What is unique at this juncture of history is that the transformation of the dharma within capitalist societies involves big risks as well as opportunities. The risk today is not whether mindfulness will be accepted by modern science, as was the case in the early years of MBSR, but that it is becoming psychologized in harmful ways. Reduced for the most part to a “privatized spirituality,” its scope is limited to helping individuals to cope, adapt and function more effectively despite the ever-increasing strains of life in neoliberal societies.
Historically, Buddhism has been a prophetic force for personal transformation and radical social change only when it has been able to maintain its marginality from what was considered the “normal” functioning of society. As Erich Fromm eloquently observes in his essay “The Pathology of Normalcy,” society could itself be a disturbing pattern of collective pathology. For the ancient Greeks, the true love of wisdom meant that the philosopher was atopos, “out of place,” an untimely critic intent on going against the stream of normalcy. The Buddhist monastic community (the sangha) has not only served as the corporate vehicle of the Buddhist teachings, but its communal space has provided the crucible for a radical questioning of the normal and conventional modes of living that lead to suffering and social disharmony.
In Jon Kabat-Zinn’s view, mindfulness “has nothing to do with Buddhism. It has to do with freedom.”19 However, this so-called freedom is not conceived in social terms. Rather than be burdened by the civic responsibilities of a community or the normative expectations of the public sphere, one can mindfully retreat with a smartphone meditation app. After all, mindfulness is simply a matter of pumping neurons — an exercise in mental fitness — without having to go to the gym. The privatized spirituality of the mindfulness movement has lost sight of collective endeavor embedded in dharma, and the very idea that communal wellbeing is a prerequisite for authentic happiness and eudaimonia, the Greek word for “flourishing” often deployed by positive psychologists.
The conspicuous absence of a path for ethical development in the secularized mindfulness movement creates a moral vacuum. A belabored form of self-surveillance — being in the present moment — displaces ethical reflection, severing the chain from past to future. Forethought and care, vigilant awareness of the consequentiality of one’s actions, and striving to eradicate unwholesome mental qualities (all basic Buddhist aims) take a back seat to just “being mindful,” “being present,” and other platitudinous edicts like “radical acceptance.” Lacking a noble vision and purpose, the mindfulness movement seems adrift, resigned to a do-it-yourself, make-it-up-as-you-go-along mentality. The ambiguity of Kabat-Zinn’s umbrella term “mindfulness” has become a new “Brand X,” inviting commodification and pilfering. The lowest common denominators of mainstream Western consumerist culture — corporate capitalism, crass instrumentalism, and scientific materialism — are sadly becoming the new “place-holder for the entire dharma.”
chapter five
Colonizing Mindfulness
Let me start by making one thing clear: I do not question the value of adapting mindfulness for therapeutic use, nor do I deny that it can help people. What bothers me is how its promoters want things both ways: one minute, mindfulness is science, since that’s what sells; the next, it stands for everything in Buddhism, since that makes it sound deep. Switching “Buddhist” branding on and off for one’s own convenience is contradictory and misleading. There is also a related problem in claiming that mindfulness is somehow universal: the underlying essence of human experience, or its transcendent core. Mystical terms shield promoters of mindfulness from engaging with critics. If what they sell is a thing beyond words, anyone who argues should learn to be mindful and keep quiet.
The rhetoric of MBSR, amplified by the media, is anti-intellectual. Although much has been gained from making mindfulness treatments more widely accessible, the pursuit of scientific legitimacy comes at a cost, which is rarely discussed. Buddhism is borrowed and exploited in ways that date back to colonialism, which distorts modern Western understanding of Buddhist traditions. My objection is not that Buddhists have exclusive rights to mindfulness. I am critiquing how people have used it to serve their own goals, while pretending that their adaptations of mindfulness are the equivalent of Buddhism.
The discursive habits of mindfulness cheerleaders are often downright offensive to actual Buddhists, whose traditions are dismissed as outdated accretions. The author Sam Harris is a case in point, deriding the “spooky metaphysics and unjustified claims within Buddhism” while praising its practices, and telling fellow meditators “we have to get out of the religion business.”1 Dan Harris, a TV news anchor and the author of the best-selling book 10% Happier, decries “meditation’s massive PR problem,” which is basically code for links to Buddhism, plus New Age tropes that Harris thinks it includes. “I always thought meditation — also known as mindfulness practice — was for people who live in a yurt or collect crystals,” he says. “As it turns out, there is all this science that says it can boost your immune system, reduce your blood pressure, and rewire key parts of your brain.”2
Mindfulness needs these media-savvy entrepreneurs like Sam and Dan Harris.
Another news anchor took a subtler approach on 60 Minutes, which screened a special report on mindfulness in 2014. CNN’s Anderson Cooper joined a short retreat led by Jon Kabat-Zinn at Spirit Rock, an Insight Meditation center.3 Despite the location, a well-known branch of the Buddhist tradition in which Kabat-Zinn trained, no mention was made of the “B” word. However, the camera zoomed in on Kabat-Zinn, who sat cross-legged on a zafu cushion in a meditative posture, ringing a Tibetan cymbal, and holding his hands in religious mudra gestures. These traditional Buddhist artifacts were on display to convey authenticity, but the science of mindfulness had somehow captured the essence of the dharma, so the need to talk about it vanished. Instead, Cooper went off to a laboratory to get his brain scanned in an fMRI machine, while conversing with white lab-coat neuroscientists. To quote the religious studies scholar Jeff Wilson, these portrayals combined the mystification and medicalization of mindfulness, colonizing Buddhism for promotional purposes:
The 60 Minutes piece, basically a commercial for the allegedly de-Buddhified arm of the mindfulness movement, couldn’t be any more positive if it were paid by Kabat-Zinn himself. That’s pretty common, but still it’s unfortunate. Mindfulness may deliver some of the benefits that promoters tout, but Americans deserve to be informed about the full context of what they’re being sold.4
Epistemic Violence
Processes of cultural appropriation are not always negative. Buddhism changed as it spread from India to China, Tibet and Southeast Asia. While it is inevitable that it will adapt in its encounter with Western modernity, the nature of such transformations is not predetermined. However, its cultural translation in the West is often being hidden from public discourse, shaped by a complex set of interacting forces involving power relations, networks of interests, and interpretative decisions. Ideally, as well as changing Buddhist teachings and practices, Western cultures would also be changed by contact with them. But so far, the process with mindfulness has only worked one way: by validating meditative practice and “proving” its benefits, science is said to be “liberating” it from religion.
Not all scientists share this perspective, even if their work can be used to support it. “There is a swath in our culture who is not going to listen to someone in monks’ robes, but they are paying attention to scientific evidence,” says Richard Davidson, a pioneer in the emerging field of contemplative neuroscience.5 A similar idea is less respectfully expressed on the inside cover of the New York Times bestseller Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace), which states that mindfulness “cannot be the domain of bald people in funny robes.”6 The author, Google’s former in-house guru Chade-Meng Tan, cites study after study to back up his claims that mindfulness delivers greater happiness, health, caree
r success and wealth, and “everything can be completely secular.” His version of mindfulness is a way to have it all with the playful spirit. This sort of prosperity-gospel thinking is often combined with a naïve faith in the authority of science as the sole arbiter of truth, meaning and value.
Early promoters of Buddhist ideas used scientific metaphors to make them sound modern. For example The Gospel of Buddha, an 1894 book by Paul Carus, hailed the Buddha as “the first prophet of the Religion of Science”7 — modern mindfulness echoes this rhetoric. In an interview in 2013 at the New York Academy of Sciences, Kabat-Zinn said: “one could think of the Buddha as more like a great scientist — a Galileo or an Einstein — somebody with very deep insight into the nature of his own experience,” whose “laboratory tools” are now used to teach mindfulness.8
Buddhist modernism — sometimes known as Protestant Buddhism — offers privatized forms of spirituality easily accommodated to Western culture. However, for mindfulness to gain acceptance in clinical, corporate and government settings, and in public schools, even a hint of Buddhism sounds too much. So despite the roots of MBSR in Theravada insight meditation, it is presented as a wholly secular intervention. Observing this sleight-of-hand, the religious studies scholar Candy Gunther-Brown says proponents of mindfulness rarely define what they mean by either “secular” or “religion,” which helps them engage in what she calls “code-switching.”9
The Buddhist switch is off when addressing public-sector funding agencies, which require secularity, but flipped back on for those more welcoming of Buddhism. In the company of Buddhists, promoters of the practice declare themselves purveyors of “skillful means,” using mindfulness as a “Trojan horse” for teaching the dharma. For example, in an interview on the Buddhist Geeks podcast, the secular mindfulness teacher Tracy Goodman could be heard giggling and joking with the hosts that mindfulness was essentially “stealth Buddhism.”10
The Dalai Lama’s long-time interpreter, Thupten Jinpa, is not impressed. He finds “code-switching” misleading, and discourages promoters of mindfulness from saying one thing onstage and another backstage:
I’ve often told them, you know, you cannot have it both ways. It is either secular, or you want to say it’s the essence of Buddhism, therefore it’s a Buddhist practice. You cannot have it both ways.11
The underlying problem is a form of discomfort with foreign ideas. As the religious studies scholar Richard King explains, Western culture operates with intellectual border guards, effectively demanding that other systems of knowledge “declare” hidden beliefs that make them religious, while Western dogma gets a pass:
Before being allowed to enter the public space of western intellectual discourse, such systems of thought must either give up much of their foreign goods (that is, render themselves amenable to assimilation according to western intellectual paradigms), or enter as an object of rather than as a subject engaged in debate.12
The Janus-faced habits of mindfulness discourse are part of this process of epistemic violence. To admit to being “Buddhist” becomes something to be wary of, or even embarrassed about, because it is saddled with “cultural” or “religious” baggage. The symbolic cachet of Buddhism can still be flaunted for commercial convenience, but only if the dharma is purged of its “foreignness” (though not its exoticness, which sells) by assimilating it under a scientific paradigm. The shameful history of Western imperialism and its violent crimes should really be declared as cultural baggage. Unless it is brought to attention, its underlying thought patterns influence mindfulness, which aspires to be a new scientific lineage of the dharma.13
Contemporary advocates of mindfulness seem unconcerned. Their rhetoric uses “on and off” Buddhist branding, apparently oblivious to its harmful consequences, which changes public perception of what Buddhism actually is. Now that MBSR has been safely established, Kabat-Zinn is clear he made a conscious decision to conceal the Buddhist basis for his form of “meditation so commonsensical that anyone would be drawn to it.” In itself, this wouldn’t really be a problem if he didn’t also boast that it encapsulates Buddhism, “without ever mentioning the word dharma.”14 To substantiate his claim, and allow him to appropriate Buddhist symbols, Kabat-Zinn says MBSR teaches something timeless: a “universal dharma” of “pure awareness,” which is everyone’s “birthright.” As a result, he can call it both secular and the “true essence” of Buddhist meditation.
This dubious universalist outlook is religious, whatever Kabat-Zinn thinks. Not only does it use the word “dharma,” a Sanskrit term from ancient Indian religions, it claims to have found the essential “heart” of this body of knowledge, while rejecting anything that doesn’t fit its sectarian point of view. “Defining dharma as universal and above or beyond any particular religion is, of course, itself a religious statement about the nature of dharma,” notes Jeff Wilson. His comments are worth considering at length:
Claims about human nature and values are religious, or at least they are philosophical claims that clearly overlap with religious concerns. When you say that something is a birthright, you are talking about essences and natures, the very stuff of religion. And the thing that continually strikes me is just how religious “secular” mindfulness really is.15
Kabat-Zinn tends to write off critics as Buddhist fundamentalists, or to dismiss what they say as “reactive backlash” from over-active minds.16 However, both of these tactics serve the broader strategy of laying proprietary claim to the “universal essence” of a non-religious, non-sectarian “dharma.” This sort of rhetoric has been long been a staple of Buddhist modernism. Westerners encountering the dharma have often been quick to proclaim expertise as to its true meaning, making reductive assertions about its natural compatibility with scientific rationalism, which distinguishes them from the traditional religious lineages of Buddhism.
Present Momentism
Despite calling MBSR “a potentially transformative dharma vehicle,” Jon Kabat-Zinn also likes to insist it owes nothing to Buddhism.17 “We are never appealing to authority or tradition,” he says, “only to the richness of the present moment held gently in awareness, and the profound and authentic authority of each person’s own experience, equally held with kindness in awareness.”18 In MBSR, the present moment is a sacred dimension, teaching what Kabat-Zinn calls a “way of being,” just as the Buddhist teacher S.N. Goenka called meditation an “art of living.”
Rather than communing directly with God, like a Protestant in prayer, the mindfulness practitioner has unmediated access to the present moment. This is said to transform the mind to a state of “being,” stepping out of the “doing” mode that keeps people distracted. Most of the time, they operate on autopilot, ensnared by habitual emotional reactions, deliberation about the past and future, and compulsive demands of non-stop connectivity. For Kabat-Zinn, the miracle of mindfulness is that we can “drop in” (a phrase he is very fond of using) to “being” and simply be present. Dwelling in this non-discursive state is equated to a form of spiritual liberation. MBSR enthusiasts consider this shift to be a countercultural force, as the practice provides a peaceful respite from the relentless pressures and constant distractions of digital capitalism.
Although there is clearly therapeutic value in stepping — however temporarily — out of the stream of what Kabat-Zinn calls “A.D.D.,” mindfulness over-romanticizes “being.” We are told it appeals to Westerners because we have (supposedly) lost touch with experience; our lives have become too stressful and our concerns too overwhelming to appreciate the simple pleasures of being alive. MBSR can help us to get back in touch with embodied existence, deepening and enriching our sensory experience, while radically accepting whatever arises, including the vicissitudes of modernity.
Newcomers to MBSR are introduced to “being” through the mindful eating of a raisin, first inspecting it, then rolling it around in their mouths before finally chewing it. This exercise reveals rich experience through mindful engagement with simple activ
ities, aware of the sensations and pleasures they evoke, perhaps even appreciating them as a miracle. You will know the raisin in a different way because you have brought to life the act of eating it. This is the epistemological aspect of meditation, rooted in experience as a way of knowing. However, there is no fundamental ontological shift in being, no radical transformation of the self, or the one who knows. In other words, the experience leaves us eager to deepen it (to bring it back to life), but not to question the nature of what we hold to be true (beyond the idea that slowly chewing raisins might be boring). We are open to appreciating more fully what happens, but not to challenging our understanding of what is really happening. Mindfulness teachers discourage this sort of inquiry, instead just celebrating the act of being fully present to the world as it is — no questions asked.
Comparing his approach to the anti-intellectual strands in Northern Chan (Chinese Zen), Kabat-Zinn says conceptual maps obstruct and “can seriously occlude our ability as a mindfulness-based instructor to see and communicate about the territory in any original and direct way — a direct transmission if you will, outside the formal teachings, and thus an embodiment of the real curriculum.”19 While MBSR teachers are required to attend several traditional Buddhist meditation retreats, and to have a strong personal grounding in Buddhist teachings, the only thing taught in the MBSR classroom is “the essence of Buddhism.” For Kabat-Zinn and his lineage: “Our job is to take care of the territory of direct experience in the present moment and the learning that comes out of it.”20
Mindfulness, he tells us repeatedly, is “the awareness that arises from paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally.” Kabat-Zinn’s operational definition has become the gold standard in clinical literature, with institutional backing from contemplative scientists. The media and even the public have also latched onto it as a definitive concept. However, it conflates awareness of the present moment with mindfulness, making the latter a standalone practice — and an end in itself.
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