What is sati?
Sati is the Pāli word, Sanskrit smṛti, for the faculty of remembering or holding in mind what is present. It is usually translated as mindfulness. It is the seventh factor of the Buddhist Eightfold Path and the quality the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta trains across body, feeling, mind and dhammas. The secular mindfulness movement is sati translated into a vocabulary the West's hospitals and schools could meet.
Sati vs adjacent concepts
Sati is not concentration. That is samādhi, which sati is paired with but is not identical to. It is also not an effortful gripping of attention; the buoyancy the commentaries describe is the opposite of the clamped quality novices sometimes mistake for the practice. And in the classical analysis it is not ethically neutral. Sammā-sati (right mindfulness) is distinguished from micchā-sati (wrong mindfulness) precisely because attention can be turned to ends that deepen craving as readily as to ends that loosen it. A skilled sniper has sati of a sort. The path-context, what the attention is for and the wider Eightfold Path it sits in, is part of the definition the Buddha intended, and the part the popularisations most often drop.
What sati actually names
The Pāli sati comes from the verbal root sar-, to remember. Its original sense is closer to keeping in mind than to the bare attention the modern English mindfulness often suggests. Sati is the faculty by which the practitioner does not lose track of what is happening: the breath, the body's posture, the felt quality of an arising emotion, and the doctrinal frame within which all of these are being examined. Bare attention is part of it. Remembering the frame in which the attention is held is the other half. The Pāli commentators describe sati's characteristic quality as apilāpana, not floating away, a buoyancy of attention rather than a clamp on it.
Where it sits in the Buddhist analysis
Sati is the seventh factor of the Eightfold Path (sammā-sati, right mindfulness), one of the five spiritual faculties (indriya), and one of the seven factors of awakening (bojjhaṅga). The Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, Foundations of Mindfulness, is the canonical instruction text. It describes four domains in which sati is applied: body (kāya), feelings (vedanā), mind-states (citta), and dhammas (the categories of experience analysed under various Buddhist schemes). Sati is the working quality of vipassanā practice and the precondition for the insight into impermanence, dukkha and anattā the path is built around. The Visuddhimagga, Buddhaghosa's fifth-century compendium of Theravāda practice, treats sati as both the gate through which the practitioner enters every other stage and the guard that keeps the path from sliding into dullness or agitation.
How it shows up in practice
Tara Brach's guided practice names sati only obliquely, but the cadence is unmistakable: the practitioner is asked to notice what is here, to allow it, and to keep remembering, across the inevitable wandering, what the noticing is for. The Plum Village teachings train sati explicitly through bell sounds, eating practice and slow walking meditation, building a habit of returning that does not depend on a posture. Thich Nhat Hanh's teaching on emptiness, signlessness and aimlessness operates downstream of sati: the seeing it describes is what stabilised sati makes possible. Jon Kabat-Zinn's MBSR curriculum is the secular clinical descendant, where the body scan, the sitting practice and the everyday mindfulness exercises are each a particular training of sati under a different name.
The translation problem
Translating sati as mindfulness, a choice the British Pāli scholar T. W. Rhys Davids made in 1881 and never seriously displaced, was useful in 1881 and is misleading now. The English word has been thinned across a century of secular adoption, and *mindfulness* in current clinical and corporate usage usually names only the bare attention half of what sati is. The doctrinal half, the remembering of the frame, was the part the Buddhist path treated as load-bearing. Whether bracketing that frame in the clinical adaptations keeps the practice's transformative force is the central live debate of contemporary contemplative science. Defenders argue the practice is robust enough to do its work without doctrinal scaffolding; critics argue that sati without the path it is one factor of is a stress-reduction tool, not a path.
