A Practice for Everyone

The Anapana practice was almost lost. The text which describes it, the Sixteen Steps, was composed two and a half thousand years ago. It's a happy miracle that it has survived. Yet it is locked away in a small number of old Indian (and Chinese) texts from the Buddhist tradition.

The Anapana practice is for everyone. It doesn't matter what your background may be. It doesn't matter how you may identify yourself. It doesn't matter what religion you may practise, or whether you practise no religion at all. You don't have to be a Buddhist to benefit from the practice, and it won't turn you into a Buddhist either!

Being human

At the deepest level, what we all share in common is that we're human. We all breathe. We all have bodies which need feeding, exercising and resting. We all have minds that think. We all have emotions. Sometimes we're excited, happy and pleased. Sometimes we're upset, angry, afraid or depressed. We all have histories too. Sometimes life has been good to us, but not always. Some of the things that lie in the past still trouble us. Those who founded the Buddhist tradition understood this.

For all who are human

Being human is all we need to benefit from the Anapana practice. It's a mindfulness practice in which we become aware of our humanity, all of it, and which also heals any damage we may have suffered. In it we first become aware of our breathing, then the whole of our bodies. Then we train until we're able to become aware of heart and mind, able to assess our own state of mind, able to assess our emotions, and eventually able to assess whatever conditioning from our past is still affecting us. As we become mindfully aware, we transform heart and mind.

A calming and healing practice

The benefits of this practice is that we learn how to calm our emotions and our deep, inner reactivity. We all have painful memories from the past, levels of stress or unhappiness in the present, and fears and uncertainties about the future. We may forget these issues for a time, but until they are fully healed they can arise at any moment to trouble us. Anapana practice leads to the healing of heart and mind. It's a psychological training from which any human being can benefit.

For all who are not Buddhists

You don't have to be part of the Buddhist tradition to practise Anapana, or to benefit from it. In fact, as the Buddhist movement developed it seems to have left Anapana behind. Few Buddhists today know of it, and fewer still practise it. Buddhism has become a great world religion, but there is nothing religious about the Sixteen Steps or the Anapana practice. Buddhism has developed some distinctive beliefs, and it has a clear religious goal, the ending of saṃsāra. If you don't know what that means, it doesn't matter at all. None of Buddhism's beliefs are found in the Sixteen Steps and they have no religious goal.

And for all who are Buddhists too

Yet if you are a Buddhist, Anapana practice is for you too. Although you won't find the teachings or practices of any of the modern Buddhist traditions on this website, what you will find is an attempt to return to the very fountainhead of the dharma. Buddhism began when a man called Gotama had a transformative experience which completely satisfied his Noble Quest. After that he was known as the Buddha (the "Awakened One") or as Bhagava (the "Blessed One"). What was the experience that transformed him? On this website we explore the sixteen steps of the Anapana practice, and learn how to work our own way through them. Anapana is an experiential practice which results in a transformation in how our minds and our hearts react, in our values and in how we live.

It's my conviction that Anapana practice brings us to an experience very similar to Gotama's. In one part of the website [not yet written] we'll explore early traditions of Gotama's life, and early reports of his teaching, which show how his dharma was focussed on the ending of human reactivity.

Not really a Buddhist practice

I'm tempted to describe the Anapana practice as contained in the Sixteen Steps as a "pre-Buddhist" practice. I don't mean by that that it pre-dated the Buddha or the movement which he began. On the contrary, I think it encapsulates perhaps his most significant discovery. What I mean is that this practice appears to pre-date all the characteristic beliefs, teachings and practices that developed even within the first century of the Buddhist movement. Here there is no "Buddha", "sangha" or "dharma" and no suggestion of "taking refuge" in them. Here there are no noble truths or noble eightfold path.

Here, the only apparent connection with the later body of Buddhist doctrine is the single word, anicca, usually translated as "impermanence". Yet Step 13 which contains that word suggests no fully developed doctrine of the impermanence of all things. All Step 13 asks of us is to observe anicca wherever we see it, and in the context of the surrounding steps I've chosen to translate that word more simply as "change".

Yet we may be grateful to all those unknown Buddhist monks who learned to chant this text, and so passed it on to the next generation, and to all those scribes who copied the written records, until the Sixteen Steps came to us. Now we can learn this practice and benefit from it.

Take a look and see

Take a look at the Sixteen Steps for yourself. See what ground they cover. See how they ask you to train. See whether or not there is anything in them that you would find problematic for any reason. Then weigh up the benefits of a deep calmness or stillness of heart-and-mind (Step 8), a liberation of heart-and-mind from all that ails it or shackles it (Step 12), an ability to face change of all sorts with dispassion (Steps 13 and 14), and an ability to let go of whatever has been lost or has ended (Steps 15 and 16).

And then, if you wish, if you're curious, take a look through some of the pages on this site about how we learn this remarkable practice, and see if it could be helpful to you.