I’ve been practicing mindfulness meditation for several years but only now starting to realize some of its deeper, more powerful benefits.
Among them is the ability to avoid emotional reactivity when dealing with challenging situations or difficult people. Scholar Bhikkhu Analayo calls it the “middle path” that avoids the two unskillful extremes of reaction and suppression.
“This non-reactive quality of mindfulness is required to enable one clearly to observe the building up of reactions and their underlying motives,” writes Analayo in his book “Satipatthana: The Direct Path to Realization.” Then he adds, “As soon as one becomes in any way involved in a reaction, the detached observational vantage point is immediately lost.” To avoid this pitfall, one must practice what Analayo calls mindful sense-restraint, which results in perceptual equanimity.
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Bhikkhu Analayo starts by explaining the stages of perceptual process in the context of Buddhist meditation:
The conditioned character of the perceptual process is a central aspect of the Buddha’s analysis of experience.
According to the Madhupindika Sutta, the conditional sequence of the average perceptual process leads from contact (phasa) via feeling (vedana) and cognition (sanna) to thought (vitaka), which can in turn stimulate conceptual proliferation (papanca).
Such conceptual proliferations tend to give rise to further concoctions of proliferations and cognitions (papancasannasankha), which lead from the originally perceived sense data to all kinds of associations concerning past, present, and future.
He continues:
Once the conditioned sequence of the perceptual process has reached the stage of conceptual proliferation, one becomes, as it were, a victim of one’s own associations and thoughts.
The thought process proliferates, weaving a net built from thoughts projections, and associations, of which the ‘thinker’ has become almost a helpless prey.
Analayo goes on to emphasize three important terms related to the perceptual process — influxes (asava), latent tendencies (anusaya), and fetters (samyojana) — and how they were used by the Buddha to explain the arising of suffering (dukkha) and our bondage to the endless cycle of birth and death (samsara). He writes:
The whole purpose of practicing the path taught by the Buddha is to eradicate the influxes (asava), uproot the latent tendencies (anusaya), and abandon the fetters (samyojana).
These three terms refer to the same basic problem from slightly different perspectives, namely to the arising of craving (tanha) and related forms of unwholesomeness….
In this context, the influxes represent root causes for the arising of dukkha that might “flow into” perceptual appraisal, the underlying tendencies are those unwholesome inclinations in the unawakened mind that “tend” to get triggered off during the perceptual process, and the fetters arising at any sense door are responsible for “binding” beings to continued transmigration in samsara.
Then he introduces a practice called mindful sense-restraint:
A way to avoid the operation of the influxes, underlying tendencies, and fetters, and thereby the arising of unwholesome states of mind and reactions at any sense door, is the practice of sense-restraint (indriya samvara). The method of sense-restraint is mainly based on sati [mindfulness], whose presence exerts a restraining influence on the reactions and proliferations that otherwise tend to occur during the perceptual process.
Such cultivation of mindfulness at the sense doors does not imply that one is simply to avoid sense impressions. As the Buddha pointed out in the Indriyabhavana Sutta, if simply avoiding seeing and hearing were in itself conducive to realization, blind and deaf people would be accomplished practitioners.
Instead, the instruction for sense-restraint enjoins the practitioner not to dwell on the sign (nimitta) or secondary characterristics (anuvuanjana) of sense objects, in order to avoid the “flowing in” of detrimental influences.
In the present context, “sign” (nimitta) refers to the distinguishing feature by which one recognizes or remembers something.
In regard to the process of perception, this “sign” (nimitta) is related to the first evaluation of the raw sense data, because which the object appears to be, for example, “beautiful” (subhanimitta) or “irritating” (patighanimittta), which then usually leads to subsequent evaluations and mental reactions.
Analayo concludes by writing that the practice of sense-restraint leads to the development of perceptual equanimity:
The culmination of training one’s cognitions in this way is reached when one completely transcends such evaluations and becomes firmly established in perceptual equanimity. …
The basis for developing such intriguing kinds of mastery is satipatthana contemplation. The presence of sati [mindfulness] directly counteracts automatic and unconscious ways of reacting that are so typical of habits. By directing [mindfulness] to the early stages of the perceptual process, one can train cognition and thereby reshape habitual patterns.
If you want to develop the ability to use sense-restraint to achieve perceptual equanimity, then read a series of our articles that contains detailed instruction on how to practice satipatthana meditation (with guided audio) from the book “Satipatthana Meditation: A Practice Guide.”
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About the book’s author: Ven. Bhikkhu Analayo was born in 1962 in Germany, was ordained in 1995 in Sri Lanka, and completed his PhD on satipatthana at the University of Peradeniya in 2000. At present, he is mainly engaged in the practice of meditation, and among other things contributes to the Encyclopaedia of Buddhism. He has authored several books on Buddhist practice, including “Satipatthana” and “Compassion and Emptiness in Early Buddhist Meditation.”
I’m a freelance writer and mindfulness advocate behind this blog. I started my meditation practice in 2014, and in 2017 I launched this website to share what I learn with others. Here are the three things you can do here:
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