Awareness in Buddhist Meditation

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an object except as a symptom which reveals the real conflict of
mental disease. Concentration on the 32 parts may at most produce
the ecstatic first stage of mental absorption (jhāna) and thus find
partial and temporary satisfaction in achieving and conceiving a
mental disgust for worldly pleasures. But the essence of conflict is
not laid bare until the mind in quiet contemplation is silent and
does not move in search and expectation. As long as ‘I’ am the
movement, ‘I’ am the source of motion and its goal; then there can
be no solution of the conflict which is the separation and opposition
of subject and object in actuality.
Awareness of breathing
Why should this exercise on inhaling and exhaling have become so
popular? There is, of course, frequent mention in the Suttas and
commentaries of the way of mindfulness through attention to the
process of breathing. Even before the Buddha gave his advice in
this regard, there was among the Hindu sadhus and ascetics (and
there still is) great emphasis laid on this exercise as a means to
acquiring mental absorption. For them it was a real exercise, for
breaths had not only to be observed, but regulated and controlled,
till finally breathing was stopped, or at least became imperceptible.
And as the mind cannot concentrate without an image or a concept,
this controlled breathing became a means for mind-control.
The stilling of the passions was acquired through the stilling of the
breathing process; and when this breathing process was taken as the
object of the thought process, thought would cease with the cessation
of breathing. But the Bodhisatta soon found the flaw in this
reasoning, when with the cessation of breathing there was a falling
off of the supply to the brain of physical blood carrying oxygen. And
when the mind faints because of the irregularity in physical functioning,
there is no cessation of the passions, not even a cessation of
the thought process, but only cessation of awareness, of intelligent