In the past few decades, mindfulness meditation and other techniques of Buddhist origin have been rapidly gaining in recognition as means of facilitating psychophysical health and well-being. However, this growing enthusiasm has recently been checked by a host of criticism that questions the ways mindfulness has been (mis)construed and (mis)appropriated in Western culture. Critics have been especially vocal about the dangers of " mystifying mindfulness " : extracting it from its traditional framework and transforming it into a watered-down, decontextualized self-help method. Although sympathetic to its main thrust, we believe such criticism must be appropriately qualified. To begin with, what critics often neglect is the fact that Buddhism is not a homogenous tradition, but exhibits great diversity. For the most part, critics base their claims on Abhidamma Buddhism and tend to ignore the contribution of other (particularly Northern and East Asian) Buddhist traditions. Drawing on recent work on Mahāmudrā in Tibetan Buddhism and early Chan in Chinese Buddhism, the paper argues that contemporary conceptions of mindfulness have telling historical precedents, which have important implications for current debates. Specifically, we suggest that the inclusion of Northern and East Asian Buddhist traditions provides us with a more nuanced conception of

Since the beginning of the twentieth century mindfulness has been positioned at the core of modern Buddhism and viewed by many modern interpreters as an essential component of Buddhist doctrine and practices. More recently, the practice of mindfulness has become rapidly popularised, radically secularised and removed from its Buddhist context, employed mainly as a therapeutic tool or applied for the enhancement of well-being. This paper examines the concept of mindfulness using an historical lens, aiming to identify some of the main parameters and consequent implications involved in the changes and developments of this Buddhist contemplative method—from its early beginnings over 2,500 years ago to the present day. Special attention is given to the historical developments in the colonial period, when various Buddhist traditions encountered the main European discourses of the time, resulting in the birth of modern Buddhism. In this period, particularly in Burma, meditation was position...

This paper is part of a larger project led by Dr. Julia Cassaniti at the Anthropology department at Washington State University. The concept of mindfulness laid its roots in South-East Asia with the creation of Buddhism in the late sixth century by Siddhartha Gautama (the “Buddha”). Since then, mindfulness and Buddhist practice has expanded out of Asia into Western society and is continuing to grow. Buddhist practices in the west, particularly mindfulness, is rapidly changing and being adapted to fit the needs of its followers. While the concept of mindfulness appears to have stayed the same on the surface, we are interested in seeing how it has changed and is being used by people today. This paper looks at how individuals at Washington State University view the concept of mindfulness and apply it to their everyday lives. We conducted surveys and interviews with 135 individuals associated with Washington State University and the surrounding area. These individuals included university students, laypeople, healthcare professionals, and religious experts. From the information gathered, we were able to determine that the concept of mindfulness in the West, which has transformed from the traditional Buddhist idea of recollection and remembrance (sati), now is seen more as a psychological technique that is able to provide physical and mental benefits in new ways with new cultural connotations. While this difference is noticeable to Western Buddhist experts in Pullman, it is less explicitly noticeable to those who are not engulfed in Buddhist ideas. By understanding how westerners view mindfulness we can better understand how different cultural practices are transferred and constantly adapting to fit the needs of individuals.

As the first of three articles, the present essay explores the character of selected aspects of early Buddhism in order to assess its potential relevance as a reference point for those engaged in research on mindfulness in psychology. The exploration, which proceeds in critical dialog with suggestions made by Donald Lopez Jr. and Evan Thompson, covers the topics of the Buddha’s omniscience, Buddhist cosmology, the notion of karma, the role of rebirth, the past lives of the Buddha, and the role of religious authority vis-à-vis the scope of personal investigation in early Buddhist thought. The present paper is meant to serve as a corrective to an apparent tendency in recent scholarship, as part of an in itself deserved criticism of exaggerated positions taken by Buddhist modernists, to overlook or even deny rational dimensions of Buddhist thought, here in particular taken up from the viewpoint of its earliest phase. This tendency appears at times to be based on a lack of historical perspective or understanding of Buddhist doctrines and their development.

Editor's Introduction: Revisiting & Re-envisioning mindfulness: Buddhist & contemporary Perspectives This article explicates the main themes in the special double issue, provide a summary of each contribution, and a comprehensive overview of the ideas and discourses from all the authors' articles. It also summarizes the main differences and parallels between the articulation and delivery of mindfulness practices in traditional and contemporary settings.

Rethinking Meditation provides a new theoretical and historical approach to Buddhist and Buddhist-derived meditative practices. It shows how, rather than coming down to us unchanged from the time of the Buddha, the standard articulation of mindfulness as bare, nonjudgmental attention to the present moment is a distillation of particular strands of classical Buddhist thought that have combined with western ideas to create a unique practice tailored to modern forms of thought and ways of life. Part genealogical study and part philosophical argument, it inquires into some of the widespread assumptions about how meditation works and what it does, presenting a view of meditative practices as technologies of the self embedded in cultural forms of life. It shows that the relationship between meditative practices and cultural context is much more crucial than is suggested in typical contemporary articulations, which often emphasize transcendence of cultural conditioning and achieving “objective” internal access to the contents of consciousness. Meditation, McMahan argues, is always situated in social contexts and draws from repertoires of cultural categories, concepts, and values, sometimes accommodating them and sometimes resisting them. Rethinking Meditation also considers the scientific study of meditation and meditation in relation to modern articulations of secularism, freedom, authenticity, appreciation, and interdependence. It also examines the potential for meditation to enhance autonomy and addresses recent attempts to bring meditative practices to bear on social, political, and environmental issues.

Mindfulness-based practice methods are entering the Western cultural mainstream as institutionalised approaches in healthcare, education, and other public spheres. The Buddhist roots of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and comparable mindfulness-based programmes are widely acknowledged, together with the view of their religious and ideological neutrality. However, the cultural and historical roots of these contemporary approaches have received relatively little attention in the study of religion, and the discussion has been centred on Theravāda Buddhist viewpoints or essentialist presentations of ‘classical Buddhism’. In the light of historical and textual analysis it seems unfounded to hold Theravāda tradition as the original context or as some authoritative expression of Buddhist mindfulness, and there are no grounds for holding it as the exclusive Buddhist source of the MBSR programme either. Rather, one-sided Theravāda-based presentations give a limited and oversimplified picture of Buddhist doctrine and practice, and also distort comparisons with contemporary non-religious forms of mindfulness practice. To move beyond the sectarian and essentialist approaches closely related to the ‘world religions paradigm’ in the study of religion, the discussion would benefit from a lineage-based approach, where possible historical continuities and phenomenological similarities between Buddhist mindfulness and contemporary non-religious approaches are examined at the level of particular relevant Buddhist teachers and their lineages of doctrine and practice.

This article fills in a gap in the historiography of modern insight and mindfulness meditation. By providing an account of the role of S. N. Goenka in the formation and dissemination of modern insight meditation (vipassanā), and his reframing of Burmese Buddhist meditation in a postcolonial South Asian context, I show how the roots of modern therapeutic forms of mindfulness emerge from magico-religious contexts that have been glossed over in a process of scientization. By presenting two parallel case studies from South Asia, in which insight meditation was appropriated and repurposed by Jain and Hindu communities under the pressure of distinct social, personal, and religious forces, I suggest that modern therapeutic mindfulness is just one instantiation of other similar processes. By understanding the variety of ways in which insight meditation has been encountered by and made available to prospective practitioners in multiple social and historical contexts, historians can better understand the complex of factors that gave rise to the modern category of 'mindfulness'.

Buddhist meditation techniques are many, whereby mindfulness is by far the most studied, secularized and popular form of meditation in the con- temporary West. Interest in mindfulness meditation skyrocketed in the last decade, accompanied by the ever-growing literature in both scientific and public discourses. The primary concern of this thesis, however, is not to en- gage directly with these scholarly debates, nor to make judgments on whether these Western adaptations of mindfulness meditation practices are right or wrong, good or bad, faithful or unfaithful to the original Buddhist tradition. Instead, this work is composed to unveil “the other side of mind- fulness” through the lens of cultural translation, by tracing the historical dy- namics of the translation of certain Buddhist meditation techniques into modern clinical settings. Within this thesis, I will offer detailed accounts on how the translated, namely, mindfulness meditation has been selected, simpli- fied, and then codified into a standardized retreat program, which then pos- sesses the potential to move beyond its original social and cultural context. Furthermore, I will show how the translators, Kabat-Zinn and the mindful- ness teachers, have translated these Buddhist messages into a modern con- text, into daily language, into scientific epistemological frameworks, and into new economic relations. In this way, I will argue that Kabat-Zinn, despite some of his ground-breaking work, is not as huge an innovator as is often depicted in the discourse. In fact, many of his ideas that were later popular- ized by the Mindfulness Movement were already present before mindfulness entered the western discourse.