Book review: Living With Awareness

Living with Awareness is Sangharakshita’s commentary on the Satipatthana Sutta. He outlines the transformative power of mindfulness, linking it to the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path. Sangharakshita offers practical advice for integrating mindfulness into daily life, fostering wisdom, compassion, and peace. The book encourages us to live with presence, deepening understanding of impermanence, and improving relationships, according to Windhorse. At least for contemporary eyes, the commentary is necessary, the original would be incomprehensible; but nonetheless that the commentary is 10-20 times the length of the original leads me to doubt that it is not introducing material of its own.

Before we go on, some preliminary quibbles.

What is the source of truth in Buddhism? For example, in contemporary physics, whilst in practice anyone wishing to study it would read papers, ultimately the source of truth is reality: comparison of theory to experimental results. In mediaeval physics, the source was Authority: generally, whatever fragments of Greek nonsense had come down to them; but we've thrown all that away now. In Christianity, the source is the Word of God, the Bible, as interpreted by the Holy Church, especially if you're Catholic; with God guaranteeing inerrancy. Buddhism has overwhelming respect for Big B, but he isn't a god, and I don't think he is inerrant as a source. Separately, whatever he said (assuming he existed as a historical person) was passed down orally for hundreds of years before being written down; and as the book itself says about 2/3 of the way through, it is likely that what was transmitted was heavily adapted towards being said, and being memorised. So I think that the claim is that, whilst at-origin the product of an enlightened being, it must ultimately stand or fall by rational scrutiny.

An appalling success rate? Nominally, the aim of Buddhism is enlightenment. Nominally, you have been given clear instructions for achieving this (p 229: this is no mere pious exhortation; the Buddha left nothing unclear. The Sutta provides everything we need; we are told exactly what to do, and exactly how to go about doing it). And yet the success rate is waay under 1%. Why? I don't see any sign of soul-searching in the book as to why the instructions are so bad. After all, big B was just some chap, and he had no instructions to follow, yet he made it. I do wonder if there's an analogy with language: I can speak; I could not tell you how to speak. Or easier: I know the rules of English grammar, I could not tell you the rules of English grammar, or how to write down a grammatical sentence. Just because Big B was enlightened, why do we think he was any good at writing down instructions of how-to-be-enlightened?

Buddhism: an individual creed? Again, it can be helpful to compare to Christianity: under which the "aim", so to speak, is to get to heaven; but you do this by... well, opinions vary, let us take a middle ground and say "by being good, by pleasing god", and you do this by (a) believing in him, and (b) loving your neighbour as yourself (hey, whaddayaknow, I got that right: And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment. And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these). I don't think Buddhism cares about part (a), but I don't think it really has part (b) either; the emphasis is on perfecting yourself. The book in uneasily aware of this; for example from p 220: But the further back you go in the history of the Buddhist tradition, the more significant this attitude seems to be. Buddhism, in other words, was never as individualistic as people sometimes think. It may well have been that the other-regarding aspect of the practice was second nature to the early Buddhists and hence did not receive so full an emphasis in the oral tradition. The Sutta contains only the most perfunctory references to anything beyond one's experience of oneself, the fourfold establishment of mindfulness apparently having come to be regarded as an all-sufficient method. I'm not really buying the "oh yeah everyone knew that so no-one wrote it down" stuff. But also I'm not claiming this is a problem, from certain viewpoints.

Buddhism is suffering-oriented? I have complained before that Buddhist books are prone to start with something like "life is suffering". Our author has heard that too, and does his best to counter it: It is worth giving careful thought to this. Hearing these truths, people often conclude that Buddhism is suffering-oriented, inward-looking, and self-centred, as though the idea was to become immersed in one's own suffering and how to alleviate it. But this is not what the Buddha is saying. Oh good; what is he saying? What is usually translated as 'suffering' is the Pali term dukkha, which points to the fact that conditioned existence, taken as a whole, is unsatisfactory and frustrating. But this does not mean that Buddhists view life as unremittingly painful and unpleasant, which it obviously is not. On the other hand, we can be sure that the Buddha did not choose this example of the workings of conditionality at random. It is salutary to reflect on the inherent unsatisfactoriness of things; like reflecting on the loathsomeness of the body, it is an example of 'bending the bamboo the other way'. We are not being asked to stop finding life agreeable, if that is our experience, but to acknowledge that however agreeable it may be, it is never wholly so. Dukkha is pain and sickness, but it is also lack of complete fulfilment; it is anxiety and loss, bitterness and cynicism... So I think he only gets a half credit: life is not unrelieved suffering, but he cannot help emphasising the loss and bitterness. I think this is an attitude for mediaeval peasants, which on the whole Tibetans were. It doesn't fit the modern world; certainly not my experience of it. Also (2025/11): replacing the false-but-startling "life is suffering" with the true-but-banal "not everything is satisfactory" leaves you saying something banal.

Conditioned existence. I think this term is flung around without being defined; as far as I can tell it means "existence", i.e. life in the real world, as opposed to, errm, the unreal world. The idea is that life must inevitably be unsatisfactory, because we cling to permanence in an ever-changing world. Again as far as I can tell, this is adopted as axiomatic, and never questioned, but I think it should be. I don't think I am clinging to permanence. Nor am I convinced that "ever changing" is really that good a description: the world changes, of course, but quite slowly. Life is wonderful; why would you think otherwise?¹ From the perspective of heightened consciousness, the apparent beauty of the mundane world appears grotesque, says p 69, so why would I want your height?

Modern life is rubbish? From p 220: The Buddha's early followers would not have experienced the alienation from nature that characterizes the lives of so many people today. For them the natural world was ever-present, and the forest glades and parks in which the monks and nuns meditated were highly conducive to the cultivation of enthusiasm and mettä. These days we have to shut ourselves off from the clutter and disharmony of modern urban life, in which the cultivation of positive emotion is continually undermined, and in these circumstances we are likely to find it difficult to contact our feelings in meditation. I'm always doubtful of the happy-peasants-dancing-in-the-fields idealisation of the past.

Aanyway, careful readers will notice that much of that comes from the last 2/3 of the book, and I found that easier to grasp. The earlier stuff I found rather mushy; it washed past my eyes leaving little behind.

What of mindfullness? It appears twice in the summary and is a Key Concept in modern Buddhism. Well, I dunno. It is a concept; one can indeed forget it, and it is good to be reminded (see-also Meetings With Remarkable Men) but I'm doubtful it can support the burden it is given.

Notes

1. That's rather hostage-to-fortune perhaps. But (a) Buddha was the favoured son of a rich family; and (b) you're not telling me this stuff is for the down-hearted only, are you? No: so why is solace-from-pain relevant; there doesn't seem to be an obvious connection between it and enlightenment.

Refs

* In What Sense Is Life Suffering? - ACX attempts another answer: that emotion, like temperature, might be though to have "plus" and "minus" but is really just a scale. As an attempted answer it is I think a failure; that's just not what they mean.