[Read an excerpt from Breathing Mindfulness: Discovering the Riches at the Heart of the Buddhist Path by Sarah Shaw, courtesy of its publisher, Shambhala Publications, here.]
As you read this sentence, you are breathing. And now, you are likely aware of your breath, even though you weren’t just a moment ago. Our breath is always with us, whether we are consciously aware of it or not.
This is, perhaps, why Pali commentaries say that the Buddha practiced mindfulness of breath on the night of his awakening. The breath can serve as a useful object of meditation because it is something that we can always access, no matter where we are and what we are doing.
Meditation on the breath has always been one of the most widely practiced forms of meditation, and Sarah Shaw’s Breathing Mindfulness: Discovering the Riches at the Heart of the Buddhist Path offers insights into the varied approaches to this type of meditation and its history.
Shaw’s book offers a survey of different types of breath meditation — what she calls “breathing mindfulness” — and shows how they originated and developed, particularly in the Theravada traditions of Southeast Asia, so that readers can understand and appreciate them in their varied forms.
The book opens by explaining some essential vocabulary and offering a commentary on the Anapanasati Sutta, the canonical work on breathing mindfulness. It then offers an overview of shamatha and vipassana practices, focusing on key teachings and important teachers. Once this groundwork has been laid, Shaw takes readers through a number of different teachings and approaches to breathing mindfulness from across the Theravada tradition.
While Buddhist traditions in Thailand, Myanmar, and Sri Lanka are the focus of much of the book, the author also references breathing mindfulness practices in Chan, Zen, Tibetan Buddhism, and even non-Buddhist traditions. By bringing all of these traditions together and placing them in historical contexts, Shaw demonstrates that breathing mindfulness encompasses a rich and varied set of traditions, and that these different approaches are all valid and useful practices in their own right.
