Sati · सति · mindfulness

Bare attention — the faculty of noticing what is happening while it happens, trained on the breath, the body, feeling-tones and mental states until the mind can watch itself without immediately becoming what it watches. It is the seventh limb of the Eightfold Path and the engine of the whole vipassanā method: not thinking about impermanence but catching it in the act. Judaism's cognates are several and none of them is a translation. Hitbonenut is contemplative gazing into an idea until it changes you; kavvanah is directed intention aimed at a specific act; cheshbon ha-nefesh, the Mussar accounting, is retrospective and moral; and shiviti — "I have set the Lord before me always" — is continuous presence. The Buddhist watches the process; the Jew stands before a Presence. It is the difference between a laboratory and an audience, and it goes all the way down.