Vipassana Thai-Eng

28 7 Vipassānā Meditation
general terms. I would like to give you a path for walking,
for you to invent your own methodology.
The Buddha, then, at the beginning practiced samatha
and vipassāna. He attained the jhāna state. As a boy, he sat
under the tree meditating, and he mentioned that the method
of meditation that he used at the age of seven or eight was the
awareness of his breath. The Buddha attained Enlightenment
through ānāpānasati in samatha. From the contemplation
awareness of his breath, he developed insight meditation.
That is why Buddhadāsa Bhikkhu wrote a book on the sixteen
stages of ānāpānasati.
Ānāpānasati in the Thai tradition develops from calmness
meditation to insight meditation whereas in the Burmese
tradition you go directly, without this much concern about the
breathing, to the rising and falling of the abdomen. However,
the rising and falling of the abdomen is related to the breath.
So somehow, Mahasi Sayadaw said that there is a mixture of
ānāpānasati and kāyānupassanā (contemplation of the body).
So not to dwell on the level of the breath but to contemplate
the body (kāyānupassanā) is a short cut mentioned by Mahasi