In this new video — part of a year-long ongoing teaching series on Mingyur Rinpoche’s text Stainless Prajña: Stages of Meditation on the Treasury of Abhidharma — Rinpoche leads us to reflect on the qualities of breath, guiding us on a short meditation on the impermanent quality of breath.
If we can really understand impermanence, we find the gateway to understanding our true nature. The breath is the perfect vehicle for doing so.
Impermanence is one of the universal characteristics of all experience. All conditioned things are impermanent — this is what the Buddha taught. This means that all our sense perception experiences are impermanent. It’s not just the breath; everything we see, hear, taste, smell, and touch, all of it comes and goes.
According to the Abhidharma (Buddhist teachings on psychology), there are four general characteristics — impermanence, suffering, not-self, and emptiness — that universally apply to all of our experience. Understanding these characteristics at a deep, visceral level is the insight that leads to our liberation.
In the context of the Abhidharma, we start with mindfulness of the body. That’s the first foundation of mindfulness because it’s the most accessible as we are here in the body, and it’s also the most gross level of our experience. Because we’re here in a body that breathes, choosing the breath to be the first point of focus is the simplest way to access the experience of impermanence, this ever-changing nature of all experience.
Breath is the most accessible way to access wisdom or insight of the true nature of relative reality.
In this video from Rinpoche, we are right on the cusp of where shamatha and vipassana meet. Shamatha refers to those practices that stabilize the mind, that train the mind to not be distracted or beguiled by experience. It’s necessary to stabilize our mind so it is not so wild or “all over the shop” before we can begin the process of inquiry, an investigation into what’s going on.
In shamatha practice, we learn about the practices of counting the breath, settling the breath, and following the breath – all practices that primarily focus on stabilizing the mind. Then, we begin to look at the impermanent nature of the breath, and we begin the vipashyana or insight practice to examine the true nature of our experience.
We see that impermanence is easy to observe. You don’t need to look too hard to see that all things are changing all the time.
At the same time, impermanence is completely contrary to a lot of our attitudes. From the view of the unhealthy sense of self, we take things to be permanent when, in fact, they are impermanent. Does anything in our experience last? Our problem is that our suffering arises from our misperception of reality as being a way that it is not.
And so we begin to align our understanding, burst the bubble of our misconception, and begin to see that “Oh, things aren’t necessarily the way I think they are.”
In fact, everything is impermanent ‚— not just the seasons, not just the night and day, not just the comings and goings. At a granular level of our mind-body experience, everything is changing moment to moment, rapidly, viscerally.
When you get that, and then you get the fact that it’s also all suffering, then at some point you realize, “Why am I so attached to this misperception of being a single, solid, separate sense of self?” and you want liberation: “I want out of this horrible mess I’m in!” And that compels you, at last, to break your attachment to your misperceptions.
See the previous pieces from this series on the Abhidharma:
How Buddhist Abhidharma Practice Mitigates Aversion, Craving, and Suffering, by Mingyur Rinpoche
Understanding Abhidharma, a.k.a. Buddhist Psychology — a Q&A with Edwin Kelley
Your Wisdom Is Your Superpower, by Mingyur Rinpoche
