Reading Highlight

This ground of being arises through an undifferentiated side-by-side balancing of form and the formless. The Buddha points toward this fact in the First Foundation when he instructs, as noted above, that all activities are to be lived in awareness without the slightest discrepancy between one activity and another (“when eating, drinking, chewing, and savoring…when urinating and defecating…when walking, standing, sitting, falling asleep, waking up, talking, and remaining silent, he makes himself fully alert”).3 This full embrace of form lived in formless awareness is the hallmark of this remarkable discourse.