Books by Rodney Smith

A prominent Insight Meditation teacher explores the profound implications of the traditional Buddhist teaching on the four areas to which mindfulness is applied as a means to liberation.Awakening manifests through the application of mindfulness to four areas: body, feelings, mind, and dharmas.  Buddhists of all the traditions share this principle found in the Satipatthana Sutta, which has been expounded upon since the time of the Buddha himself.  Rodney Smith challenges us to hold this teaching up against our own experience, and in doing so to discover the inherent interconnection of all Four Foundations. They are revealed to be a sequential path leading the practitioner from the world of form to the joyous perception of the formless. The Four Foundations of Mindfulness thus serve as a road map for any genuine spiritual path.

An amazingly succinct and accessible answer to the question "What is enlightenment?"--from one of America's most prominent teachers of Insight Meditation.One of today's most highly regarded Insight Meditation teachers describes the process of enlightenment in a way anyone can understand--demonstrating in clear language why we operate with the illusion of separation, how we can move out of it to the realization of emptiness and no-self, and how we can live from that state of awakening. He provides brief, powerful exercises that enable us to challenge the reality of our thoughts in order free ourselves from the illusion they keep us bound to, all the while steering us away from the temptation to regard spiritual practice as a process of self-improvement or a goal to be obtained.

Anatta is the Buddhist teaching on the nonexistence of a permanent, independent self. It's a notoriously puzzling and elusive concept, usually leading to such questions as, "If I don't have a self, who's reading this sentence?" It's not that there's no self there, says Rodney Smith. It's just that the self that is reading this sentence is a configuration of elements that at one time did not exist and which at some point in the future will disperse. Even in its present existence, it's more a temporary arrangement of components rather than something solid. Anatta is a truth the Buddha considered to be absolutely essential to his teaching. Smith shows that understanding this truth can change the way you relate to the world, and that the perspective of selflessness is critically important for anyone involved in spiritual practice. Seeing it can be the key to getting past the idea that spirituality has something to do with self-improvement, and to accessing the joy of deep insight into reality.