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Pages are being written and updated regularly. There is enough on this site so far that you can make a start with learning the Anapana Practice. By the time you're ready to move on, I hope more pages will be ready to guide you on the way.
Pages in the Understanding Anapana section will also be added to accompany those in the Learning section, but that section as a whole will probably be the last one to be completed—if a site like this is ever completed!
I hope your Anapana Adventure will be fruitful. If you need any more help or information, do send me a message.
Thank you for your patience.
The Relationship between Anapana, Sati-paṭṭhāna and Jhāna practices
Sati-paṭṭhāna, also a marginal practice
Of these few discourses, many take the line that the four parts of Sati-paṭṭhāna meditation and the four phases of Anapana practice are equivalent to each other (for example MN 118). This seems to have been part of an appeal to those who practised the older Anapana practice that they were engaged in the same practice as those who had taken up the newer Sati-paṭṭhāna practice. Sati-paṭṭhāna means "establishing mindfulness" and it was a practice to bring about constant mindfulness of four aspects of a meditator's life.
In fact the two meditation practices are not the same. This is seen especially in their second and fourth stages or phases. In Sati-paṭṭhāna practice the second stage consisted of "Observing hedonic feelings in hedonic feelings." Hedonic feelings (vedanā in Pāli) are the simple feelings in which we find all experiences either pleasant, unpleasant or neither. This in no way corresponds to the Anapana practice of experiencing pīti and sukha (an "enhanced body sensitivity" and "well-being") in Steps 5 and 6, though there is one verbal correspondence here because sukha as an adjective can be translated as "pleasant", while as a noun it means "well-being".
The key feature of Sati-paṭṭhāna meditation is that it avoids the original Buddhist practice of Jhāna. Anapana practice parallels the stages of Jhāna practice, and may have been a more "user-friendly" version of the same practice, giving a practical method for attaining the four stages of Jhāna.
The fourth stage of Sati-paṭṭhāna practise centres around remaining mindful of several sets of Buddhist teachings. There is nothing in Anapana practice which corresponds with this fourth stage, or its focus on Buddhist doctrine.
Sati-paṭṭhāna practice is also found in a limited set of the discourses. It is found in the 104 discourses of the Sati-paṭṭhāna saṃyutta (SN 47), and its fully developed form is found in just two texts, DN 22 and MN 10.
Jhāna Practice, widely known in early Buddhism
In contrast to both Anapana and Sati-paṭṭhāna practices, a short four-stage text describing Jhāna practice is found widely in many of the discourses of the first four Nikāyas. This suggests that Jhāna practice was widely known throughout the Buddhist communities as the original meditation practice they had learned from the Buddha, and that both Anapana and Sati-paṭṭhāna practices were late-comers, much less widespread within the early Buddhist communities.
Though both were later formulations within Buddhism, they seem to have had opposite purposes. Anapana meditation seems to have wanted to preserve and uphold the original practice of Jhāna, while Sati-paṭṭhāna meditation wanted to move away from it to a purely mindfulness practice.
Underlying each of these new practices was an opposite understanding of liberation. The constant fourfold mindfulness of Sati-paṭṭhāna meditation was to give the meditator insights into their own life, so they might let go of whatever kept them unfree. By contrast, the Anapana practice liberates heart-and-mind directly, through a psychological training, as described in the Learning Anapana section of this website.
