The transformations of mindfulness

Bhikkhu Bodhi

pp. 3-14

in: Ronald E. Purser, David Forbes, Adam Burke (eds), Handbook of mindfulness, Berlin, Springer, 2016

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.