What does "mindfulness" mean?

Dhr. Seven and Ananda (Dharma Buddhist Meditation), Wisdom Quarterly

Sati: bare attention to what's happening in this moment free of evaluating, attaching, resisting?

Buddhism's Mindfulness Meditation

"Mindfulness! Mindfulness," it is said. What is "mindfulness" (Pali sati, Sanskrit smrti)?

The word is used by Buddhist teachers -- and now by everyone else, too. But rarely is it defined.

Instead, it's taken for granted that it must just mean "awareness."

• (Western psychology has come up with a different definition than the Buddhist original, so most people are nowhere near practicing actual mindfulness/sati).
• What is mindfulness? Nobody really knows, and that's a problem (theconversation.com)

Awareness is happening in any case, but that is NOT mindful awareness. Key elements to mindfulness include:

• adverting,
• dispassion,
• detachment (non-clinging, letting go, letting be),
• vigilance,
• watchfulness,
• watching rather than getting entangled in what is being watched,
• bare attention (without evaluation, without judgment),
• presence of mind,
• memory/remembering the object,
• being here now,
• cool, calm observing.

There are four groups or categories of things to observe.

Buddhism made many lists.

When we are just the witness of what is, we have let go (detached) in the moment and therefore can finally begin to see clearly. This "clear seeing" is the basis of vipassana or "insight meditation."

• Originally jhana (samatha or serenity practice) and vipassana (insight practice) had a much closer connection

Once we've grasped what sati or "mindfulness," "vigilance," "wakefulness," "watchfulness," or "bare attention" means and how it is practiced, we can put it into effect as a factor of enlightenment.

The Buddha teaches this usage in the Great "Four Foundations of Mindfulness Sutra" (actually called the "Discourse on the Fourfold Setting Up of Mindfulness," which appears as two Satipatthana Suttas, DN 22 and MN 10). Instructions are given to be mindful of:

1. body (kaya)
2. feelings (vedana)
3. mind (citta)
4. mind objects, phenomena, things (dhammas*).

Buddhism and Mindfulness Meditation

How important is mindfulness in Buddhism? It occurs 14 times in the list of 37 Factors of Enlightenment or bodhipakkhiya dhamma.

We can endure all things and benefit from them when we remain mindful, when we stay in the moment as Byron Katie teaches and as Eckhart Tolle keeps saying. Our power is now.

That being the case, let us practice and study and question, "What does 'mindfulness' mean?" In that way we have a chance of finally actually doing the real thing.

*Phenomena (dhammas or dharmas): Though in the second factor, dhamma-vicaya, the word dhamma is taken by most translators to stand for the Buddhist doctrine [or Dhamma], it probably refers to the bodily and mental phenomena (nāma-rūpa-dhammā) as presented to the investigating mind by mindfulness, the first factor. With that interpretation, the term may be rendered by "[keen] investigation of phenomena" (Ven. Nyanatiloka/Anton Gueth, Buddhist Dictionary).