With "the way to settle the body and mind" as its theme and based on the Agama sutras, this thesis investigates the buddhadharma that Mahākāśyapa practiced, in order to explore the action-oriented spirit of meditative contemplation as passed down by Śākyamuni Buddha. By investigating how Mahākāśyapa practiced in his daily life and inquiring into the specialized content of his meditation practice, this thesis has formed the following points of view: 1. With respect to the practice in daily life, such as "begging for food," Mahākāśyapa set an example to Buddhist followers. This is mainly because he could embody some aspects of the spirit of practice that accord with the Buddha's frame of mind, such as humility, equality, compassion, no expectation, no discrimination, no comparison, and no attachment. 2. Mahākāśyapa was famous for adhering to the practice of "dhūta (asceticism)" and "aran ya (dwelling in the forest)," whose spirit of practice mainly consists in"keeping away from two kinds of attachment':(1)physically, to keep away from a noisy place where people dwell together; (2)mentally, to keep away from the negative mentalities such as the five desires and the five kinds of obscuration. 3. Serving as the main spirit of practice in the teaching of Agamas, "keeping away" is put into action through the "practice of aran ya." Besides requiring the physical body to keep away, keeping away mentally is not limited to keeping away from certain mentalities such as the five desires and the five kunds of obscuration, but further requires that one keep away from all the relative views and personal prejudices resulting from thinking and speaking. 4. "Keeping away," the action-oriented spirit of Buddhist teachings, is concretely shaped through the following process: One contemplates the impermanence of the five skandhas so as not to generate the delude thoughts such as desire, craving and attachment, but instead to harbor only the intention of realizing the state of purity and liberation, and, based on that nothing whatever exists. 5.Another expression of "keeping away" is "no abiding" or "non-abiding." Its doctrinal basis consists in correctly contemplating all the phenomena of the world as being dependently originated and impermanent, so as to remove the deluded affrimation that takes the "self" as truly existent, while abandoning all sorts of dualistic views such asa being and non-being, and embodying the right view of the middle way of "neither being nor non-being."
