The contemplative practice of satipaṭṭhāna is a process of verifying and internalizing Dhamma through experiential investigation, moving beyond a mere intellectual understanding of Dhamma to an effortless, intuitive and automatic way of seeing. The Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta (for our purposes, “the Sutta”)is a tutorial that presents a set of twenty-one exercises through which this practice is to be pursued, each of which investigates one or more major Dhamma teachings. The starting point for each of these exercises is an initial intellectual understanding of the relevant teaching(s), and that is what this paper/chapter undertakes to provide. The companion manual Satipaṭṭhāna Rethought presents these same teachings from a practice perspective.
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