Mindfulness in Plain English
20th Anniversary Edition
By Bhante Henepola Gunaratana · 224 pages
“A masterpiece.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn. The most direct instruction on Vipassana meditation available in the English language. Written by a monk with 80+ years of practice. Available free online. Worth buying anyway.
What This Book Is
Bhante Henepola Gunaratana was ordained as a Buddhist monk at age twelve in Malandeniya, Sri Lanka, in 1939. He took full ordination at twenty, spent years doing missionary work in India and Malaysia, came to the United States in 1968, earned a PhD in philosophy from American University, served as Buddhist chaplain there, and co-founded the Bhavana Society Forest Monastery in West Virginia in 1985 — where he still lives and teaches. By the time he wrote Mindfulness in Plain English, he had been practicing meditation seriously for over fifty years.
The book he produced is exactly what the title promises: the most direct, unadorned, practically useful instruction on mindfulness meditation available in English. No metaphysics, no elaborate theory, no cultural context required. Just the practice itself — what to do, how to do it, what will go wrong, and how to work with it. Jon Kabat-Zinn called it “a masterpiece.” It has been translated into almost a dozen languages, used in university courses worldwide, and is available in its entirety for free online. The 20th Anniversary Edition adds a new chapter on loving-kindness meditation.
Where Full Catastrophe Living is the clinical manual and Wherever You Go, There You Are is the daily-life companion, Mindfulness in Plain English is the pure instruction manual. It teaches one thing: how to sit, watch the breath, and develop the kind of sustained, non-reactive attention that changes how the mind relates to everything.
The Central Argument
Bhante Gunaratana opens with a chapter on misconceptions about meditation — what it is not — before describing what it is. It is not relaxation, though relaxation may come. It is not trance, not spacing out, not escape. It is the opposite: a precise turning of attention toward what is actually happening in the mind right now, including the restlessness, the boredom, the physical discomfort, and the racing thoughts. The aim is not to quiet the mind by suppressing what arises, but to see what arises so clearly that its grip loosens on its own.
The central distinction the book makes is between concentration (samatha) and insight (Vipassana). Concentration is the capacity to hold attention on a single object without being pulled away — the breath, in this practice. Insight is what develops when that concentrated attention is turned toward the nature of experience itself: the impermanence of each sensation, the constructed quality of the sense of self, the unsatisfactory nature of grasping at anything as permanent. The book teaches both, beginning with concentration as the foundation and building toward insight as the natural result of sustained practice.
What distinguishes Bhante Gunaratana’s teaching is its clinical precision combined with genuine warmth. He describes exactly what will happen when you sit — the discomfort, the wandering mind, the drowsiness, the sudden surges of emotion — and exactly what to do with each of them. There is no gap between instruction and practice. He has sat with these experiences himself for decades, and the writing reflects that.
💡 The neuroscience connection: What Bhante Gunaratana describes as the development of concentration and insight maps directly onto what neuroscience calls attentional regulation and metacognitive awareness. Research by Sara Lazar and colleagues at Harvard, published in NeuroReport in 2005, found that experienced meditators showed increased cortical thickness in regions associated with attention, interoception, and sensory processing — including the prefrontal cortex and right anterior insula. A follow-up study by Britta Hölzel and colleagues at Massachusetts General Hospital, published in Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging in 2011, found that eight weeks of MBSR produced measurable increases in gray matter density in the hippocampus (associated with learning and memory) and decreases in amygdala gray matter density (associated with stress reactivity). The practice this book teaches — sustained, non-reactive attention to present-moment experience — is the same practice those studies measured.
The Theravada Foundation
Bhante Gunaratana is a Theravada Buddhist monk in the lineage that has preserved the Pali Canon — the oldest complete collection of the Buddha’s recorded teachings — in its original form for 2,500 years. The practice he teaches in this book is Vipassana: insight meditation as described in the Satipatthana Sutta, the Buddha’s foundational discourse on the four foundations of mindfulness. The breath as the primary object of meditation, the systematic observation of physical sensations, the recognition of impermanence in each arising and passing of experience — all of this comes directly from that text.
What Bhante Gunaratana adds is a lifetime of practical experience and a gift for explanation. The Satipatthana Sutta is precise but spare. Mindfulness in Plain English answers the questions the Sutta leaves implicit: what do you actually do when the mind wanders for the hundredth time? How do you work with physical pain without either suppressing it or being overwhelmed by it? What is the difference between noting a sensation and becoming absorbed in thinking about it? These are the questions that practitioners actually face, and this book answers them from someone who has faced them himself.
The book also includes a chapter on loving-kindness meditation (metta) — the systematic cultivation of goodwill toward oneself and others — which the Buddha taught as a complementary practice to Vipassana. Bhante Gunaratana treats it with the same practical directness: what to do, how to do it, what it actually develops in the practitioner over time.
Who Should Read This
🌟 Final Verdict
Every other book on this shelf teaches you something about mindfulness. This one teaches you how to do it. The distinction matters more than it sounds. Bhante Gunaratana does not explain the practice in poetic language or motivate you with inspiring ideas. He sits down next to you on the cushion and walks you through exactly what to attend to, what will go wrong, and what to do when it does. After 80 years of practice, he can do this with a clarity that no amount of research or good writing can substitute for.
It is available free online. Buy it anyway. It belongs on the shelf beside the books you reach for when the practice gets difficult.
