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The author of this book is a German born Buddhist monk ordained and trained in Sri Lanka in the Theravada tradition. He is an eminent scholar of Buddhism and a prominent meditation teacher. His study area is Early Buddhism. In fact, Buddhism as we see it today is composed of different schools of thought, interpretation, and practices. Each one of these schools base their practice on a set of texts that were transmitted orally and then written centuries after the death of the Buddha.
Furthermore, each of these texts are in a different language and were transmitted by a reciting tradition proper to a peculiar area. As a result of this situation, we have texts in Pali from Sri Lanka, in Chinese from China, Tibetan, and Sanskrit and Gandhari fragment from the Indian sphere of influence. For most of the history of Buddhist practice and scholarship, these traditions and texts existed separately. The work of this scholar is the first ever attempt to bridge these texts by learning all these languages and surveying all these texts in order to detect the points of convergence and divergence. The common teachings are more likely to be closer to the historical Buddha. This body of work is dubbed early Buddhism. The divergences are more likely to be results of later elaborations. This is in no sense a belittling or a diminishing of the value of these texts, on the contrary, they give us an insight how the understanding and the practice of Buddhism unfolded throughout the centuries across vast geographical areas and different host cultures.

Inside of this paradigm, this book is a survey of the notion of mindfulness in the different reciting traditions in which parallel versions exist. By the time of the Buddha, mindfulness was already an age-old practice in the Indian subcontinent, central to many religious tradition and philosophical systems. However, as is the case now, a clear definition and understanding of its use was never a consensus. The goal of the author is to survey key aspects of mindfulness as described in parallel versions of Buddhist texts. Each chapter of this book deals with a specific aspect of Mindfulness, provides the English translation of the Chinese text, since it is the one in which no English translation is available, then compares the differences with the other versions preserved in other languages. There are five aspects of Mindfulness that he focuses on: Protective, Embodied, Attentive, Receptive, and finally liberating.

The more intuitive aspect of mindfulness is the attentive one. Any beginner practitioner is told that mindfulness is about directing your attention towards an object and sustaining it there. However, this have led to a confusion between Mindfulness and attention and concentration, all of them being important notion in themselves in Buddhist practice. Attention being a link in the dependent origination chain and concentration being a factor of the noble eight-fold path. The author uses the texts to clear this ambiguity, showing that attention is there in every act of cognition, while mindfulness is a specific type of attention that needs to be established, the purpose of establishing it is to gain more concentration, which means a collected mind undistracted and undivided, able to see the real nature of things.

The Embodied dimension is more related to the type of meditation most prominent in the Buddhist practice, which is the four establishments: awareness of body, of feeling tones, of consciousness and mental objects. The four establishments are used as a sort of anchor to sustain the state of mindfulness. Attention is kept on the body, feeling and mind yet there is a kind of monitoring of all what is happening around us. Having this form of embodiment facilitates the coming back to a mindful state when it is lost, and at the same time provides the practitioner with a wider perspective without him being lost or carried away by sense objects.

The receptive dimension is closely related to this aspect. After the anchoring comes the opening of the mind to experience the body, feeling and mind in a broader way, both those of oneself and of others. The mind obtains an increased receptivity to phenomena, being equanimous and balanced, and safely anchored in the body, to which it can come back whenever the balance is disturbed. Balanced receptivity is also supported by not being overwhelmed by our biases and inclinations that stem from ignorance and habituation. In this manner, the mind is able to see itself in a clearer and more neutral way.

This leads us to the protective aspect of Mindfulness. The balanced and undivided mind is less likely to be dragged around by its delusions. The mental proliferation is the characteristic of the untrained and heedless mind. A mind with the right mindfulness receives the sense objects while knowing what they are, or at least while investigating what they are. It is thus sheltered from hasty mental constructions that lead to suffering. Mindfulness helps him to create a distance between him and the sense object, and also gives him time to investigate, understand and react properly.

This is the start of the path to liberation. Building on this practice, strengthening all of the aspects of mindfulness, but especially the protective one, leads to the proper understanding of the real nature of our experience, and the three marks of existence that characterizes it: impermanence, un-satisfactoriness and non-self. On the gradual path, mindfulness helps drag the mind out of the endless whirlpool of desire and discontent, attraction and repulsion, making it thus an essential practice towards enlightenment.

It is important to understand that these aspects are not independent, they do in fact depend on each other and build on each other. Besides, this is a conceptual description to be used only as an indication to what should be practiced concretely in daily life. The practice takes all conceptual frameworks into a different level. Furthermore, the topic of mindfulness is inexhaustible, the buddha himself stated that he could give a teaching for a hundred years just in this specific topic. So, what comes in this book is only pointing at certain aspects that can help practitioners understand where they are going with their practice. Yet, it is a deeply appreciated help from a highly learned teacher and meditator.