Vipassana represents perhaps the central meditation practice/technique taught by the Buddha upon his enlightenment and handed down through the ages. The person known to history as “The Buddha” was born as Siddhartha Gautama, a prince in what is now Nepal, and lived from the mid-6^th century BCE to late in the 5^th century BCE. According to tradition, the prince Siddhartha left the sheltered life of his palace and soon encountered an old man, a sick man, and a corpse. Then, when he saw one of the many wandering ascetics of that time, he himself became an ascetic in hopes of overcoming aging, illness, and death.

After many years of studying with different teachers and trying various methods of asceticism and meditation to achieve liberation, including near-fatal starvation, Siddhartha realized that the “ Middle Way ” between the extremes of self-indulgence and self-mortification was the only way to true wisdom. Then, seating himself under the Bodhi tree in Bodh Gaya, he vowed he would not rise from meditation until he achieved enlightenment. After 49 days of meditation, at the age of 35, Siddhartha succeeded: he discovered the Four Noble Truths—suffering, the origin of suffering in desire, the possibility of ending suffering, and the Noble Eightfold Path as the way to end suffering.  And thus Siddhartha Gautama  became The Buddha or “Enlightened One.”

After initial reluctance to share his new insights with others through teaching, he did indeed begin teaching, starting with five of his former ascetic companions. Among the many suttas or “discourses” that he gave in his 45 years of teaching, the Satipatthana Sutta stands as one of the most important and is the source of Vipassana meditation. Here, teaching the “four foundations of mindfulness” (the body, feelings, the mind, and dhammas or “phenomena” as used here), the Buddha gave instructions on how to realize liberation through moment-to-moment attention to some aspect of one’s experience, such as the breath. According to the Buddha, this mindful manner of meditating—indeed, of living one’s entire life—allowed the meditator to recognize the truth about every single phenomenon.

In Vipassana or Insight Meditation, then, the practice consists of a detached, non-judgmental focus upon some aspect of individual experience. The most common object of Vipassana is the breath, which the meditator simply watches in its natural in-and-out motion.  By “knowing” the breath through this direct, mindful experience, the meditator recognizes its impermanence—it is always changing, never the same in duration, temperature, etc.; its unsatisfactoriness—whether pleasant or unpleasant or neither, each breath is gone with the next and so can never be in itself satisfying; and its lack of an independent essence or “self”—the breath does not exist independently of conditions, for each in-breath requires a preceding out-breath...and vice versa. And thus one “sees clearly” the breath, loses attachment to it as “my breath,” and so can go on to realize the same qualities in every aspect of life—the truth that nothing is worth desiring or getting attached to.