Sati (Buddhism)

• 1. Introduction

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  Sati is one of the oldest and most debated concepts in Buddhist thought, yet its English name is barely a century and a half old. In 1881, a scholar named Thomas William Rhys Davids coined the word "mindfulness" to capture what the Pali term sati meant in the context of right meditation. Before that coinage, the English language had the word "mindful" going back to 1340, and "mindfulness" itself had appeared in print as early as 1530, but it carried none of the Buddhist weight Davids gave it. That single translation decision would eventually shape how millions of people in the West understand Buddhist practice. What exactly did Davids think sati meant? And how far does the modern, therapeutic version of mindfulness stray from the ancient concept it claims to represent?

• 2. Memory Before Mindfulness

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  Smriti, the Sanskrit counterpart to the Pali sati, literally means "that which is remembered." In the Vedic tradition, the word described the act of recalling sacred texts, a discipline of precise mental retention rather than relaxed, open awareness. Scholars have traced this meaning carefully. Monier Monier-Williams, in his Sanskrit-English Dictionary, distinguishes eight separate meanings of smriti, ranging from personal memory and reminiscence to the entire body of sacred tradition handed down by human teachers, including the Mahabharat and Ramayana, the Puranas, and the great law codes such as the Manusmriti. The scope of the word in Sanskrit is therefore enormous. It covers a private moment of recollection and the collective inheritance of a civilization. When Buddhist scholars translated smriti into Tibetan, they rendered it as trenpa, meaning dran pa. When they rendered it into Chinese, they chose the character nian, composed of the elements for "now" and "heart/mind," which the scholar Bernhard Karlgren described as meaning to have the present to the mind. That Chinese character appears in everyday Mandarin words for concept, for cherishing memory, and for the Buddhist practice of chanting the name of Buddha.

• 3. What the Translators Debated

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  Henry Alabaster, writing in 1871 in The Wheel of the Law, defined satipatthana as "the act of keeping one's self mindful," a decade before Davids published his more famous translation. Davids himself acknowledged the word carried the literal meaning of memory but insisted the term had taken on new resonance in Buddhist usage, describing "that activity of mind and constant presence of mind which is one of the duties most frequently inculcated on the good Buddhist." He called the earlier translation by Daniel John Gogerly from 1845, which rendered sammā-sati as "correct meditation," insufficient for the same reason. The debate did not end in the nineteenth century. John D. Dunne, an associate professor at the University of Madison-Wisconsin whose research focuses on mindfulness in both theoretical and practical contexts, argues that translating sati and smriti as "mindfulness" is confusing and that a number of Buddhist scholars now prefer "retention" as the alternative. Bhikkhu Bodhi, one of the most widely read contemporary Theravada scholars, has pointed out that sati carries two distinct senses: the connection to memory, and what he calls "a lucid awareness of present happenings." He quoted Davids's own admission that Buddhism attached a new connotation to the word, one that makes "memory" an inadequate and misleading translation on its own. The list of proposed alternatives is long: attention, awareness, concentrated attention, inspection, recollection, reflective awareness, remindfulness, retention, and self-recollection have all been offered by different scholars and teachers.

• 4. Practice and Its Architecture

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  The Satipatthana Sutta, which is among the earliest texts dealing with mindfulness, describes four fields of awareness that practitioners maintain in daily life: the body, feelings, mind, and dharmas. Grzegorz Polak argues that these four fields have been misread by later Buddhist tradition, including Theravada, as four separate foundations. Polak reads them instead as four aspects of a single process of raising mindfulness: awareness of the six sense-bases, contemplation of the feelings that arise when senses contact their objects, the altered states of mind that practice produces, and the movement from the five hindrances toward the seven factors of enlightenment. The sutta itself pairs sati with sampajanna, meaning clear comprehension, and with atappa, meaning ardency. Together the three form yoniso manasikara, translated as "appropriate attention" or "wise reflection." Bhikkhu Bodhi, in published correspondence with B. Alan Wallace, clarified that Nyanaponika Thera, who famously rendered sati as "bare attention," never believed that bare attention captured sati's full significance. Nyanaponika held that bare attention was only the initial phase, and that right mindfulness required sati to be integrated with sampajanna before it could fulfill its purpose. According to Vetter, dhyana, or meditative absorption, may have been the original core practice of the Buddha, with mindfulness functioning as something that dhyana actively supported.

• 5. Liberation and the Arising of States

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  Paul Williams, drawing on the work of Erich Frauwallner, describes the original function of mindfulness as "constantly watching sensory experience in order to prevent the arising of cravings which would power future experience into rebirths." In the Theravada tradition, sati is classed as one of the powers, or bala, that contribute to attaining nirvana, a state in which greed, hatred, and delusion have been fully overcome and abandoned. Buddhadasa similarly argued that mindfulness prevents the arising of disturbing thoughts and emotions that set off the chain of reactions leading to rebirth of the ego and selfish behavior. Vipassana, meaning discriminating insight into the true nature of reality, emerges from the practice of satipatthana and anapanasati, which is mindfulness of breathing. Anapanasati is now practiced across Tibetan, Zen, Tiantai, and Theravada schools, as well as western-based mindfulness programs. According to tradition, the Buddha taught it in several suttas, including the Anapanasati Sutta, catalogued as MN 118. The Agamas of early Buddhism discuss ten forms of mindfulness altogether. According to Nan Huaijin, the Ekottara Agama places greater emphasis on mindfulness of breathing than on any other method, and offers the most specific teachings on it. In Mahayana contexts, the insight that vipassana produces is described in different ways: as sunyata, as dharmata, as the inseparability of appearance and emptiness under the two truths doctrine, or as clarity and emptiness.

• 6. The Modern Misreading

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  Georges Dreyfus has written critically about the definition of mindfulness as "bare attention" or "nonelaborative, nonjudgmental, present-centered awareness." He argues that this reading underestimates the cognitive dimension of sati, which includes the ability to retain information and bring together various aspects of experience. Dreyfus warns that over-emphasizing the nonjudgmental quality of mindfulness risks producing a one-sided view of it as a form of therapeutically helpful spacious quietness, losing sight of its role as a natural cognitive capacity. Robert H. Sharf makes a related point about the technique popularized by Mahasi Sayadaw, which did not require familiarity with Buddhist doctrine or adherence to strict ethical norms, and promised unusually quick results. This was made possible, Sharf notes, by interpreting sati as "bare awareness," meaning the unmediated, nonjudgmental perception of things as they are, free of psychological, social, or cultural conditioning. Sharf argues this notion is at variance with premodern Buddhist epistemologies, which aimed at acquiring "correct view" and proper ethical discernment rather than "no view" and a nonjudgmental attitude. Jay L. Garfield, citing Shantideva among other sources, demonstrates a direct connection between the practice of mindfulness and the cultivation of morality in the Buddhist tradition. He describes mindfulness as constituted by two functions working together: calling to mind, and vigilantly retaining in mind. Mindfulness practice has since been applied in psychology to conditions including obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety, and the prevention of relapse in depression and drug addiction, a trajectory that sits at some distance from the Noble Eightfold Path, where sammā-sati holds the seventh position.