usage until this century. Even as a professional meditation
teacher, I hardly ever heard the word used outside the Bud-
dhist context before about 2002.
Soto Zen meditators, by contrast, do quite a different prac-
tice from the Satipatthana Sutta. They try to achieve a state of
“emptiness,” or sunyata, through “just sitting, not thinking.”
This is an unfocused, passive, and undiscriminating state,
“open” to passing sensory experience. The Zen teacher Dan
Leighton describes it as an “objectless” meditation “that does
not grasp at any of the highly subtle distinctions to which
our familiar mental workings are prone.”1 For the Buddha,
mindfulness ( sati) correlates with attention. For Kabat-Zinn,
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however, mindfulness ( sati) correlates much more strongly to sunyata (emptiness).
Presumably because this spiritual terminology was
unsuitable for MBSR, and because his therapy did take its
outer form from ten-day Vipassana retreats, Kabat-Zinn used
the (then-underutilized) word “mindfulness” to describe
this ideal state. His definition of mindfulness as “a state of
nonjudgmental acceptance” is a remarkably good, secular
description of sunyata.
Redefining mindfulness, and orienting it toward “emp-
tiness” was a bold move, but at that time, no one cared
what he was doing. Few people practiced Vipassana, and
the mindfulness boom had not yet started. I have searched
the commentarial literature in vain for any use of the word
“nonjudgmental” prior to Kabat-Zinn. There are related
terms—nonreactivity, the watching mind, bare attention, and
choiceless awareness—but these are all modern. So where
does “nonjudgmental” come from?
It seems to come from the second-century Indian philos-
opher Nagarjuna, considered by some to be the most import-
ant figure in Buddhist thought after the Buddha himself.
The Buddhist doctrine of sunyata was formulated by Nagar-
juna about seven hundred years after the Buddha’s death. In
Nagarjuna’s philosophy of “nonduality,” all distinctions of
right and wrong, good or bad, future or past, large and small,
enlightened or ignorant, are seen as ultimately false. They
should be abandoned in favor of the mystical vision of One-
ness. Nondualism is the idea out of which Dogen, the founder
of Soto Zen, like thousands of Chinese and Tibetan teachers
before him, recommended the ultimate transcending of all
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judgments (“zazen has nothing to do with right or wrong”).
However, Dogen wasn’t talking about sati. He was referring
to sunyata.
Kabat-Zinn, however, seems to be the first person to use
the word “nonjudgmental” as a defining characteristic of sati.
This descriptor of mindfulness starts with him. It only goes
back forty years. It doesn’t derive from the Buddha or from
any Theravadin source that I know of.
Kabat-Zinn’s claim that he is authentically translating
sati and original Buddhist principles has been taken at face
value by most modern writers ever since. No psychologist
or researcher of that time knew enough about meditation
to know any better. He was criticized by scholars, but their
voice is rarely heard in the popular literature. The Sutta was
virtually unknown except as the iconic source. No one was
checking what the Buddha actually said. Through viral repli-
cation in the years since, “nonjudgmental” is now embedded
in modern consciousness as a defining, nonnegotiable qual-
ity of mindfulness.
MINDFULNESS IN THERAPY
So does it matter? Maybe not. There is no doubt that Kabat-
Zinn’s new definition, by importing a Zen perspective, has
vastly expanded the use of meditation as therapy. The empha-
sis that Modern Mindfulness places on nonjudgmental self-
acceptance has some huge therapeutic advantages. It makes
meditation far more acceptable to a psychologist’s usual clien-
tele. Tens of thousands of people have now benefited from the
Modern Mindfulness approach who would never have other-
wise considered meditation.
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Anxious and depressed people tend to be overly self-critical and dread the idea of further failure. In contrast, the Mod-
ern Mindfulness version of mindfulness is often described
as being so easy that it is almost impossible to fail. As the
bestselling mindfulness author Daniel Siegel says, “There is
no particular goal, no effort to ‘get rid of’ something, just the
intention to experience being in the moment.”2
The emphasis on acceptance also allows mindfulness-
based stress reduction to offer a new way of monitoring the
peripheral thoughts and sensations that invariably arise
in meditation. Unlike classical practices, MBSR is quite tol-
erant of the mind’s tendency to wander. When meditating,
we are bound to periodically lose focus on the body and get
distracted by thoughts, emotions, daydreams, sleepiness,
impulses, and pains. This can make practitioners very frus-
trated, and it often prompts them to abandon the meditation
altogether.
MBSR treats this common situation with sympathy and
even indulgence. It regards peripheral thoughts, sensations
and emotions, good or bad, as integral components of any
meditation (which they are). It recommends that we treat
these potential distractions “kindly,” like visitors who come
and go. We are allowed to identify or mentally “note” them,
as long as we don’t engage with them as much as usual. We
are encouraged to regard them as transient mental events of
little intrinsic value.
John Daido Loori describes the related Zen practice:
“When you’re doing shikantaza you don’t try to focus on
anything specifically, or to make thoughts go away. You sim-
ply allow everything to be just the way it is. Thoughts come,
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thoughts go, and you simply watch them, you keep your
awareness on them. It takes a lot of energy and persistence to
sit shikantaza, to not get caught up in daydreaming. But little
by little, thoughts begin to slow down, and finally they cease
to arise.”3 Psychologists will recognize this as the process of
extinction: The repeated reduction of a response eventually
leads to no response.
Meditators often achieve good states of body-mind still-
ness through a perpetual, persistent, and ever-more-subtle
“letting go” of physical tension and arousal. A meditato
r
who is well embodied will also notice how certain thoughts
and emotional responses make her tense up, and so impede
her drift toward stillness. This will prompt her to gradually
abandon those thoughts and responses as well. This effort
to universally “let go” of everything doesn’t involve much
focused attention, but it can still lead to excellent results.
Some writers even claim that whatever attentional train-
ing occurs in MBSR is irrelevant. When meditating, it is still
necessary for a practitioner to maintain some degree of focus
on the body, but MBSR even discourages this cognitive effort.
After “letting go” of a distracting thought, the meditator is
instructed to “place” or “rest” the mind gently back on the
breath or the body. MBSR promotes a soft form of attention
that is supposed to feel almost effortless. This correlates with
the important Taoist idea of wu-wei (literally, “no-action”). This concept argues that all striving is counterproductive since it
would disturb the natural spontaneous purity of the mind.
In MBSR therapy, this passive, nonstriving stance is
labeled “acceptance.” Acceptance is a useful concept that is
rarely emphasized in traditional meditation. Students are
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encouraged to notice unpleasant sensations and thoughts
without resisting them. They are to be reframed as “just” sen-
sations, not requiring a response. Students thus learn to relax
despite pain or a bad mood, increasing their capacity to toler-
ate discomfort and emotional distress. In psychology, this is
called “negative affect tolerance” or “pain tolerance.”
Trying to forcibly change or get rid of a stubborn pain
or mood can be very frustrating for a meditator—or anyone.
Strategies to avoid pain by ignoring it have been repeat-
edly demonstrated to be counterproductive. They actually
increase arousal and mental agitation. To become more
accepting of what can’t be changed counteracts our natu-
ral tendency toward denial, suppression, and “experiential
avoidance” and actually reduces the physiological markers of
stress. The “just watching,” “open” stance recommended by
MBSR thus sits in the zone of neutral affect between reacting
to discomfort or suppressing it. This is one of the most posi-
tive outcomes of the MBSR method.
Nonetheless, a state of pure nonjudgmental acceptance
is still quite hard to achieve. It is more of a spiritual ideal
( sunyata) to aspire to than a concrete reality. (This also
explains why it is so difficult to do research on.) No matter
how hard we try to “just watch what happens” we will invari-
ably make appraisals and readjustments along the way. Fur-
thermore, the instructions on MBSR’s guided meditation CDs
gently encourage these micro-judgments and reappraisals.
The students do want to relax and calm their minds, and the
instructors want to help them do so.
If we notice that a muscle is unnecessarily tense, we
release it. If we notice an emotional overreaction as such, we
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downgrade it. If we notice an obsessive thought, we discount it as “not worth thinking about” and refocus on the body. The
instructions frequently refer to cutting off, “defusing,” objec-
tifying, “letting go,” “decentering,” and generally devaluing
unwanted thought and emotion. Does all this really qualify as
being a “nonjudgmental” attitude toward whatever happens?
Through the practice of MBSR, the client can learn how
to relax his body, tolerate negative mood, and become less
reactive and better able to control his thoughts and impulses.
There would be no point in doing the lengthy training other-
wise. So how can we reconcile all this positive, goal-directed
change with the definition of mindfulness as “nonjudgmen-
tal acceptance of present-moment experience” or “just watch-
ing what happens without reacting”? That’s a problem that
researchers are now trying to sort out.
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25
The Modern Definition
Although the contemporary view of the concept
“mindfulness” is increasingly becoming part of
popular culture, there remains no single “correct” or
“authoritative definition” of mindfulness and the
concept is often trivialized and conflated with many
common interpretations .
—David Vago and David Silbersweig1
The word “mindful” as an adjective dates from the four-
teenth century. It means to pay attention, or to take care
to avoid mistakes and improve performance. That definition
still works equally well today. In 1881, however, T. W. Rhys
Davids chose to resuscitate “mindfulness,” an archaic noun
form of the word, to translate sati (attention). By shifting
the concept of “mindful” from an adjective to a noun, and
strongly associating it with Buddhism, he inadvertently
opened up the floodgates for new possible usages.
“Mindfulness” as a noun now represents a diverse range
of “things” in a way that the word “attention” could never do.
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Mindfulness can now be a meditation practice (Vipassana), a therapy (mindfulness-based cognitive therapy), an ideal state
of mind (nonjudgmental acceptance), a way of life (“be here
now”), a cognitive function (attention), a popular movement,
and the essence of Buddhism itself. This is the protean bun-
dle of phenomena that for convenience I refer to as Modern
Mindfulness.
When Kabat-Zinn chose to give a Zen interpretation to
mindfulness, he virtually had a clean slate to work with. In
1979 there were no more than two or three readily available
books on the Satipatthana Sutta. I assume he knew Nyanap-
onika’s The Heart of Buddhist Meditation (1962). He may also
have read Soma Thera’s The Way of Mindfulness (1949), which
was the book that I started with in 1975. However, the field
of English-language literature on early Buddhism is still tiny
even now, and there is very little dialogue between the play-
ers. Modern scholarship has a more accurate understanding
of the past, but it seems to operate in a different universe from
meditators, monks, psychologists, and popular writers.
In the East, the teaching of Buddhism remains an oral tra-
dition. The original texts are in languages (Pali and Sanskrit)
that are just as dead as Latin. Senior monks have absolute
freedom to interpret the texts as they wish. In a similar way,
Kabat-Zinn’s new definition of mindfulness undoubtedly
arose in the informal ora
l context of meditation instruction.
It is quite loose—more descriptive and allusive than defin-
itive—and he frequently rephrases it to suit his purposes in
talks and books and articles. But what works perfectly well in
an oral context is often too indeterminate for scientific appli-
cation. Researchers struggle to make Kabat-Zinn’s definition
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of mindfulness work, and some have questioned whether it can be regarded as a definition at all.
AN EVOLVING DEFINITION
So what is mindfulness? A commonsense answer would be
that it is a standard meditation practice, as in chapter 1. Focus-
ing on the body for relaxation and mental calm is certainly a
necessary, if not sufficient, requirement. Few people think of
mindfulness as being anything other than a meditation prac-
tice, but it is rarely defined this way.
In his 1994 bestseller, Wherever You Go, There You Are,
Kabat-Zinn defined mindfulness as “paying attention in a
particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-
judgmentally.”2 Although this states that mindfulness has a
purpose, Kabat-Zinn doesn’t spell out what that is. This places
tremendous weight on the concluding word “nonjudgmen-
tally.” By default, it seems that the purpose of mindfulness is
to achieve a state free of all judgments.
In 2003, however, Kabat-Zinn presented a revised “work-
ing definition” in a paper for the journal Clinical Psychol-
ogy: Science and Practice, in which he defined mindfulness
as “the awareness that emerges through paying attention on
purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally to the
unfolding of experience.”3
The difference between these two definitions is significant.
In the science journal, mindfulness is no longer described as
a form of attention. It is identified as the emergent quality of
“awareness” that arises from paying attention. This suggests
that you would start a meditation in a non-mindful state and
gradually achieve mindfulness as you approach some degree
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of body-mind stillness ( passaddhi) or equanimity or emptiness ( sunyata). This new definition reorients Modern Mind-
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