Philokalia, Volume IV, Athens 1893 edition · fresh scholarly translation from the Byzantine Greek
Gregory Palamas (c. 1296–1359) is the systematic theologian of the hesychast tradition — the figure who gave doctrinal substance to the contemplative practices Nikephoros describes. Where Nikephoros offers a manual, Palamas offers a defence. His Triads, written in response to the Byzantine scholar Barlaam’s attacks on hesychast prayer, argue for the legitimacy of keeping the intellect within the body during prayer, using the breath as a tool for beginners, and attending to somatic experience as the appropriate vehicle for inward recollection. The Xanthopoulos chapters included in this volume, written by disciples of Palamas’s teacher Gregory of Sinai, contain the most procedurally explicit breath-meditation instruction in the entire Philokalia.
In some respects this material makes the parallel with Mahasi-style practice even more visible than Nikephoros does, because Palamas is arguing against critics who say the same things Mahasi’s critics say: that anchoring the mind in the body is a confusion of the spiritual with the physical, that attending to the breath and navel is beneath the dignity of the intellect, that beginners should be pushed outward toward doctrinal learning rather than inward toward somatic awareness. His rebuttals are structurally identical to the defenses any Mahasi teacher would make. Both controversies are the same controversy.
Barlaam and his followers accused hesychasts of being omphalopsychoi — “navel-souled” or “belly-souled” — on the grounds that directing the gaze toward the chest or navel during prayer confused the spiritual with the corporeal. Palamas’s response is grounded in a non-dualist anthropology: the body is not evil. It is a temple of the Holy Spirit. The intellect was housed in the body by God; confining it there is not degradation but restoration. The same critics would have to call Isaiah “belly-souled” for writing “My belly shall resound like a harp” and “We have conceived in the womb the spirit of thy salvation.” The parallel with Mahasi is exact: rise-and-fall practice is regularly criticized as too bodily, too mechanical, beneath the level of true insight. The Mahasi response is structurally identical — the body is not the object but the door; the somatic anchor is a legitimate vehicle for inward gathering, not a confusion of the physical with the spiritual.
The passage in the Triads (Triad I, Discourse 2) is the most explicit endorsement of breath-anchoring in the Philokalia. Palamas writes that for beginners, “to be advised to look upon themselves above all, and through the breath to send the intellect inward, is not inappropriate.” He goes further: there are teachers who advise attending to the frequently dispersed and recalled in-breath and “holding it slightly, so as simultaneously to check the intellect, keeping it within it.” This is breath retention as a concentration technique — the breath is used to give the scattered mind something to grip until attention stabilizes. The Xanthopoulos chapter is more explicit still: “introduce [the intellect] into the passage of the nostrils, where the breath enters into the heart; and press it and force it to descend together with the in-breathed breath into the heart.” Mahasi’s instruction to anchor attention to the rise and fall of the abdomen, noting each movement until the mind settles, is the same technique with a different somatic anchor point — the abdomen rather than the nostrils — and without the theistic frame.
Palamas defends the hesychast posture of directing the eyes downward toward the chest or navel during seated prayer. His argument is both physical and noetic: gathering the body into a “circular form” corresponds to the “circular and unerring motion” sought in the intellect, and the downward gaze helps redirect the power of attention — which normally flows outward through the eyes — back toward the heart. He then invokes Job 40:16: “the power of the noetic beast is upon the navel of the belly,” meaning that the stronghold of the passional life is located there, and that prayer must be stationed there as a counter-force. The parallel to Mahasi is almost embarrassingly direct: the abdomen (navel region) is the primary object of attention in rise-and-fall noting precisely because it is where the breath most visibly moves the body, making it the clearest available anchor for a mind that is still too scattered to attend to subtler objects.
In his systematic treatment of the three powers of the soul, Palamas defines nepsis explicitly: “sending away everything that stands in the way of the mind’s upward movement toward God — and this part of the law we call watchfulness.” Self-mastery governs the senses; love transforms the passible part of the soul; nepsis governs the rational part. The Pali equivalent is sati, which in Mahasi’s system plays the same structural role: the faculty that stands between the arising of a mental event and the proliferation into narrative, maintaining bare contact with what is occurring without elaboration. Both traditions locate the critical operative faculty in the same structural position — between perception and reaction — and give it a similar name rooted in the same underlying function: to notice what is arising before it gathers force.
Palamas makes a consistent distinction throughout the Triads between eisagomenoi (those being introduced) and those who have made progress. For beginners, the breath anchor, the downward gaze, the specific posture, and the verbal prayer are all prescribed as training supports. For advanced practitioners, “all these things follow without toil and without care” — attention becomes continuous and spontaneous, and the supports are no longer needed because awareness has stabilized without them. Mahasi’s system has the same architecture: rise-and-fall noting is a training device for establishing initial sati; as practice matures the noting becomes effortless, continuous, and eventually transparent to the underlying awareness it was meant to support. Both traditions are clear that the technique is not the destination and that clinging to it is itself an obstacle.
The Xanthopoulos chapter describes the moment when the intellect enters the heart and unites with the soul as a homecoming: “as a man who has been long absent from his own home, when he returns, cannot contain himself for joy at being deemed worthy to meet his children and his wife — so also the intellect, when it is united with the soul, is filled with ineffable pleasure and gladness.” This is the qualitative shift that Mahasi teachers describe when the noting mind finally settles stably on its object — a moment of ease and delight that is categorically different from sensory pleasure, marking the entry into actual practice from the preparatory stage. Both traditions describe this event — the mind arriving at its object — as a return to something natural rather than an achievement of something new. The mechanism appears to be the same event read through different conceptual grids.
Palamas’s ultimate goal is theosis: deification, union with the uncreated divine light seen on Mount Tabor, an encounter with a personal God. The distinction between God’s essence (which remains unknowable) and God’s energies (through which the practitioner participates in divine life) is the theological linchpin of the entire edifice. There is no equivalent in Mahasi. The practice leads to liberation through insight into impermanence, suffering, and non-self — not to participation in the life of a personal deity.
The Jesus Prayer, for Palamas and the Xanthopoulos, is not a technique but an invocation. It is addressed to a specific person: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.” Mahasi’s noting is impersonal and descriptive — “rising, falling, sitting, touching” — labelling phenomena without any relational address. The difference in the verbal tag is the difference between prayer and observation.
Palamas defends the body as a temple and the seat of divine indwelling. Mahasi makes no such claim about the body; it is simply the most accessible domain of present-moment phenomena, and its impermanence is precisely what makes sustained attention to it liberating. One tradition sanctifies the body as vessel; the other uses the body as a window onto impermanence.
Gregory Palamas, Metropolitan of Thessaloniki — To the Most Venerable among Nuns, Xene: Concerning the Passions and Virtues and the Fruits that Spring from Mental Stillness
[On Solitude and Unitary Attention]
For those who are truly resolved to live as solitaries, fellowship is distasteful — not only fellowship with the many, but even fellowship with those of like manner of life. For constant intercourse interrupts that most delightful communion with God, and renders the unitary character of the intellect — by virtue of which the inner and truly solitary monk subsists — twofold, and sometimes even multiple. Hence one of the Fathers, asked why he fled from men, replied: “Because I cannot be with God while associating with men.” Another, explaining such matters from experience, blamed not only association but even the very sight of men, as capable of disturbing the settled stillness of the mind in those who practise hesychia. And if one were to examine with precision, even the memory of an encounter and the anticipation of a coming visit and its attendant company will not suffer the soul’s reasoning faculty to be wholly at rest.
[On the Three Powers and the Law of Watchfulness]
One who has purified the body by self-mastery, and has made wrath and desire a source of virtues through love, and has presented to God a mind that has been refined through prayer — acquires and beholds in himself the grace promised to the pure in heart. For the senses, what and how far they are to apprehend — and the work of this law is called self-mastery. For the passible part of the soul we produce the best disposition — and it has received the name of love. And through this we also improve the rational part, sending away everything that stands in the way of the mind’s upward movement toward God — and this part of the law we call watchfulness [nepsis].
From the Holy Discourses: In Defence of Those Who Practise Holy Hesychia (Triad I, Discourse 2)
[The Question Put by Barlaam]
They say that we do wrong in our eagerness to confine our intellect within the body. For outside the body, they say, it is rather needful to drive the intellect out by every means. And so they severely ridicule some of our people, writing against them, as though they exhort beginners to look upon themselves and through the breath to send the intellect inward. But teach me, Father, how we are resolved with every care to send the intellect inward and do not consider it an evil to confine the intellect within the body?
[Response: That the Body is a Legitimate Seat of the Intellect]
Brother, do you not hear the Apostle saying that our bodies are the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in us? And again: that we are the house of God, as God himself says, “I will dwell in them and walk among them and I will be their God.” The body, then, being destined by nature to become a dwelling-place of God — how could any man of sense think it unworthy to house his own intellect within it? And how did God in the beginning house the intellect within the body? Did he too do wrong?
Such arguments will suit the heretics who say that the body is evil and the creation of the Evil One. But we consider it evil for the intellect to be in bodily-minded thoughts — not evil to be in the body, since the body itself is not evil. With David, each one of those who devote their lives to God cries: “My soul has thirsted for thee, how much more my flesh!”; and, “My heart and my flesh have rejoiced in the living God.” And with Isaiah: “My belly shall resound like a harp, and my inward parts like a wall of bronze which thou hast renewed”; and, “Through thy fear, O Lord, we have conceived in the womb the spirit of thy salvation.”
Therefore we who are set in battle-array against the law of sin, drive it out of the body and install the oversight of the intellect. And through it we legislate for each power of the soul and each member of the body what is fitting.
[On Breath-Following as a Technique for Beginners]
And for the beginners to be advised to look upon themselves above all, and through the breath to send the intellect inward, is not inappropriate. For one who is not yet capable of contemplating himself — to gather the intellect to himself by certain devices, no one of right mind would discourage; since for those who have recently stripped themselves for this contest, the intellect even when gathered together repeatedly leaps away; and it is needful for them continually to bring it back again; but being unpractised, they find it most difficult to observe, since of all things it is the most hard to see and the quickest to move.
For this reason there are those who advise attending to the frequently dispersed and recalled in-breath, and holding it slightly, so as simultaneously to check the intellect, keeping it within it, until — advancing with God’s help toward the better — they have rendered their own intellect impervious to things around it and unmixed, and are able to gather it accurately into a single unitary recollection.
And one might see this following spontaneously from the attention of the intellect — for this breath enters and goes out quietly, and above all on every occasion of earnest inquiry, especially in those who observe hesychia in body and mind. For all those who have made progress in hesychia, all these things follow without toil and without care. For they necessarily attend of themselves upon the soul’s perfect entry into itself. But for beginners, one would see none of the things mentioned succeeding without labour. And why need one say more about these things? For all who have experience laugh at those who, from inexperience, legislate against them. For in such matters not argument, but toil and the experience won through toil is the teacher.
[The Posture: Chest and Navel]
Since also, as one of the great ones says, the inner man is naturally conformed to external postures after the transgression: how would it not greatly benefit one who is eager to collect the intellect into itself — so that it moves not in a straight but in a circular and unerring motion — not to lead the eye here and there, but as it were to rest it upon some support, namely one’s own chest or navel?
For in addition to gathering oneself outwardly, as far as possible, into a circular form, corresponding to the sought-after circular motion of the intellect itself, it also sends inward the power of the intellect that pours out through the sight, toward the heart through such a posture of the body.
And if the power of the noetic beast is upon the navel of the belly, as the stronghold of the law of sin being there and there finding its pasture — why should we not station against it the counter-law, armed through prayer, lest the spirit that was driven out through the laver of regeneration, returning with seven spirits more wicked than itself, lodge there again?
[The “Belly-Souled” Accusation and its Rebuttal]
They would call them “belly-souled” [koiliopsychoi], and would jointly calumniate all who by means of bodily symbols figure forth and invoke and track the noetic, divine, and spiritual realities. But by this logic they must also call Isaiah belly-souled, who wrote of his belly resounding like a harp and his inward parts like a wall of bronze; and every prophet who used the language of womb and belly for the inner spiritual life. The bodily practice of directing the gaze downward toward chest or navel is a legitimate physical support for the inward movement of the intellect — not an identification of the soul with the belly.
Kallistos and Ignatios Xanthopoulos — Concerning Those Who Choose to Live in Hesychia and in the Monastic Life
[On the Heart, the Breath, and the Entry of the Intellect]
You know, brother, that the breath we breathe is this air; and we breathe it in not for any other reason than for the sake of the heart — for the heart is the principle of life and of heat in the body. The heart therefore draws in the breath so that it may expel its own heat outward through the exhalation and provide equability to itself. The instrument of this economy is the lung, which, created loose by the Creator, like a kind of bellows, painlessly introduces and expels the surrounding air. Thus the heart, drawing in the cold of the breath and expelling the hot, preserves inviolably the order for which it was fashioned for the constitution of the living being.
You therefore, sitting in a quiet cell and gathering your intellect, introduce it — the intellect, that is — into the passage of the nostrils, where the breath enters into the heart; and press it and force it to descend together with the in-breathed breath into the heart. Once it has entered there, what follows will not be joyless or without grace; but just as a man who has been long absent from his own home, when he returns, cannot contain himself for joy at being deemed worthy to meet his children and his wife — so also the intellect, when it is united with the soul, is filled with ineffable pleasure and gladness. Therefore, brother, accustom the intellect not to depart quickly from there; for at first it grows very remiss from the confinement and narrowness within; but when it has become accustomed, it no longer delights in wandering outward — for “the kingdom of heaven is within us,” which to one who looks there and seeks it through pure prayer, all external things appear hateful and detestable.
[The Jesus Prayer as the Work within the Heart]
And shortly after, you must also learn this: that when the intellect is there, you must not keep it silent and idle, but give it the work and continual meditation of: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me” — and let it never cease from this. For this, holding the intellect undistracted, renders it unconquered and untouched by the assaults of the enemy, and daily raises it to divine love and desire.
[The Natural Method: Entry through the In-Breathing of the Nostril]
[Greek heading: Περι της δι’ εισπνοησεως ρινος φυσικης μεθοδου και της συν αυτη του Κυριου Ιησου Χριστου επικλησεως]
It is necessary also to make this clear to the lover of learning: that if we train our intellect to descend with the breath upon its entry, we shall then learn accurately that as the intellect descends, it does not depart before it has set aside every thought and has become single and naked, gripped by no memory of anything, except the invocation of our Lord Jesus Christ; and again, as it withdraws from there and goes outward to the multiple memory, it is divided even against its will.