Breath-Centered Consciousness
The Way of Equanimity
The Shape of Consciousness (Chapter 1)
I USED TO THINK of consciousness as shaped like a circle, with attention like a bright spot at the center. Later, I began to think of consciousness as shaped more like an ellipse. A circle has only one center of focus, but an ellipse has two. I don’t believe consciousness has a literal shape, but I find the shape of an ellipse is a good metaphor for how consciousness functions. If you look into your own consciousness, you can confirm that your mind functions with two points of focus: a dim, almost fuzzy, background focus and a bright, sharp foreground focus.
When we focus awareness sharply on something, we say we are “paying attention” to it. So let’s call the bright foreground focus of consciousness its attention-point. The focus at the attention-point constantly shifts from one thing to another, depending on what we need to notice at the moment.
The background focus doesn’t move as much. It stays fixed on one thing, which is usually the thought of self and the things of concern to the self. Since the background focus of the mind is stationary, let’s call it the anchor-point.
Meditation is the centering of awareness in something other than the thought of self at the mind’s anchor-point. Many things have been used as meditation objects, including certain sounds (mantras), particular postures (crossed legs, straight back), and fixed gazing on visual objects (a bright light, an earth-colored disk). But the most widely used and time-honored meditation object is the breath.
When the thought of self is at the anchor-point of consciousness, we can call the anchor-point the self-focus. When the sensation of the breath is at the anchor-point of consciousness, we can call the anchor-point the breath-focus.
Breath-consciousness is the kind of meditation the Buddha practiced. His instructions for practicing breath-awareness are contained in the Anapana Sati Sutta, one of the oldest Buddhist scriptures. (Anapana sati means “mindfulness of the in-breath and out-breath.”)
In the Anapana Sati Sutta, you won’t find any idea about consciousness having an anchor-point and attention-point. That idea is a new tool to help us understand and apply the Buddha’s instructions. This new tool is also useful in describing the state of equanimity that occurs when consciousness becomes centered in awareness of the breath instead of the thought of self. Equanimity is what meditation is all about, although the term equanimity isn’t always used.
Equanimity is not a new quality added to consciousness, but a name for the whole of consciousness when we perceive things in a way that’s not partial to our own needs and interests.
In our usual self-centered state of mind, we put our own needs before the needs of others in an effort to get what we need to be happy. The trouble is that when we put our own needs before the needs of others, our relationships become characterized by conflict, mistrust, ill will, and unhappiness. So our self-centered efforts to acquire happiness are, ironically, the cause of our unhappiness.
Even so, meditation isn’t an effort to eliminate the thought of self. The thought of self isn’t a bad thought. In fact, it’s a necessary thought. The thought of self causes trouble only when we make it the center of consciousness. Strange as it may seem, the thought of self is not a self-centered thought if we experience it while keeping awareness centered in the breath.
When we center consciousness in the breath, our connectedness to others becomes clear. We see the needs of others and our own needs as equally important. This is the essence of equanimity.
Equanimity doesn’t mean we abandon concerns for our own welfare, but that we discover even deeper desires within us for the welfare of all beings.
Needless to say, when the welfare of others becomes as important as our own, our relationships become characterized by cooperation, trust, goodwill, and happiness.
Happiness, therefore, isn’t something that develops inside us as individuals, but between us and others. The same is true of unhappiness — and any other characteristic or quality we may use to describe ourselves. . . .
We find realness and our lives become meaningful only in our relationships, and whether we find happiness (or fail to find it) is dependent on the way we relate to others.
The interrelatedness of all things is what the Buddha discovered when sitting under the Bodhi tree 2,500 years ago. I hope as you read further that you will see — if it’s not clear to you already — how that insight is the basis of the Eightfold Path the Buddha taught as the path to happiness.
The way of breath-centered meditation described in this book is a contemporary adaptation of the Path the Buddha taught. But it’s also a way that’s strongly influenced by a reinterpretation of the Buddha’s teachings that happened hundreds of years after the Buddha, in the Zen school of practice. So before going further, let’s hear what one of the most famous of the Zen teachers had to say.
The Path of Zen (Chapter 2)
ZEN DEVELOPPED IN CHINA during the Eighth Century of the current era. The teachers of this school were heavily influenced by the Diamond Sutra, which is one of the oldest Mahayana scriptures. (The Mahayana, or Great Vehicle, is a branch of Buddhism known for its emphasis on understanding and compassion.)
The Zen teacher of most interest during this period was named Shen-hui. Shen-hui talked a lot about something he called wu-nien. The word wu in wu-nien means without in the exact sense in which we would say some food is without sugar or without fat. We commonly call such foods sugar-free or fat-free. So wu-nien means nien-free.
The question is, what did Shen-hui mean by the word nien? The word literally means thought or reflection, but Shen-hui clearly used it to mean a certain kind of thought — that is, the clinging, grasping, and greedy thinking we usually associate with self-centeredness.
I believe if Shen-hui were living now, he would likely use the concepts of self-centeredness and self-centered thought to convey the sense of nien as he used the term in the Eighth Century.
Listen to how Shen-hui himself described nien in the following excerpt from his teachings, in which the words self-centered thought translate nien:
What is self-centered thought? You who are gathered here today are thinking of making money and having sex with handsome men and beautiful women. You are thinking of big houses and beautiful gardens. This is the obvious form of self-centered thought. To believe that you must stop thinking of those things is the subtle form of self-centered thought. That’s what you don’t realize.
What is the subtle form of self-centered thought? When you hear talk about enlightenment, you think you must attain that enlightenment. When you hear talk of nirvana, emptiness, purity, and samadhi, you think you must acquire that nirvana, emptiness, purity, and samadhi. This is all self-centered thought.
– Shen-hui, Sermon on Sudden Awakening
So let’s think of a nien-free mind as a state of mind that’s free of self-centered thought and the distorted perceptions that arise from self-centeredness. That freedom is the same state of mind the Buddhist scriptures call upekkha — a Pali word whose root meaning is to view everything impartially–and which, in English, we call equanimity.
Shen-hui’s main point in this passage, though, was not to describe equanimity, but to identify what he called a “subtle” form of self-centeredness. The subtle form of self-centeredness appears only when we recognize the obvious form. The subtle form of self-centeredness is, in fact, an attempt to eliminate the obvious form.
Shen-hui’s concern in identifying the subtle form of self-centeredness was to expose what I call the paradox of practice: any attempt to eliminate self-centeredness is itself an act of self-centeredness. We will talk more about this paradox in a later chapter.
For now, let’s see how the concept of being free of self-centeredness fits into the larger picture of Shen-hui’s thinking. The following passage summarizes his teaching:
Be aware that your original nature is pure, peaceful, and completely undisturbed. It’s like the emptiness of space — without foundation, without attachment, without bias, and extending everywhere. It’s the same thing as the Body of Suchness of the Buddhas. Suchness is the natural state of the mind in the absence of self-centered thought. Because we understand this, we teach freedom from self-centeredness.
Those who view things free of self-centered thought fully experience seeing, hearing, feeling, and thinking. Yet they always remain undisturbed and peaceful. In this one practice, they train in conduct, meditation, and understanding at the same time.
– Shen-hui, Sermon on Sudden Awakening
When Shen-hui spoke of conduct, meditation, and understanding, he was talking about the Threefold Training. The Threefold Training was an evolution of the Eightfold Path in which the Buddha originally formulated his teachings.
Keeping all eight factors of the Path in mind was like traveling with too much luggage. So early on, Buddhists repacked their bags. They arranged the eight factors of the Path into three groups and then referred to each group as a single factor of the Threefold Training. Having only three factors to remember, instead of eight, made practice much easier.
So when Shen-hui said that we accomplish the entire Threefold Training in the single practice of remaining free of self-centered thought, he was declaring a new formulation of the Path. The Path that had been condensed from eight factors to three was now condensed to just one thing: to remain free from self-centered thought.
This article consists of the first two chapters of Breath-Centered Consciousness: The Way of Equinimity (Booksurge: 2008). I wrote this manual a couple of years before I resigned as practice leader of Blue Iris Sangha in New Orleans.
See Chapter 3 here.
