I've been reading (but haven't finished) Bhante Sujato's
A Brief History of Mindfulness: How insight worsted tranquility in the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta. Reading all those Pāḷi words is massively headache-inducing (dig my diacriticals?), but if you're into incredibly geeky and detailed technical discussions of Buddhism and Buddhist history, you'll ignore the blood vessels as they burst in your head as I did.
My problem with this book is the same problem I have with any of these books written from the perspective of "this is the more authentic practice." It's captured nicely in Sujato's
blog post summarizing the argument of the book:
Bhante Sujato:
Modern teachings on mindfulness are almost exclusively derived from a peculiar 20th century interpretation of one text, the Pali Satipatthana Sutta. This doctrine, the vipassanavada, says that satipatthana is a practice of ‘dry insight’, where the meditator, without previous practice of tranquility meditation, is ‘mindful’ of the changing phenomena of experience. This alone is sufficient to realize enlightenment.
When we carefully consider the range of teachings found in early Buddhist texts on mindfulness, it becomes clear that this doctrine does not hold up.
The bolded part is where I wish the discussion would go in the direction of, "When we consider these different
practices based upon different interpretations of the text, it becomes clear that
some practices are better than others for achieving awakening. [And by "awakening" I mean x, y, and z.]" Instead it becomes the fascinating though slightly less useful discussion of what the original teaching is - which is useful only if you think there is one, unequivocal, worthwhile awakening, and the historical Buddha got it, and everything since then has been a fall from grace.
The book is well worth the headache just to get to the part near the end (or to skip to the part at the end, as I did) where he offers a reconstruction of the original Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta - and then offers his interpretation of how to apply these instructions in an actual sit. So-called "mindfulness meditation" starts to look uncannily like jhāna meditation.
But here are the questions I have, and they're questions that I've had for awhile and aren't just connected to this book:
If you follow an approach like that described in the Ānāpānasati Sutta or the reconstructed Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, will you end up at a different destination (different perception of reality, different kind of awakening) than if you do a "dry insight" practice that is focused on perceiving the three characteristics? Or is it basically the same? Did the Mahasi folks (and Tibetan folks and Zen folks) basically find an alternative road to the same destination?
And before anyone tells me, "Go test it out, dude!" let's keep in mind that it takes lots of time (often on lengthy retreats) to master either one of these approaches to the point where significant breakthroughs occur. The most useful thing would be to get a bunch of monks who practice different techniques and ask them about their attainments and baseline experiences of reality and put them in MRI machines, etc., but clearly I'm a hippie and a dreamer to speak this way.
Unless someone else knows of resources that go in this direction...?