Being Mindful of What is Absent

Abstract

The cultivation of mindfulness in early Buddhist soteriology can comprise awareness of an absence. Such absence can be specific, in the sense of the absence of a particular mental condition. It can also take on a general sense, in that certain meditation practices that involve mindfulness can take as their object the notion that there is nothing at all. Besides being the standard approach for cultivating one of the immaterial spheres, a pre-Buddhist form of practice, the same notion that there is nothing can also be related to insight. Such insight could be retrospectively applied to the attainment of the immaterial sphere of nothingness, or else insight could be cultivated in conjunction with tranquility in a way that involves the same notion of nothingness, testifying to the interrelatedness of these two modalities of meditation in early Buddhism. In addition, the term nothingness can also serve as an epithet for the final goal of Nirvana, a usage that can also be related to mindfulness.