“Practitioners, one does not enjoy the deathless who doesn’t enjoy mindfulness directed to the body. One enjoys the deathless who enjoys mindfulness directed to the body. The deathless has been enjoyed, by those who have enjoyed mindfulness directed to the body.” – the Nikāya Buddha, from the Anguttara Nikāya; from the Book of the Ones, Translated by Christopher J.Ash.
“Yoniso manasikāra” is an important term in the early Buddhist texts (the Nikāyas). It indicates an important quality of attention. Nevertheless, when I first encountered the term decades ago, it didn’t catch me, and on reflection, I believe that is because it wasn’t an obviously experience-near term. I was always looking for terms I could apply to my actual experience. If I am going to think about death, I want a way to think freshly, openly; a way of discovery.
The conventional translation of the term yoniso manasikāra is: skilful attention. Other translations are ‘proper,’ ‘appropriate,’ or ‘wise’ attention. (All of which should be understood as having liberation as the background. That is, it’s attention that is methodical for that purpose.) ‘But, what exactly did ‘skilful’ mean?’ I wondered.
Furthermore, over the years I felt a little disquiet, at one time or another, at the very flat, prosaic sound of these translations. They made the principle sound too logical, too methodical; as though one were imposing a system onto one’s experience, from the outside (which is a not uncommon use of the Buddhadharma, of course).
‘Manasikāra’ is attention, or pondering. The Pāli-English Dictionary (PED) entry suggests to me that it is guided thought, of a kind. But, what do we base our pondering upon, or guide it by? Upon already received categories? Upon prejudices? And, where does the direction forward come from? Mere belief in other people’s priorities, however noble?
In other words, when we enquire, are we only re-jigging the old thinking, making new arrangements of previously learned knowledge? And, applying old categories to present-moment experiences? If so, ‘manasikāra’ could be a name for a procedure guided, at best, by logic (re-arranging language units according to conventions or rules); and, at worst, by untested opinion.
Then, for me, there is the matter of how our thinking is guided after awakening. Traditional approaches may help awaken us to non-conceptuality. A certain kind of freedom arises – a liberation based on the deathless may be realised. However, we don’t usually learn to think from the liberation; or, to see the relationship between the non-conceptual and our need for on-going concept formation.
Indeed, to a large degree, awakened traditional teachers usually go on thinking about life in their culture’s old terms. They often interpret their new-found non-conceptual experience from the old cultural point of view. These old concepts don’t work to think freshly, radiantly from the no-mind experience. They tend to express the liberation experience in terms of the old frameworks, and not attribute the arising of thinking to the non-conceptual.
(Of course, there are exceptions. Dzogchen thinkers – Nyingma and Bön – have taken steps in the direction of articulating an organic relationship between language and the deathless element; where language is the creative communication of the deathless element.)
Then, there is ‘yoni.’ According to the PED, ‘yoni,’ in the word ‘yoniso,’ is a feminine noun of Vedic origin, which means: ‘womb.’ And, it’s also: ‘origin,’ way of birth, place of birth, realm of existence; nature, and matrix. It seemed to me that this hinted at something much more than imposing already-formed systems of thought, with their reason and logic. (Do we have, here, another patriarchal distortion of the meaning of a term?)
Even after learning Pāli, I didn’t twig to a deeper way to see this facet of the way of enquiry; until I read Linda S. Blanchard’s perspicacious study Dependent Arising in Context: The Buddha’s Core Lesson in the Context of His Time, and Ours. I was moved, then, to discover the relevance of the phrase to my bodily-felt life. Let’s look at this.
In a note, Blanchard quoted British Buddhist scholar Richard Gombrich. He was in turn quoting someone else. In a note (What the Buddha Thought, p. 132), he quoted: “(L)iterally [yoniso manasikāra] means ‘making in the mind according to origin’ ”
The penny dropped. The ‘womb’ meant, here, is bodily-felt experience. The body, in its present living, is the meeting place of everything – and here, the skilful attention of the four placements of mindfulness can bring the holistic felt sense of our situations into view, and with the right support for clear comprehension, can work to carry our lives forward (and therefore, to carry the big Dharma, the big life process, forward).