dzogchen · Dudjom Lingpa's Vajra Essence (B. Alan Wallace commentary)
Mindfulness of Breathing: One Taste of Body and Mind
A breath-and-body awareness practice used to directly test the assumption that bodily sensation and mental experience happen in separate domains — and to discover, experientially, that they don't.
The theory, briefly
This passage addresses a specific confusion in ordinary experience: the assumption that bodily sensation and mental experience occur in separate domains — as if some sensations happen 'in the body' while thoughts and images happen somewhere else, in 'the mind.' The text uses the simple practice of mindfulness of breathing as a direct way to test this assumption.
While attending to the rhythm of the in- and out-breath, awareness is let to suffuse the whole body, setting aside remembered or imagined pictures of what the body looks like and instead attending as nakedly as possible to what is actually presented to the tactile sense — the rhythms, buzzing, tingling, and movements of embodied experience, moment to moment.
Held this way, thoughts and images that arise during the practice turn out not to occupy some other location, separate from the body being attended to. The text's conclusion is that the domain of bodily experience is simply a subset of the domain of mental experience: all experience of the body is itself nothing more than sensation arising to the mind — appearances of body, speech, and mind sharing, in the text's phrase, 'one taste.'
The practice
Mindfulness of Breathing with Whole-Body Awareness
10–20 minutes · Seated wherever you already are (specific physical posture not detailed in this passage)
- 1Begin the practice of mindfulness of breathing, following the natural rhythm of the in-breath and out-breath.
- 2Let your awareness suffuse the whole body.
- 3As you do, set aside any picture you're holding of what your body looks like, based on memory — let your awareness meet what's actually here, not a mental image of it.
- 4Attend as nakedly as possible to what is presented to the tactile sense moment to moment — the rhythms, buzzing, tingling, and movements.
- 5When thoughts or images arise, notice that they are not occurring in some location separate from the body you are attending to.
- 6The body you're attending to isn't divided into one area with sensation and another where thoughts happen — there's no boundary between them, no separate zones, the text says: 'neither separate nor adjacent.'
- 7Recognize that the domain of bodily experience is simply a subset of the domain of mental experience — all bodily sensation is itself an appearance arising to the mind.
- 8Rest in this: the tactile sensations and the arising thoughts are one continuous field, not two domains meeting at some border.
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