Meditation matters

replies to the anti-mcmindfulness bandwagon!

Rick Repetti

pp. 473-493

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

Abstract

Many objections have been leveled against what Purser and Loy have coined "McMindfulness," the widely popularized use of mindfulness extracted from Buddhism. These include the claims that meditation (a) fails to attempt to try to change the world, (b) is guilty by association with other ends to which its use is applied, (c) ought not to be separated from its Buddhist ethical framework, and, among others, (d) is not as important to Buddhism as Westerners think it is, as evidenced by the relatively few Buddhist practitioners. I defend mindfulness against these objections directly, but I also put them in dialogue with each other. My general responses to these objections are, respectively, that (a) it is not the purpose of meditation to change the world, although it may be put to that end, (b) the uses to which any form of cognitive development is put (as means to certain ends) do not necessarily impugn such forms of cognitive development, but rather it is the ends to which such forms of development are put that ought to be evaluated as such, (c) although everything may in principle have ethical implications and we ought to be mindful of them, there is no serious ethical principle that invalidates the potential merits of working with meditation practices outside the Buddhist ethical framework, in one's own or some other ethical framework, or in an amoral context, and (d) the extent to which mindfulness meditation matters to or is practiced by Buddhists is irrelevant to its merits.