[KCI-Indexed] What Does Sati Keep Present?

Abstract

In early Buddhism, sati has commonly been explained as either memory or attention. Yet neither explains how practices with different objects—the recollections (anussati) and the four establishments of mindfulness (satipaṭṭhāna)—belong to one category of sati. This paper diagnoses the difficulty as a failure to see sati as a process rather than preserved content or a settled state, and redefines it in three terms: process, establishment, and entailment.

First, sati is the process of keeping seamlessly present a liberation-oriented frame of reference that the practitioner has adopted. Here 'seamless presence' is an analytical term, grounded in Nikāya usage (asammuṭṭhā, upaṭṭhitā), for sati's continuance without lapse. On this account, memory, awareness, and attention are relocated as constitutive facets of the process, not its essence. Second, the completion of that process—the frame standing present without lapse—is its establishment (paṭṭhāna). That the Mahānāma Sutta (AN 6.10) assigns a verbatim formula to all six recollections shows that while the reference points differ, the form that handles them is one. Third, the correction of distraction, and the concentration and liberation that ensue, are not goals imposed on this establishment but entailments that naturally follow from it, as the Cetanākaraṇīya Sutta (AN 10.2) states in terms of dhammatā.

On this analysis, the recollections and the four establishments, despite their different objects, prove to be a single function differing only in its reference point.

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