The classical practice
The source text is the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta — Foundations of Mindfulness — in which the Buddha describes four domains of clear attention: body, feelings (pleasant/unpleasant/neutral), mind-states, and dhammas (the constituents of experience analysed under various Buddhist categories). The instruction throughout is the same: notice what is here, notice that it is impermanent, do not cling, do not push away. The practice is not a technique for producing calm; calm is treated as a side-effect of the seeing.
Modern transmission
The twentieth-century revival of Vipassanā came largely through Burma — Mahasi Sayadaw and the lay teacher U Ba Khin — and through the Thai forest tradition. S. N. Goenka, U Ba Khin's student, designed the ten-day silent residential course that has now been offered to several million students worldwide at no charge. In parallel, the Insight Meditation Society in Massachusetts trained the generation of American teachers — Goldstein, Salzberg, Kornfield, Tara Brach — who introduced the practice to the English-speaking dharma world. Jon Kabat-Zinn's MBSR is the secular clinical descendant of the same lineage.
In the index
Brach's guided practice, Kabat-Zinn's *Full Catastrophe Living*, and the Plum Village teachings all draw from this stream, though only the first two name it explicitly. The continuities run beneath the labels.
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