阿毘达磨大毘婆沙论卷第二十六

问此观息风从鼻而入还从鼻出。何故乃说我觉遍身入出息耶。答息念未成观入出息从鼻入出。息念成已观身毛孔犹如藕根息风周遍于中入出。

辨识
[作者]坦尼沙罗尊者
[中译]良稹

Perception
by Ven. Thanissaro Bhikkhu
August 19, 2005

如果你坚持气能的辨识，尽可能维持该辨识稳定不变，你将学得两件事。一是，你对?了维持那个辨识，自己正在做什么，越来越敏感。你开始对辨识的过程，明了 得多。二是，你能使气平静下来 ，变得极其，极其寂止。一旦全身各处的气能像是在流畅流动时，它会越来越细微。如果你坚持那个单一的辨识，你会发现大脑用的氧气少多了。这样，你的呼吸就 减少了，直到最后，达到只需要出入气孔的氧气。[口鼻]呼吸静止下来。

气寂止时，你对身体形状的觉受开始变化。身体的内外界限开始融解。只有一团雾点感，就在那里，你可以改变你的辨识。与其专注那个雾 ，你可以专注那些小觉点之间的空间 ，于是你突然就与“空间”在一起了。

Bhikkhu Analayo:

I am not sure about this, some people take it that the breath actually stops completely, others suggest that this is only the subjective experience that one feels as if the breath had completely stopped

The final step in this first tetrad then is passambhayaṃ kāyasaṅkhāraṃ, “calming the bodily activity”.

And the Visuddhimagga understands this to refer to absorption experience, actually the fourth absorption.

In the discourses, with the fourth absorption the breath disappears.

This is an interpretation that is very difficult to maintain, because the instructions clearly are about continuous awareness of inhalation—exhalation, so it could not be referring to a stage of practice where the breath disappears.

And, there is a general tendency, in the commentarial tradition, of really taking a term and giving a literal interpretation, and then bringing that in, where from a practical perspectiveit does not really make so much sense.

And absorption, which is a topic I will be talking about more in relation to the third tetrad — absorption attainment is nowhere mentioned in the Ānāpānasati-sutta. This is anāpānasati, not ānāpāna-samādhi. It is mindfulness of breathing, not concentration on the breath. And the purpose of it is knowledge-and-liberation, not absorption attainment.

This does not mean that absorption has no place. In fact, I will be talking about it in relation to the third tetrad, because that is a particularly convenient entry door into absorption.

But we should not reduce the potential and significance of the different steps of mindfulness of breathing, just to aids in absorption attainment.

So calming bodily activity can just be taken to a general relaxation, a settling in, breath calm, body calm, overall relaxation of the body, as a foundation for what is going to come next.

In a number of Chinese parallels, in Āgamas and also in a Vinaya text, the translation they give has a rather stronger nuance of experiencing the physical body. This nuance of experiencing the physical body has then led, in some meditation traditions, to another interpretation, which is that we should actually experience the breath in the whole body — means you breathe in and you feel the breath percolating throughout the whole body down to the tip of the feet, and then you breathe out and it comes up again.

These approaches can be very powerful modalities of meditation practice to ground ourselves in the physical reality of the body. But I do not think they correspond to the instructions. We have sabbakāyapaṭisaṃvedhi, “experiencing the whole body”. In the later part of the instructions we also get cittapaṭisaṃvedhi, “experiencing the mind”.

This can hardly mean that we are supposed to experience the breath in the mind.

So the instruction sabbakāyapaṭisaṃvedhi much rather seems to mean that we are to experience the whole body alongside breathing in and breathing out.

In fact, if you look at the remainder of the instructions — the remainder of the 16 steps — we find that they introduce all kinds of different themes alongside awareness of breathing in and breathing out.

So in the present case, the third step, I understand the instruction to mean that, being aware of breathing in and out, we become aware of the whole body.

And this is a level of whole-body awareness that is a little bit more refined than the one we had earlier, when checking if the body is straight. That is, the earlier one was more on the anatomical level. This one is more on the energy, elemental kind of level.