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What edition of MN are you reading? I find it important to find an edition that is translated well. This means that the translator should be not only an expert in reading Pali, but also a seasoned practitioner him/herself. For my money, you can’t beat “The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Majjhima Nikaya,” by Bhikkhu Nanamoli and Bhikkhu Bodhi.
The repetition you refer to is intentional. You have to remember that the suttas were passed down orally for several hundred years before being committed to the written page. The repetition served as a way for important passages/concepts to be embedded into the collective memory of the sangha, and also aided in ensuring accuracy over the centuries. The book I mentioned above does away with much of the repetition occurring within the same areas of a given sutta. You’ll still encounter a lot of repetition from one sutta to the next, though – which is good, IMHO, since many of the concepts presented (e.g. dependent origination, the five hindrances, voidness, the five aggregates, etc.) are hard to penetrate, and repetition breeds familiarity.
Another problem is that many phrases in Pali do not have an exact translation into English. The English words chosen by translators often have unintended connotations that were not there in the original Pali; and as a corollary, there were alomost certainly connotations associated with the Pali words that an English word can’t convey. So you’re dealing not only with the language barrier, but a cultural barrier as well – remember that this material was taught to groups of people from India, 2600 years ago, a largely agrarian society with a completely different social structure than we have today.
As you said, learning the suttas is a skill. You can take the approach of just reading them (which is admirable, but difficult). Or you can try to learn from someone else’s attempts at translating the meaning. Probably the best approach is to combine those two, and also start listening to dhamma talks. A book like What The Buddha Taught or In The Buddha’s words is also a good place to start for learning concepts. And of course there is a wonderful series of audio teachings called “A Systematic Study of the Majjhima Nikaya” that is available here: https://bodhimonastery.org/a-systematic-study-of-the-majjhima-nikaya.html.
I do not recommend the commentaries (e.g. Visuddhimagga or Vimuttimagga) for trying to comprehend the Buddha’s words. They are texts written nearly a thousand years after the original tipitaka was laid down. They do not represent the true word of the Buddha in many important aspects. They can be important resources for advanced practitioners, but I don’t feel they represent the Buddha’s teachings accurately, and they outright contradict them in many places.
Here are some additional resources you might want to look into:
https://suttacentral.net/
https://puredhamma.net/
https://audiodharma.org/
http://buddhiststudies.commongroundmeditation.org/
http://palicanon.org/I have some experience doing TMI-style practices in bed. This might not help one get to sleep, but it can pass the time spent in bed quite nicely.
I often awake very early in the morning so I can sneak in a little bit of quiet practice before the rest of the house gets up. The trouble is, of course, that I am often quite sleepy at that time, so I have settled on doing a modified body-scan, similar to what Culadasa recommends in Stage 5, but while lying in bed instead of sitting with hands in lap.
The practice involves focusing attention on progressively larger areas of the body, starting with something very small, like the tip of a finger, and then very slowly moving the point of attention, gradually widening the scope of attention. So, for example, placing attention on the very center of the tip of my right index finger, I focus there until I can actually *feel* it. I then move attention to the right side, then the left side of the fingertip, then the nail, the cuticle, the pad, around the surface of the finger up to the first knuckle, always making sure to *feel* instead of conceptualizing. Then I move on to the area between the first and second knuckle, then the area between the second and third knuckle, and stop once I get to the place where the finger meets the hand. At this point, I move on to the middle finger; then the ring finger; the pinky; then the thumb. Then I repeat on the other hand.
Once I have gotten this far I start to expand the field of attention to include two fingers at a time…sometimes on the same hand, sometimes opposite hands. And then 4 fingers, 6, 8, 10, then the whole of both hands…you can make a game of it.
The hands seem to be a good place to start – it’s much harder to do with the feet, probably because we have a large percentage of our cortical mapping mapped to the hands, and relatively less to other parts of the body.
I don’t typically try to feel ‘the breath’ in the body parts as you would in a proper Stage 5 practice. Just very clearly feel the body parts (or groups of parts). The whole practice takes me about 45 minutes, but can be adjusted. I have also followed along Culadasa’s guided body scan meditation while lying down, and that works quite well, too, but this one requires less setup time, won’t wake up the person sleeping next to me, and is adjustable to my liking.
Hope this helps,
Jeff
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JavaJeff.
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