Knowing a Thought as a Thought
Resentment arrives while the dishes are being washed. It does not announce itself. It speaks in the first person and sounds like a fact. An old Buddhist instruction asks for one small act at that moment: to know the thing that has arrived as what it is. KTT counts the resentment as a thought, noticed or not, even when it comes as heat in the chest. The text is a manual of practice. The sources read for this article are translations and commentary, and none of them measured what the practice does.
What the text says
The Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta (Majjhima Nikāya 10) lists four places to keep watch: the body, feelings, citta and mental objects. Translators render citta as mind, consciousness or heart-mind. In the Pāli, the instruction for citta repeats one pattern in pairs. The practitioner understands a citta with lust as a citta with lust, and one without lust as one without lust. The pairs continue with hatred and delusion, contracted and distracted, exalted and unexalted, and others.
One sentence at a time
The next foundation gives the pattern in a first-person form. When sensual desire is present, the practitioner understands: “There is sensual desire in me.” When it is not, the practitioner understands that too. The same passage asks how the desire arises, how it is let go, and how it does not arise again.
The sentence does not argue with the thought, and it does not follow it. It says what the thought is, once, and moves on.
Inside and outside
The text asks for the watching to be done within oneself, within another, and both. It also asks for the arising and the passing away of the state to be seen. The aim is stated modestly: that mindfulness that “there is” this state be established, only as far as needed for knowledge and recollection.
What is not known
Whether noticing a state as what it is changes the state is not known from these sources. The sutta is a manual and does not report results.
When the text took its present form is also open. One translator and scholar, Bhikkhu Sujato, suggests it was put together from older suttas as late as 20 BCE.
How the first listeners practiced it is not known. A second, longer version of the sutta exists, and the two differ.