Buddha attained supreme enlightenment through meditation and then spent His whole life converting sentient beings. The Four Foundations of Mindfulness Sutra teaches a method of meditation to gain no-self, and to enter Nirvana.
Why do we know well how breath is but we shouldn’t control it?
Breath is to reflect all activities of mind. If it is interfered in, then it will be stopped. It means that our self will rise high.
We only need to know passively how breath is. It is long we know it’s long. It short we know it’s short. It’s weak we know it’s weak. It is strong we know it’s strong. That’s all. We know it well but we never interfere in. any attention to it or interference in it will bring practitioners tenseness chest pains, and tiredness.
Throughout a period of meditation breath will be unstable. Inner secret erroneous thing can appear to control our breath. That makes our breath long or short, weak or strong at a time.
For example, when we try hard to concentrate on something, our breath will be strong. When our mind is tranquil, our breath will be softer and longer. If our mind is secretly shaken in mind, our breath will be strong and short. If we have feelings of fear, hatred, and love, our breath will be more rapidly. It means that all activities of mind are reflected by breath. So, knowing well our breath is that we know well our mind whether it is peaceful or disordered.
If we control or direct our breath, our brains will be tense even though our mind is tranquil.
It is likely that our self will be multiplied after that. Please note that our control of breath only multiplies our self more and more.
When our breath is strong, we know that our mind is disordered. Such knowing is meant that we realize our mistakes when meditating, and then we should repent of our mistakes. Soon after, owing of repentance, our erroneous thinking will be down, our mind will be down too, and then our breath will be calm without our control. Specially, our self has no chance to be multiplied.
The key point of controlling breath is that we know it well but we don’t control it at all.
That is why the Buddha taught us “Our breath is long we know it’s long. It is short we know it is short. It is little we know it is little. It is much we know it is much’
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