Noting practitioners worry their labels are ‘thinking.’ Buddho practitioners worry their word is ‘just a mantra.’ Both worries dissolve once you see the four ways a word can ride your meditation — and the one question that tests them all: is it converging?
Every satipaṭṭhāna formula turns on one verb: pajānāti. Strip its prefix and you get jānāti, the ordinary verb of knowing. What does the pa- add? The commentators answered fifteen centuries ago, and a full census of the canon now backs them: the prefix marks a different mode of knowing — the one meditators train.
A Corpus Census of the ‘ti-Construction, Its Ancient Readers, and What It Means for the Meditator A guest contribution. The thesis examined here was first advanced by the editor of this blog in March 2008 (“iti and sallakkheti”) and April…