r/streamentry • u/16cheeseburgers • Nov 02 '22
Ānāpānasati Is anapanasati overrated?
This is just my personal experience and I’m interested if other people feel this way too or am I missing something very crucial, this is not to offend anyone who enjoys doing anapanasati. If breath meditation is “necessary” for noting or other insight practiced later on, that probably means that the concentration and skills necessary for noting is the “same” kind of those gained from anapana. The thing is after getting to a place where i could easily stay with the breath, feel it very precisely and not get distracted much, I switched to noting all objects. Btw this is on a retreat. So i noted for a couple of weeks 10-15 hours a day. I would think that now my concentration should be at a whole new level, after meditating this much and noticing how i can note faster and a lot more effortlessly and naturally. To my surprise, when i was advised to return to practicing anapana for a little bit, it felt like starting from scratch. I thought that now i could be able to enter the jhanas or just pick up the anapana where I left it off almost a month ago, but I couldn’t even keep myself from wandering off every couple of minutes. Not to mention, when noting i was rarely ever lost in thoughts and that too for a short amount of time. So now I’m actually starting to wonder weather it’s necessary to even do anapanasati if your goal isn’t jhanas or ability to stay on a single object for a long period of time. These abilities are very cool to have, but if you don’t plan on continuing to practice just that and lose them the second you stop practicing that type of meditation even when continuing to practice a different meditation very intensely, then I honestly don’t see the point. Even when i can’t keep with my breath for a minute i can note everything without any problems, and i feel like if you want to progress with your noting practice then that’s the practice you need to be doing. And also if i use metta or fire kasina as an object for samatha, then i can keep my attention on the object for much longer, probably because it’s more interesting for the mind, so the only benefit i see from practicing anapana, that you can’t get from other objects, is that you train your mind to sustain the attention on something that the mind isn’t really inclined on, because at first the breath is boring and you are kind of forcing the attention on it anyways, that’s why it’s so difficult to stay on the object. Is this skill even that necessary and worth the time and struggle? I doubt it. What are your thoughts and where i went wrong here :)?
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u/ClockJoule Nov 02 '22 edited Nov 02 '22
Not sure what your goals are. Anapanasati was taught as an alternative to death contemplation because some of the monks were too engrossed in sensuality to practice it without their minds rebelling to the point of suicide.
During the time of the Buddha, he instructed his followers on practices leading to liberation. The purpose of Anapanasati is enlightenment, not concentration or special states of mind.
This practice allowed the practitioner the ability to notice non-self as opposed to impermanence directly. The Buddha almost always taught around the topics of the three marks of existence and four noble truths.
As for the practice, if you’re practicing to keep your direct attention on the breath, you’re just concentrating on an object and it won’t bring much insight.