Meditation on the Breath: Mindfulness and Focused Attention

This article explores to what degree meditation on the breath in early Buddhist thought involved focused attention. Closer inspection of instructions on this mode of meditation in the form of sixteen steps shows focused attention to be only a secondary aspect of the practice, which for the most part rather involves cultivating breadth of mind. This differs from later tradition. As the apparent result of a gradual reduction of the sixteen-step scheme to just the touch experience of the breath, a stronger focus naturally came to be required, eventually leading to the necessity of devising additional meditation techniques such as counting the breaths, a modality of practice only found in later texts. The findings from the present article suggest the need to consider “focus” on the breath and “mindfulness” of the process of breathing as related but distinct mental qualities.