This essay aims at preliminary clarification of what is referred to by the term kāyagatā sati (念身in Chinese), which is usually rendered as mindfulness of the body and is equated to the first of the four Satipatthānas in the Theravāda tradition. Taking into account the oral tradition of Buddhist texts, an investigation into the Pali and Chinese versions of the Kāyagatāsati Sutta and other early texts leads to the suggestion about how the Kāyagatāsati Sutta may have evolved from three other texts which are internally much more coherent, and proposes a partial reconstruction of an antecedent version of the Kāyagatāsati Sutta from which the Pali and Chinese versions derived. According to this antecedent version, kāyagatā sati did not refer to mindfulness of the physical body only, but it implied much more than that.
