness is key to the other elements of the Eightfold Path: we can’t cultivate right speech or right action, for example, if we aren’t aware of the sensations, feelings, emotions, and thoughts that might cause us to speak sharply or act selfishly.

While the goal is to be in this state consistently, mindfulness is most associated in our own culture with meditation, one of the primary practices designed to cultivate it.

At least in its most basic form practiced today in the West, mindfulness meditation is the practice of concentration on one’s breathing. You sit and pay attention to your breath, and when your mind wanders (as it inevitably will), you simply call its attention back to your breath. That’s it. It’s not trying to control one’s breath, nor is it trying to control one’s thoughts: simply to consistently return attention to the breath as it arises. But this is only one form of mindfulness meditation, and is often treated as an introductory practice that opens the door to other forms of mindfulness meditation, as one learns to be more present to all of one’s experiences in the world.

But this is a hard practice, one that even experienced practitioners need to return to time and time again. As secular Buddhist writer Stephen Batchelor writes:

The Buddha described his teaching as “going against the stream.” The unflinching light of mindful awareness reveals the extent to which we are tossed along in the stream of past conditioning and habit. The moment we decide to stop and look at what is going on (like a swimmer suddenly changing course to swim upstream instead of downstream), we find ourselves battered by powerful currents we had never even suspected—precisely because until that moment we were largely living at their command.

And that’s the rub. We live so much of life unaware of everything and so caught up in the fast current of conditioning and opinion, that it’s only when we try to step out of the current that we realize just how fast it really is — to say nothing of trying to turn around and swim upstream. And, at least for beginners (and really most of us are always beginners when it comes to sacred practices), it’s this shock to the system that’s the main point and benefit.

Christian Response

Unlike Buddhism, Christianity has little inherent interest in our psychology. Any benefits to our psychological health and wellbeing derived from Christian belief and practice is just a side benefit. But, while the aim is very different, there is a long history of prayer practices that bear a lot of similarity to mindfulness meditation, with varying degrees of centrality. The prayer modality of this kind with the greatest pedigree is almost certainly the Eastern Church’s practice of the Jesus Prayer: “Lord, Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner” (sometimes shortened simply to “Lord, have mercy”). Rather than the breath being the focus of the practice, here the focus is on the words of the prayer, with the breath is commonly used to guide the rhythm of prayer, with the first half of the prayer said on the inhale and the second on the exhale. While mindfulness meditation’s goal is to make us more present to our circumstances, the Jesus’ Prayer’s goal is to make us more present to the presence of Christ.

Similar things can be said for a more contemporary movement in Western Christianity, widely known as contemplative or centering prayer. Though, here, influenced to some extend by the ideas of Buddhist practice in the West, there’s often a stronger sense of wanting to be present to daily life. In this form of prayer, the focus is on a single word or phrase (for example, “love”, or “grace,” or “Jesus”). When the mind wanders, one simply notices this and returns attention to the word. As Cynthia Bourgeault notes, there are four principles when it comes to our relationship to our thoughts in centering prayer: “Resist no thought, Retain no thought, React to no thought, Return to the sacred word” (Centering Prayer and Christian Awakening, p. 39f). Substitute ‘breath’ for ‘sacred word’ and you’d essentially be back in the realm of Buddhist mindfulness meditation.

As Christians have written on these forms of prayer, they have often connected them to the idea of ‘negative’ or ‘apophatic’ theology, which, as opposed to ‘positive’ or ‘cataphatic’ theology, is grounded in a suspicion of language and a desire for faith beyond conceptions and opinions. While the things of cataphatic theology and prayer — “our reason, memory, imagination, feelings, and will” (Cynthia Bourgeault) — are not bad, all these things can get in our way. Our words and conceptions about God can get in our way of experiencing God, and contemplative prayer seeks to eliminate these barriers. The goal is to know and experience God as God really is (within the limitations of finite human existence).

Conclusions

While Christianity contains no core concept similar to right mindfulness, it has historically developed practices that traffic in similar states of mind. Some of these, like the Jesus Prayer, have been central in a particular Christian tradition’s theological and spiritual development; others, like contemplative or centering prayer, are more peripheral. But they are if nothing else representative of a common human concern about the mind and its tendency to play tricks on us, and the related desire to see through those tricks.