The inner life
Satipatthana
Direct answer
Satipatthana: Satipatthana, Pali for the establishing of mindfulness, is the Buddha's fourfold scheme of attention to body, feelings, mind and mental qualities.
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At a glance
- Also called
- four foundations of mindfulness, four establishments of mindfulness
- Found in
- Consciousness & Spiritual Psychology
- Related
- Mindfulness, Vipassana, Anapanasati, Body Scan
Satipatthana, Pali for the establishing of mindfulness, is the Buddha's fourfold scheme of attention to body, feelings, mind and mental qualities.
A plain educational schematic; it does not diagnose a condition or replace professional care.
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What does satipatthana mean?
Satipatthana is usually translated as the foundations or establishments of mindfulness. It names four fields in which attention is to be kept: the body, including breath and posture; feeling tone, whether an experience is pleasant, unpleasant or neither; the state of the mind; and dhammas, the patterns the teaching points out, such as the hindrances.
The Satipatthana Sutta, which sets the scheme out, is the root text of modern insight meditation. The noting methods of Burma, the body sweeping taught by S. N. Goenka and much of secular mindfulness draw their exercises from it.
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What sets Satipatthana apart
Its mark is completeness: the four fields are meant to leave no part of experience outside attention. The discourse opens by calling this the direct path, and closes with a bold line about how soon a diligent practitioner may see results, from seven years down to seven days. Each exercise ends with the same refrain, to watch things arise and pass, inwardly and outwardly, which is where the insight comes in.
- Language: Pali: sati, mindfulness, with upatthana, establishing, or patthana, foundation
- Sources: Majjhima Nikaya 10; Digha Nikaya 22
- Four fields: body, feelings, mind, dhammas
- Body exercises: breathing, postures, daily activities, parts of the body, elements, the decaying corpse
- Opening claim: ekayano maggo, the direct or one-way path
Often mistaken for something else: Anapanasati follows one object, the breath, through sixteen steps; satipatthana spreads attention across four fields, of which the breath is only the first exercise.
The story behind Satipatthana
The scheme is taught in the Satipatthana Sutta, number 10 of the Majjhima Nikaya, and at greater length in the Mahasatipatthana Sutta of the Digha Nikaya; parallel versions survive in Chinese translation. Burmese monks, among them Ledi Sayadaw and Mahasi Sayadaw, made it the basis of lay meditation in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Nyanaponika Thera's The Heart of Buddhist Meditation carried it to English readers.
Why Satipatthana matters
Satipatthana is the map behind most mindfulness exercises, and shows that the original practice covered far more than the breath and the body.
How to read Satipatthana
Teachers use the four fields to organise a course, and meditators use them to ask which part of experience they have been leaving out.
Satipatthana in practice: an example
Irritated in a queue, someone notes in turn the tight jaw, the unpleasant tone, the irritated mind, and the wish for things to be otherwise.
Where readings of Satipatthana go wrong
The discourse belongs to a path with ethical and doctrinal parts; lifting the exercises out of it changes what they are for.
Sources and editorial method
This entry summarizes the tradition in the Almanac's own words; where no source is listed, it is an editorial summary rather than a primary text, and symbolic readings are named as the tradition's, not as fact.
- Source
- The Great Almanac Dictionary
- Category
- Consciousness & Spiritual Psychology
- Aliases
- four foundations of mindfulness, satipatthana sutta, satipatthana meaning, four establishments of mindfulness, satipatthana meditation
- Last updated
- 2026-09-26
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Common questions
What does satipatthana mean?
It joins sati, mindfulness, with a word meaning either foundation or establishing. Scholars now tend to prefer establishing of mindfulness, though four foundations of mindfulness remains the familiar English name.
What are the four foundations of mindfulness?
Body, feelings, mind and dhammas. Feelings here means the pleasant, unpleasant or neutral tone of an experience, not emotions, and dhammas are categories of the teaching such as the five hindrances.
Is satipatthana the same as vipassana?
Vipassana is the insight that the practice aims at, and the name of a modern meditation movement. Satipatthana is the framework of four fields of attention that the movement's methods are built on.
