Mindfulness (sati)

Mindfulness translates the Pali sati (Sanskrit smṛti), whose root meaning is memory: keeping something in mind. In the Buddha’s teaching it is the seventh factor of the eightfold path, and the four foundations of mindfulness, of the body, feelings, mind and mental phenomena, are set out in the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta as a direct path to liberation.

Mindfulness in this sense is not mere attention. It remembers what is wholesome and what is not, and it is joined with clear comprehension and with the insight into impermanence, suffering and non-self that the path cultivates. Theravāda meditation teachers distinguish calm (samatha), the stilling of the mind, from insight (vipassanā), for which mindfulness is the main instrument.

In the twentieth century, Burmese teachers such as Ledi Sayadaw and Mahasi Sayadaw taught insight meditation to lay people, and from the 1970s mindfulness was adapted into secular programmes for stress and health. Scholars debate how much of the traditional meaning survives in the secular adaptations.