Westernized Buddhist studies began in Japan after the Meiji restoration. Most of them were philologically oriented and rare studies have been made from the view of practical meditation.

Monks have been teaching Buddhist insight meditation, and “Mindfulness” meditation based on insight meditation has been growing more popular in the U.S. and Japan since the 1980’s. But the term “Mindfulness” seems to be interpreted and used arbitrarily by teachers. Buddhist scholars should commit to “Mindfulness” meditation movement from a Buddhist context.

Mindfulness means to label any object as it is; this object means any phenomena or feeling occurring in one’s mind. Practitioners keep labeling as many objects arising in their mind as they can. For example, “sound, sound, pain, pain, pain.” They have no time to think of those objects, because they are too busy concentrating on labeling. An object arises and disappears momentarily and another arises in no time. Therefore practitioners must be mindful of occurring objects in their mind. When one is mindful of objects occurring in one’s thoughts, one’s mind becomes very clear and awakened. This is called “awareness.”

When practitioners realize that these objects are momentary, impermanent, and thus with no value, they reach enlightenment. But long before that, they can feel joy, lightness and “awake-ness” by their concentration. Such change of mind and body benefits practitioners’ lives. Thus “Mindfulness” meditation has become popular.

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In Buddhism some schools accept the concept antarābhava, while the others do not. The most comprehensive discussions about this concept are found in the Mahāvibhāṣā. The present paper is a summary of the discussions. Among them, the most interesting topic is whether the antarābhava exists or not. It can be judged as the starting point for the later development of the concept. For several related important concepts are proposed there. Incidentally, the explanations of this concept in the Abhidharmakośa are extracted from the exhaustive discussions in the Mahāvibhāṣā.

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There is the statement in the Abhidharma Mahavibhasa (AMBh) translated by Xuanzang 苦奘 that discrimination in meditation is devoid of conceptual construction (nirvikalpaka), but that language exists until the first stage of meditation (prathamadhyana). Dharmakirti (ca. 600-660) calls cognition (jñana) that can combine with language conceptual construction (kalpanajñana). This may be understood to mean that there is no language in meditation. On the contrary, it is said that language exists until the first stage of meditation in the AMBh. The authors of the AMBh regard cognition that is combined with language in the first stage of meditation as non-discriminative (nirvikalpaka), because they say that discrimination in meditation is devoid of conceptual construction.

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At the beginning of Chapter Seven of the Vimalakirti-nirdesa translated by Kumarajiva, thirty comparisons were pointed out to explain thoroughly that sattva is non-existence, namely that it is sunya. These comparisons are classified into three kinds: (1) Existing as phenomena but not existing as real bodies, (2) Not existing theoretically and (3) Not existing in reality in general theories.
Seeing such a classification, Zhiyi regarded these comparisons to understand respectively: (1) Earthly truth for sattva (仮), (2) Essential existence for sattva (空) and (3) Existence enhanced from both existences (中). Particularly, he discussed comparisons of type (3) and elucidated that they existed in fact even though they are impossible at first glance. This explanation is a jump from the context of the sutra and quite unique from opinions of other scholars.
Though the sutra after this part elucidates the compassion of the bodhisattva, Zhiyi admitting the earthly meaning regards the sattva, the object of the bodhisattva's compassion, as not a complete sunya and thus finds a foundation for compassion.

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