Successful branding stories are often characterized by disruption, which turns an established industry or experience upside down. The MBSR brand is one such disruptive force, with Kabat-Zinn’s talking points including pithy quips such as: “The Buddha wasn’t a Buddhist,” or Buddhists “don’t own mindfulness” because it is “an innate, universal human capacity.” Potential customers are thereby assured that MBSR is a non-religious product, yet still offers the best bits of what the Buddha taught. In Kabat-Zinn’s words, his version of mindfulness is “a place-holder for the entire dharma.”7
This claim has a powerful branding story with emotional resonance: no less an authority than the Dalai Lama is said to have endorsed it, sanctioning MBSR as a form of “universal dharma.” As Kabat-Zinn recalls:
I specifically asked His Holiness the Dalai Lama at the Mind and Life XIII conference in Washington, D.C., in 2005 whether there was any fundamental difference between Buddhadharma and universal dharma and he said “no”.8
However, a video recording of the exchange provides a different account. During a presentation to the Dalai Lama on the history and accomplishments of MBSR, one of Kabat-Zinn’s slides posed his crucial question. The Dalai Lama’s translator, Thupten Jinpa, relayed it: “Can we make a valid distinction between the Buddhadharma, on the one hand, and the universal dharma, on the other?” The response came with a chuckle. “Oh yes,” the Dalai Lama replied. “Suppose we are trying to put universal dharma, this for scientists… [pause, laugh] … we just can’t apply to all dharma.”9 Clearly, this was not the resounding “no” that Kabat-Zinn implies. It seems to say that the so-called “universal dharma” may be useful in the scientific realm, but it is by no means equivalent to all of the teachings of the Buddha. Nonetheless, it still seems important to Kabat-Zinn to go out of his way to seek Buddhist validation for MBSR, while at the same time disavowing its connections to Buddhism for marketing purposes.
This strange contradiction pervades the whole movement. Margaret Cullen, a longtime teacher of MBSR, believes that mindfulness-based interventions are spawning a “new American Dharma,” which is widely accessible, democratic, non-dogmatic, pragmatic and utilitarian. “The intention of MBSR is much greater than simple stress reduction,” she says.10 With such proclamations, Kabat-Zinn and his peers have positioned what they teach as a new Buddhist school in a manner consistent with tradition, whatever they think. Each variant of Buddhism grounds itself in a reading of scriptural sources, and a focus on certain selected practices, then claims this reading to be an appropriate interpretation of the Buddha’s true intent. In Buddhist historical terms, Kabat-Zinn does nothing less than declare himself the founder of a new lineage.
If, as he claims, MBSR represents “a universal dharma that is co-extensive, if not identical, with the teachings of the Buddha,” then it ought to be interrogated as such.11 To busy Westerners, mindfulness offers a convenient “one-stop shop” of diluted Buddhism. Kabat-Zinn describes it as “mostly vipassana practice (in the Theravada sense as taught by people like Joseph Goldstein and Jack Kornfield) with a Zen attitude,” informed by both the Soto and Rinzai traditions, plus ideas from Korean Seon and Chinese Chan.12
When pressed about connections to Buddhism, mindfulness teachers often say that their curriculum is just as robust as traditional forms of Buddhist training, missing nothing out. MBSR claims to be grounded in the four foundations of mindfulness as put forth by the Buddha in the Satipatthana Sutta. The “body scan” — in which practitioners rotate awareness from the head to the toes while observing sensations — claims to be an application of the first foundation of mindfulness (“watching the body”). A short seated meditation supposedly expands to include the other three (watching feelings, mental states and the constituent qualities of all things), although the fourth foundation is simply referred to as “mental contents.” Even ethical foundations — which traditionally require training in restraint of the body, speech and mind — and the brahma viharas (promoting loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity) are all “seamlessly integrated” into the practice. A little hatha yoga and poetry are also thrown in for good measure. Given that formal Buddhist teachings really have no place in a secular setting, what matters most for MBSR teachers, supposedly, is the mysterious capacity to embody and transmit the essence of the dharma in their conduct.
Without the fertile soil of Buddhist modernism, tilled earlier by the vipassana revival movements that trained some of Kabat-Zinn’s teachers, it is hard to imagine that MBSR would have taken root. However, Kabat-Zinn is no traditionalist. Although he is fond of appealing to Buddhist sources and flaunting his earlier Buddhist experience, his mission has been to modernize mindfulness for the masses. Like other Western and secular Buddhists, Kabat-Zinn often speaks as if he has extracted the highest of the Buddha’s insights and discarded the junk that religion wrapped around them. Manu Bazzano, a London-based Zen teacher and existential psychotherapist, recalls a four-hour chat with Kabat-Zinn at an academic conference:
I told him that MBSR was all very well, but without the lineage and one-to-one transmission (from teacher to student) his was no real Dharma. His reply surprised me. “What I am creating with MBSR — he said — is a new lineage”. I was disappointed: by his overconfidence, but also by the suggestion that his expedient technique could be compared to the sheer magnitude of the Dharma.13
Seeing himself as the founder of a lineage, Kabat-Zinn derives his authority not from the traditional Buddhist institutions, but from personal charisma. He essentially claims special access to the miracle of mindfulness, which he interprets and shares with the world. Charismatic leadership is a common feature of new religious movements. Kabat-Zinn’s intentional retention of Buddhist-inflected language — such as “lineage” — signals his guru-like status in authorizing followers and transmitting mindfulness.
Coming Out of the Buddhist Closet: MBSR is the Dharma?
Now that MBSR has moved beyond its start-up phase to entrepreneurial maturity and widespread acceptance, the Center for Mindfulness (as the Stress Reduction Clinic is now known) is no longer in stealth mode. Deflecting accusations that MBSR is dumbed-down dharma, its website declares: “MBSR is a vehicle for embodying and transmitting the dharma in a wholly secular and universal idiom. It is a recontextualizing of dharma, not a decontextualizing of it.” This statement is becoming a talking point. One of the most senior MBSR teachers told me: “I really feel MBSR is not secular, I actually don’t like that word and don’t like to see MBSR fall into that category. Secular implies not holy or sacred, that it is a separation from the ‘church’ and from my perspective MBSR is very spiritual and holy.”
Whatever this teacher may “feel,” a stripped-down and decontextualized model of mindfulness is problematic. It assumes that mindfulness has a context-free essence, and that by extracting this essence, it can be better understood, studied and practiced. Yet the mindfulness movement has a context of its own. It is distinctively American, priding itself on the narrative of scientific progress, the belief in the individual as the sole nexus of meaning, an entrepreneurial ethos, and other underlying and generally unexamined assumptions that are anything but universal, much less Buddhist, but are simply absorbed from its social environment. This narrative is also a radical break with the past, and is used to reinforce the view that mindfulness stands outside of, rather than within, social and historical contexts. In this respect, the mindfulness revolution is a typically American big-bang innovation myth.
Kabat-Zinn first came to public prominence in 1993, with an appearance on Bill Moyers’ Public Broadcasting Station special, Healing and the Mind. By this time, Kabat-Zinn had been publishing extensively in scientific journals to document benefits from mindfulness practice. From the 1980s onwards, numerous medical studies (many of which are now considered poor quality) were conducted on MBSR, showing its efficacy in treating stress-related illnesses. Other positive outcomes ranged from improvements in recovery time for psorias
is patients to greater immune responses to the flu vaccine.
Emboldened by scientific legitimacy, Kabat-Zinn renamed his clinic and began calling its program Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction. The standardized eight-week MBSR course is now offered in over six hundred clinics worldwide. In three decades, twenty thousand people have graduated from UMass’s clinic alone, and nine thousand have attended MBSR teacher-training programs offered through the Center for Mindfulness. The widespread acceptance of MBSR by the scientific and medical communities has encouraged many clinicians and entrepreneurs to spin-off numerous mindfulness-based programs. This includes Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), a group intervention that aims to prevent relapse in recurrent depression, which is now a treatment modality recognized by the UK’s National Health Service.
Self-Help Mindfulness
Kabat-Zinn’s charisma has played a big part in popularizing mindfulness. He is the author of three best-selling books, the first of which — Full Catastrophe Living — has sold over four hundred thousand copies and is now in its fifteenth edition. He has also spread the mindfulness gospel through audio courses, international lectures, and frequent media appearances. Kabat-Zinn’s self-help enterprise has now reached millions of people — way beyond the thousands who have taken the MBSR course at his center. The majority of people come across his mindfulness products through books and CDs, opening the doors to a “do-it-yourself” medicalized version of practice. As with most other self-help tools and techniques, their creator promoted the notion that mindfulness could be learned and practiced on one’s own. A little bit of mindfulness is better than none. The promise and allure of this easily accessible technique also meant that it was no longer bound to the standards and requirements of institutionalized medicine.
A key discursive element of privatized mindfulness, wherever one learns it, is this self-help narrative. Throughout Kabat-Zinn’s writings and audio courses, we are told that health and happiness are contingent on turning inward to recover our “inner resources” for healing. The sociologist Kirstin Barker has analyzed Kabat-Zinn’s most popular books and recordings to see how mindfulness is medicalized. Many human problems and experiences have now been pathologized in terms that require interventions to treat them. Identifying stress as a personal pathology was the first step, but as Barker points out, mindfulness medicalization now applies the labels “healthy” and “illness” to “an ever increasing part of human existence.”14 Disorder becomes an ever-present risk, and mindfulness serves therapeutic order in response, defining us all as potentially unwell unless we practice. As Barker puts it: “the common malaise of everyday life is a diseased state” and “mindfulness portrays our failure to pay attention as the principal reason.”15
Kabat-Zinn repeatedly expounds the idea that stress is omnipresent and inevitable, because we have lost touch with innate capabilities to be mindful. Paying attention to the present moment is the medical way to treat a disease of inattentiveness. Indeed, the whole premise of MBSR is that we suffer on account of letting our emotions get the better of us. Like other self-help techniques, mindfulness targets individuals and seems insensitive to social, political and economic dimensions of suffering. Kabat-Zinn’s publisher categorizes his bestseller Wherever You Go, There You Are in the “self-help/spirituality” genre. More telling still is a back-cover endorsement that exclaims: “Want to meet the most interesting, exciting person you will ever know? Let Jon Kabat-Zinn introduce you to YOU. Nowhere else in the literature on meditation can you find so simple and commonsensical a path to yourself.”
Far from being a countercultural force (remember the promised “revolution”), the mindfulness movement’s reinforcement of Western individualism seems more like an entitled, self-centered, and myopic path to happiness. A stress-free life is ours for the taking, within a protective bubble that screens out the cries of the world. The products are marketed as providing more fulfilling and sensual experiences, not the development of virtue, ethical behavior, moral courage, and compassion.
Self-Centered Mindfulness
The privatizing of mindfulness is disconcerting given the epidemic of social isolation in America and other capitalist societies. Despite relative affluence, significant numbers of people report being very lonely, without meaningful relationships, notes Ruth Whippman in America the Anxious. Skeptical of this trend towards privatized self-help, Whippman laments that “in the midst of this social isolation, we are getting the message that the key to happiness is everyone sitting in the room in total silence, with each individual plodding his or her own solitary path to inward bliss.”16 She underscores the irony of this situation — people complain of being too stressed, busy and lonely, lacking time to spend with their children or nurture friendships, but they seem to have plenty of time to attend long silent retreats or practice mindfulness meditation by themselves.
The mindfulness movement is an example of an ideological shift, in which an obsessive focus on wellness and happiness becomes a moral imperative. In The Wellness Syndrome, Carl Cederström and André Spicer call this development “healthism,” a form of bio-morality that tells individuals to make themselves flexible and more marketable in a precarious economy by making the “right” life choices — whether it’s exercise, food, or meditation.17
Buddhist teachings on impermanence are often coopted by mindfulness advocates to celebrate the acceptance of change in the face of late-capitalist insecurities, including serial unemployment (the traditional focus on eradicating greed is conveniently omitted). In addition, with the onus of responsibility placed on individuals to manage their own bodies, emotions, and health, the ideological subtext of modern mindfulness is that changing the world starts with changing oneself. And this change is seen primarily as a personal lifestyle choice, rather than directly engaging with society and politics.
The injunction to “be mindful” includes implicit assumptions that individuals lack self-control, discipline, and willpower. In many respects, the imposed self-management of “the wellness syndrome” is like the continual failure and episodic guilt associated with diets; both forms of self-discipline internalize the punitive commands of the superego. The individual is forever vigilant, wary of slipping from their regimen and fearful of becoming tormented by feelings of shame.
As MBSR moves outside of the medical-clinical setting, its tone becomes increasingly hedonic, promising greater wellbeing and happiness. This is offered without any need to challenge or change one’s beliefs and assumptions, values and priorities or lifestyle (apart from anything that gets in the way of being mindful). It seems to be of no importance whether one’s worldview or choices are dysfunctional, because mindfulness allows one to reduce unwanted symptoms — stress, depression and anxiety — even if one’s way of life is out of balance with reality. Think Wall Street traders.
Kabat-Zinn seems to agree. When asked if reducing stress entails making changes to one’s lifestyle, he told an interviewer:
I don’t think that it means giving up anything. I think it means embracing the whole of experience and discerning what has merit in terms of your own heart and your own intuition. That will be different for different people. Some thrive on Wall Street while others thrive in the wilderness. In many ways, stress is in the eye of the beholder.18
For the most part, MBSR and the mindfulness movement have downplayed and even ignored the importance of ethics. They also neglect the role played by a path of cultivation, not only as a foundational support for the development of mindfulness, but also in terms of the practice’s meaning, purpose and aims. This raises the ultimate question: what is mindfulness for? Is it merely to attain better health, higher exam scores, focused concentration at work, or “self-compassion?” Is it a medical form of self-improvement? In a way, posing the question is tantamount to asking what constitutes “the good life,” the traditional basis of philosophy.
Mindfulness training, at least as understood within the Buddhist tradition, is inseparable from ethical devel
opment. The cultivation of “right mindfulness” is only one part of the Buddha’s Eightfold Path, along with “right” understanding, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort and concentration. This list has no Western equivalent. Each of the factors is interrelated, and none of them correlates directly to Judeo-Christian edicts, or Western ideas about prescriptive duties that people “should” perform to be morally upright. However, the other dimensions that support “right mindfulness” — which leads to wisdom by cultivating wholesome mental states — are left out of MBSR, suggesting its teachers have misconstrued Buddhist ethics.
In light of their secular commitments, Kabat-Zinn and a number of his senior teachers have argued that an ethical framework would be an inappropriate imposition. To fill this void, some MSBR apologists make weak appeals to the Hippocratic Oath. This is a limited concept: it only covers professionals teaching MBSR in healthcare settings, not in other contexts, for example in corporations or the military. More importantly, the Hippocratic Oath has no bearing on the participants in MBSR courses. When pushed on this issue, the last line of defense from mindfulness merchants is the dubious claim that an ethical path is somehow implicitly integrated into the practice, because it involves being kinder to oneself by stepping out of stressful thought patterns.
It could of course be argued, as Kabat-Zinn does, that recontextualizing dharma for modern Western needs is to be celebrated. After all, the history of Buddhism has been one of transformation since its migration from the Indian subcontinent, often undergoing major changes to adapt to new host cultures. One could therefore claim, with some foundation, that modern mindfulness isn’t really all that different from how Chinese translators needed to strip away Indian scholasticism, its pantheon of deities and cosmology, and other cultural overlays, resulting in Chan’s (Chinese Zen) earthy emphasis on meditative practice.
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