Abstract
Over the past forty years, mindfulness has followed an unexpected trajectory that has brought it from the Buddhist monasteries of southern Asia to the secular enclaves of the West. This paper raises the question why mindfulness has followed this particular route. It sees the answer as partly traceable to the attempts by the early Western Buddhist teachers to sever the explicit connections between insight meditation and Buddhist spirituality. To make the practice more amenable to skeptical Westerners, faith and Buddhist doctrine were marginalized and mindfulness was taught as an autonomous, non-religious method of mind training that could be undertaken by anyone without regard to their worldview or motivation. This change in emphasis paved the way for the practice of mindfulness to be reconceptualized as a purely psychological discipline aimed at ameliorating the specific types of existential anguish that weighed on the minds of Western seekers. Once this shift occurred, it did not take long for mindfulness to be progressively secularized and appropriated for a variety of purposes, therapeutic and life-enhancing, that had little to do with its original function as part of a path to world-transcendent liberation.
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Notes
- 1.
I will generally use the Pāli forms of technical Buddhist terms except when I am citing or referring to those who use the Sanskrit forms. Thus, I generally use “Dhamma,” but “Dharma” when referring to those who have adopted this form of the word.
- 2.
I use the expression “mindfulness movement” guardedly and only as a matter of convenience. I do not intend to suggest by this term that there was any concerted effort to propagate mindfulness meditation around the country. Rather, at roughly the same time, different people with different backgrounds were teaching Buddhist meditation as they had learned it in Asia, and the teaching styles were too diverse to constitute anything resembling a movement.
- 3.
In time, two major lines of transmission would emerge, which were quite distinct. One, which stemmed from teachers trained in the Mahasi Sayadaw style of practice, was based at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre. It later spread to California with the establishment of Spirit Rock in the Bay Area. These became the East Coast and West Coast focal points of “Mahasi style” insight meditation. The other, which stemmed from Goenka, had its own centers in the USA. While Western teachers in the Mahasi system tended to be syncretic, the Goenka lineage did not caucus with followers of other forms of Buddhist meditation, much less with other spiritual traditions, but strictly adhered to Goenka’s teaching, as it still does today.
- 4.
Translated by Bhikkhu Ñāṇamoli as The Path of Purification (Kandy, Sri Lanka: Buddhist Publication Society, 1991).
- 5.
Though what I say relates particularly to the early generation of Western pioneers, who went to Asia in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I will frame my discourse in the present tense, as relating to present-day practitioners.
- 6.
While the expression “classical Buddhism” is problematic, I prefer it to “traditional Buddhism” and “religious Buddhism,” which both suggest the Buddhism of rituals, ceremonies, and devotional observances. By “classical Buddhism,” I have in mind the doctrines and practices of Theravāda Buddhism as derived from the Pāli Canon. Other schools of contemporary Buddhism have their own classical forms, which could be compared with modern adaptations. Here, however, I am concerned with the school from which the prevailing systems of mindfulness meditation directly stem.
- 7.
The formula appears numberless times. See for example SN 22:49, V 49–50; SN 22:59, V 67–68; and SN 22:82, V 104. SN = Saṃyutta Nikāya, translated by me under the title Connected Discourses of the Buddha (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2000). The references give chapter and sutta numbers, followed by the volume and page number of the Pali Text Society’s Roman-script edition.
- 8.
This formula, too, appears numberless times. See for example SN 22:12–20, V 21–24; SN 22:63–72, V 74–81, and so forth.
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Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi (2016). The Transformations of Mindfulness. In: Purser, R., Forbes, D., Burke, A. (eds) Handbook of Mindfulness. Mindfulness in Behavioral Health. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44019-4_1
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