Is mindfulness Buddhist? (and why it matters)

Introduction

In a chapter in an edited volume on the role of culture in depression, Gananath Obeyesekere begins by quoting from Brown and Harris’s influential 1978 study on the social origins of depression in women:

The immediate response to loss of an important source of positive value is likely to be a sense of hopelessness, accompanied by a gamut of feelings, ranging from distress, depression, and shame to anger. Feelings of hopelessness will not always be restricted to the provoking incident—large or small. It may lead to thoughts about the hopelessness of one’s life in general. It is such generalization of hopelessness that we believe forms the central core of depressive disorder. (Brown & Harris, 1978, p. 235)

If one has any doubts, consider the advanced stages of insight described in the Path of Purification (Visuddhimagga), an authoritative Pali compendium composed by the 5th-century monk Buddhaghosa in Sri Lanka. After an exhaustive account of the various practices and meditative states discussed in the scriptures, Buddhaghosa turns to the ascending “stages of insight” that immediately precede the attainment of liberation. The eight stages of insight include “knowledge of dissolution,” “knowledge of appearance as terror,” and “knowledge of danger,” and Buddhaghosa resorts to vivid similes to capture the affective tone that accompanies these rarefied states. One of the most harrowing is found in the description of “knowledge of appearance as terror”:

A woman’s three sons had offended against the king, it seems. The king ordered their heads to be cut off. She went with her sons to the place of their execution. When they had cut off the eldest one’s head, they set about cutting off the middle one’s head. Seeing the eldest one’s head already cut off and the middle one’s head being cut off, she gave up hope for the youngest, thinking, “He too will fare like them.” Now, the meditator’s seeing the cessation of past formations is like the woman’s seeing the eldest son’s head cut off. His seeing the cessation of those present is like her seeing the middle one’s head being cut off. His seeing the cessation of those in the future, thinking, “Formations to be generated in the future will cease too,” is like her giving up hope for the youngest son, thinking, “He too will fare like them.” When he sees in this way, knowledge of appearance as terror arises in him at that stage. (Buddhaghosa, 1956/1976, Vol. 2, p. 753)

Yet today Buddhist insight is touted as the very antithesis of depression. Rather than cultivating a desire to abandon the world, Buddhism is seen as a science of happiness—a way of easing the pain of existence. ¹ Buddhist practice is reduced to meditation, and meditation, in turn, is reduced to mindfulness, which is touted as a therapeutic practice that leads to an emotionally fulfilling and rewarding life. Mindfulness is promoted as a cure-all for anxiety and affective disorders including post-traumatic stress, for alcoholism and drug dependency, for attention-deficit disorder, for anti-social and criminal behavior, and for the commonplace debilitating stresses of modern urban life.

Buddhist modernism and the rhetoric of bare attention

The notion that Buddhism is a rational, empirical, and therapeutically oriented tradition compatible with modern science is one of the characteristic features of “Buddhist modernism” (sometimes known as “Protestant Buddhism”), an approach to Buddhism that evolved out of a complex intellectual exchange between Asia and the West that took place over the last 150 years or so. As there is now a robust literature on this subject, there is little need to rehearse it here. ² My focus is on the particular practice most characteristic of Buddhist modernism, namely, “mindfulness” (Pali: sati, Sanskrit: smṛti), and more specifically, the interpretation of mindfulness as “bare attention” or “present-centered awareness,” by which is meant a sort of non-judgmental, non-discursive attending to the here-and-now.

Scholars have argued that the widespread understanding of mindfulness as bare attention has its roots in the Theravāda meditation revival of the 20th century, a movement that drew its authority, if not its content, from the two recensions of the Scripture on Establishing Mindfulness (Satipaṭṭhāna-sutta), ³ as well as Buddhaghosa’s Path of Purification (Visuddhimagga), and a few other Pali sources. The specific techniques that came to dominate the Satipaṭṭhāna or Vipassanā (“insight”) movement, as it came to be known, were developed by a handful of Burmese teachers in the lineages of Ledi Sayādaw (U Nyanadaza, 1846/7–1923) and Mingun Sayādaw (U Nārada, 1870–1955). ⁴ Mingun’s disciple, Mahāsī Sayādaw (1904–1982), developed the technique that is best known today, in which the practitioner is trained to focus on whatever sensory object arises in the moment-to-moment flow of consciousness. Mahāsī designed this method with laypersons in mind, including those with little or no prior exposure to Buddhist doctrine or liturgical practice. ⁵ Perhaps most radical was Mahāsī's claim that the cultivation of liberating insight did not require advanced skill in concentration (samatha) or the experience of absorption (jhāna). Instead, Mahāsī placed emphasis on the notion of sati, understood as the moment-to-moment, lucid, non-reactive, non-judgmental awareness of whatever appears to consciousness. One of Mahāsī's most influential students, the German born monk Nyanaponika Thera (Siegmund Feniger, 1901–1994), coined the term “bare attention” for this mental faculty, and this rubric took hold through his popular 1954 book The Heart of Buddhist Meditation. ⁶

Western Buddhist enthusiasts may have a hard time appreciating just how radical Mahāsī's method was in its day. Designed to be accessible to laypersons, it did not require familiarity with Buddhist philosophy or literature, most notably with the scholastic literature known as abhidhamma. (Traditional forms of Theravāda meditation required proficiency in the categories and methods of abhidhamma analysis.) It also did not require renunciation of lay life, and it could be taught in a relatively short period of time in a retreat format. All this made it easy to export, and it has been influential not only in the Southeast Asian Theravāda world, but also among modern Tibetan, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese religious reformers. By the end of the 20th century, Mahāsī's approach to mindfulness, understood as “bare attention” and “living in the here and now,” had emerged as one of the foundations of Buddhist modernism—an approach to Buddhism that cut across geographical, cultural, sectarian, and social boundaries. ⁷

The meaning of the term “mindfulness” is presumed by many to be self-evident, and thus modern exponents of mindfulness meditation may see little need to explore the intellectual history of the concept in Buddhism. ⁸ “Mindfulness” is a translation of the Sanskrit smṛti (Pali: sati), a term that originally meant “to remember,” “to recollect,” “to bear in mind.” Its religious significance is sometimes traced to the Vedic emphasis on setting to memory the authoritative teachings of the tradition. The Pali term sati retains this sense of “remembering” in the Nikāyas (the scriptures attributed to the Buddha in the Theravāda school): “And what, bhikkhus, is the faculty of sati? Here, bhikkhus, the noble disciple has sati, he is endowed with perfect sati and intellect, he is one who remembers, who recollects what was done and said long before.” ⁹ Moreover, the faculties of recollection and reflection were unarguably central to a variety of classical practices associated with smṛti, including buddhānusmṛti or “recollection of the Buddha,” which typically involves some combination of recalling the characteristics of the Buddha, visualizing him, and chanting his name.

Even in the Satipaṭṭhāna-sutta, the term sati retains a sense of “recollecting” or “bearing in mind.” Specifically, sati involves bearing in mind the virtuous dharmas so as to properly apprehend, from moment to moment, the true nature of phenomena. At least this is the explanation found in early Pali exegetical works such as the Milindapañha ¹⁰ and the commentaries of Buddhaghosa. ¹¹ Rupert Gethin (1992), who has undertaken a careful analysis of such passages, notes that sati cannot refer to “remembering” in any simple sense, since memories are, as Buddhists are quick to acknowledge, subject to distortion. Rather, sati

should be understood as what allows awareness of the full range and extent of dhammas; sati is an awareness of things in relation to things, and hence an awareness of their relative value. Applied to the satipaṭṭhānas, presumably what this means is that sati is what causes the practitioner of yoga to “remember” that any feeling he may experience exists in relation to a whole variety or world of feelings that may be skillful or unskillful, with faults or faultless, relatively inferior or refined, dark or pure. (Gethin, 1992, p. 39)

Critiques of mindfulness as bare attention

There are, in addition, philosophical objections to construing sati as bare attention. The popular understanding of bare attention presumes that it is possible to disaggregate pre-reflective sensations (what contemporary philosophers sometimes refer to as “raw feels” or qualia) from perceptual experience writ large. In other words, there is an assumption that our recognition of and response to an object is logically and/or temporally preceded by an unconstructed or “pure” impression of said object that can be rendered, at least with mental training, available to conscious experience. Mindfulness practice is then a means to quiet the ongoing chatter of the mind and to keep to the “bare registering of the facts observed.”

Superficially, this notion of mindfulness as bare attention would seem tied to a view of the mind as a sort of tabula rasa or clear mirror that passively registers raw sensations prior to any recognition, judgment, or response. The notion of a conscious state devoid of conceptualization or discrimination is not unknown to Buddhist exegetes; indeed, later Buddhist philosophers associated with pramāṇa (logic) and yogācāra (mental construction) systems posit a “non-conceptual cognition” (nirvikalpajñāna) that operates by means of “direct perception” (pratyakṣajñāna), and these authors use the imagery of the mirror to illustrate the relationship between pure mind and defiled object. This state is sometimes understood as preceding (or undergirding) the arising of conceptualization, or as an advanced stage of attainment tantamount to awakening. ¹³ But while the notion of non-conceptual cognition became important in some yogācāra systems (not to mention Tibetan Dzogchen), it remained at odds with the Theravāda analysis of mind and perception. In Theravāda abhidharma, consciousness and the object of consciousness emerge codependently and are hence phenomenologically inextricable. That is to say, the objects of experience appear not upon a preexistent tabula rasa, but rather within a cognitive matrix that includes affective and discursive dispositions occasioned by one’s past activity (karma). ¹⁴ The elimination of these attendant dispositions does not yield “non-conceptual awareness” so much as the cessation of consciousness itself. ¹⁵ Arguing along similar lines, Paul Griffiths suggests that the closest thing to a state of unconstructed or pure experience in classical Indian Buddhist literature is nirodhasamāpatti—a condition in which both objects and conscious experience cease altogether (Griffiths, 1986, 1990; Sharf, 2014a). In such a framework, it seems misleading to construe any mode of attention or perception as “bare.” The psychological model behind Nyanaponika’s understanding of sati as bare attention may owe more to internalist and empiricist epistemologies than it owes to early Buddhist or traditional Theravāda formulations (Sharf, 1998).

Given the ambiguities surrounding sati, it is not surprising that the Mahāsī method quickly came under fire from a number of quarters, including both Theravāda traditionalists in Southeast Asia and practitioners and scholars in the West. Critics object to (1) Mahāsī's devaluation of concentration techniques leading to absorption (Pali: jhāna); (2) claims that practitioners of the Mahāsī method are able to attain advanced stages of the path, including the four stages of enlightenment (Pali: ariya-magga), in remarkably short periods of time; and (3) the ethics of rendering sati as bare attention, which would seem to devalue or neglect the importance of ethical judgment. ¹⁶

In my own work on the roots of the Zen (Chinese: Chan) tradition in 8th-century China, I found that certain early Zen teachers seem to have turned away from traditional forms of meditation—repentance practices, meditations on corpses and the impurity of the body, and so on—in favor of instructing their disciples to simply set aside all distinctions and conceptualizations, and allow the mind to come to rest in the flow of the here-and-now (Sharf, 2014b). It may not be a coincidence that the teachers who advocated this new style of practice were also those who had garnered a sizable lay audience, an audience that presumably had little interest in monastic renunciation and little background in Buddhist doctrine. So these early Zen techniques, which went under the rubrics of “viewing mind” (kanxin), “discerning mind” (guanxin), “reflecting without an object” (wu suo nian), and so on, were, like “bare attention,” seen as direct approaches that circumvented the need for traditional dhyāna attainments, for mastery of scripture and doctrine, and for proficiency in monastic ritual. In brief, the early Zen technique (or techniques—it is difficult to determine whether these terms were referring to one and the same practice) revolved around a seemingly simple figure–ground shift, wherein attention is directed away from objects of any kind toward the abiding “luminosity” or “transparency” of mind or awareness itself. The early Zen reformers, like the Burmese reformers in the 20th century, were popularizers: they touted a method that was simple, promised quick results, and could be cultivated by anyone in a short period of time. Indeed, one early Zen text, attributed to the fourth patriarch Daoxin (580–651), actually traces the technique back to Layman Fu. ¹⁷

Early Zen was not the only pre-modern Buddhist tradition to develop something akin to “bare attention”; one finds it in Tibetan Dzogchen as well, which is not surprising as there is evidence, albeit controversial, that Dzogchen was itself influenced by Zen. ¹⁸ I do not want to engage the thorny issue of whether these traditions were referencing a common meditative experience or state of consciousness. ¹⁹ Rather, I would draw attention to certain institutional and sociological parallels—to the fact that the early Zen patriarchs and Dzogchen masters, like their modern Burmese counterparts, were interested in developing a method simple enough to be accessible to those who were unschooled in Buddhist doctrine and scripture, who were not necessarily wedded to classical Indian cosmology, who may not have had the time or inclination for extended monastic practice, and who were interested in immediate results as opposed to incremental advancement over countless lifetimes. It is thus not surprising that the early Zen and Dzogchen teachers found themselves in the same position as Mahāsī: castigated for dumbing down the tradition, for devaluing ethical training, for misconstruing or devaluing the role of wisdom, and for their crassly “instrumental” approach to practice.

Those interested in the scientific, empirical study of mindfulness today would do well to pay attention to some of these criticisms. The Tang master Mazu Daoyi (709–788), for example—a celebrated representative of the Hongzhou Zen lineage—was noted for his rejection of the more scholastic interests of the monks in his day, and he is particularly associated with the idea of a sudden, almost spontaneous, realization of one’s buddha nature or “true mind.” But Guifeng Zongmi (780–841), another celebrated master and chronicler of early Zen, had deep misgivings. He believed that the Hongzhou method, which he characterizes as “simply giving free rein to the mind” (dan renxin), failed to distinguish between right and wrong. ²⁰ Indeed, a not uncommon criticism was that the excessive focus in meditation on achieving “inner stillness” (ningji), especially when unbalanced by an engagement with the scriptures, leads to a state described as “falling into emptiness” (duokong), which is, in turn, associated with “meditation sickness” (chanbing). ²¹ The term meditation sickness was used by various Buddhist masters as a critique of practices they deemed detrimental to the path, notably techniques that emphasized inner stillness—they seem to have been targeting practices that cultivated a sort of non-critical or non-analytical presentness. Today we might translate “meditation sickness” as “zoning out,” by which I do not mean being lost in thought or daydreaming. Rather, I suspect that when medieval meditation masters used terms such as “falling into emptiness” and “meditation sickness,” they were targeting techniques that resulted in an intense immersion in the moment, in the now, such that the practitioner loses touch with the socially, culturally, and historically constructed world in which he or she lives. The practitioner becomes estranged from the web of social relations that are the touchstone of our humanity as well as our sanity. The key to avoiding this is to learn to see both sides at once. Zongmi says: “While awakening from delusion is sudden, the transformation of an unenlightened person into an enlightened person is gradual.” From a more traditional Buddhist perspective, what is missing in the modern mindfulness movement is precisely this gradual transformation, which involves active engagement with Buddhist doctrine and Buddhist “forms of life” (Lebensform). ²²

The modern mindfulness movement

This engagement with Buddhist scripture, doctrine, ritual, and institutions is often rejected by modern advocates of mindfulness, who believe they can garner the rewards of Buddhist practice without having to adopt a Buddhist form of life or world view. Indeed, some insist that Buddhist practice does not entail a worldview at all; rather than a process of reconditioning, they claim that Buddhist meditation, properly understood, is a process of deconditioning—of setting aside our culturally constructed notions of reality so as to see things “as they really are.” The object, they believe, is to put an end to the ceaseless inner chatter of the mind—to stop thinking. The epistemological and metaphysical commitments behind this are vividly illustrated in Jill Bolte Taylor’s popular book (2008) and TED Video, ²³ both of which are titled “My Stroke of Insight.” Taylor, a brain scientist, experienced what she believes is a taste of Buddhist nirvāṇa as the result of a debilitating stroke that compromised areas of her left hemisphere. She writes:

As the language centers in my left hemisphere grew increasingly silent and I became detached from the memories of my life, I was comforted by an expanding sense of grace. In this void of higher cognition and details pertaining to my normal life, my consciousness soared into an all-knowingness, a “being at one” with the universe. (Taylor, 2008, p. 41)

In short, the rhetoric of “bare attention” is predicated on an often unacknowledged commitment to what scholars of religious mysticism call “perennialism”—the notion that there is a singular, transcultural, trans-historical, and spiritual experience that is common to mystics around the globe. ²⁴ The perennial experience is, in itself, unconstructed: it is free of local cultural, linguistic, or social inflections, although such inflections invariably color any and all descriptions or analyses of such a state. More specifically, the popular understanding of mindfulness seems to be associated with an understanding of perennialism that is sometimes called the “filter theory.” The filter theory, vividly illustrated in Taylor’s narrative, holds that our normal sensory and discursive processes, rather than opening us to reality, actually serve to filter it out. The Indian master Kamalaśīla (fl. 740–795), in his critique of the Chinese Zen master Heshang Moheyan (d.u.) in a famous 8th-century Tibetan debate, pointed out that there is a particular place for yogis who erroneously believe that the goal of meditation is to put an end to thinking: it is the realm of the “beings without minds,” who, after death, will spend five hundred eons as mindless zombies (Sharf, 2014a).

Just as there is a set of metaphysical commitments that undergird the modern mindfulness movement, there are also ethical and political commitments. The problem is that, in America at least, these commitments so resemble those of mainstream consumer culture that they go largely unnoticed. Note that, in the early period at least, the Buddhist institution—known as the saṃgha—comprised a renunciate community that embodied, quite literally, a critique of mainstream social values and cultural norms. For the saṃgha, liberation required “letting go,” and letting go did not mean to merely adopt a particular attitude or psychological frame, however important such a frame may be. Rather, it necessitated a radical change in the way one lived; one was required to opt out of family ties and worldly pursuits, and opt into an alternative, communal, celibate, and highly regulated lifestyle. Modern teachers of mindfulness rarely make such demands of their students; the liberating, or if you will therapeutic, benefits apparently do not require dramatic changes in the way one lives. Rather than enjoining practitioners to renounce carnal and sensual pleasure, mindfulness is touted as a way to more fulfilling sensual experiences. Rather than enjoining practitioners to renounce mainstream American culture, mindfulness is seen as a way to better cope with it. There may be no better exemplar of this ethically dubious and politically reactionary stance than Tricycle Magazine, with its advertisements for expensive meditation gear, for dharmic dating services, dharmic dentists and accountants, and its implicit authorization of the entrepreneurial and commercial activities of countless dharma centers and self-styled Buddhist masters. The packaging of mindfulness in programs such as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) is arguably a variant on the same theme.

Could it be that this socially conservative ideology is tied to the particular ideological strand in modern Buddhism that I have identified as perennialism? Arguments to similar effect have been made by, among others, Hannah Arendt and Emmanuel Lévinas (Sharf, 1995b, pp. 50–51), but perhaps most relevant is the so-called “Critical Buddhism” (hihan bukkyō) movement that emerged out of Japanese Sōtō Zen in the 1990s. The leaders (and possibly sole members) of this movement, Hakamaya Noriaki and Matsumoto Shirō, claimed that the ethical failings of Japanese Buddhist schools—notably their complicity in the militarist and nationalist fever that led up to the Pacific War—could be traced, in part, to buddha-nature theory (Hubbard & Swanson, 1997). (The doctrine of inherent buddha-nature holds, in brief, that we are all naturally endowed with the awakened state of the buddhas but fail to recognize it.) Their argument, in short, is that the East Asian Buddhist tradition largely abandoned the more analytical and critical dimensions of Indian Mahāyāna, aligning itself instead with buddha-nature doctrine, and that this led to a kind of ethical, social, and political passivity. This is not the place to weigh in on this issue, except to note that this critique too emerges not from without, but from within the Buddhist tradition itself. ²⁵

Conclusion

To conclude, it is my impression that many of the psychologists, cognitive scientists, and sociologists doing research on Burmese style mindfulness practices seem to assume that the psychological benefits of such practice are born out by centuries of Buddhist experience. Such is not the case. To the extent that the modern approach to mindfulness can be found in premodern Asia, it was a minority position that was met with considerable criticism from traditional quarters. The nature of the criticism warrants our attention, as it parallels criticism directed against Mahāsī's technique in modern Southeast Asia. Thus we hear the charge that such practices emphasize momentary states rather than long-term transformation, that they do not yield the benefits that are claimed on their behalf, that they are more Hindu than Buddhist, and that the overriding emphasis on inner stillness, in the absence of critical intellectual engagement with the teachings, can lead to a paralyzing state of self-absorption—what East Asian Buddhists have long identified as “meditation sickness” (Ahn, 2007).

To be clear, I am not claiming that mindfulness has no therapeutic value. I am aware of the claims, based on a substantial body of empirical (if contested) data, that suggests it does. But my own experience among long-term meditators in Asian monastic settings as well as in American practice centers leads me to be somewhat skeptical, and I sometimes wonder if researchers in this area are asking the right questions of the right people. It is not just that advanced meditation practitioners in more traditional Asian settings may not exhibit the kinds of behavior that we associate with mental health. It is that, as Obeyesekere noted, it is not clear that they aspire to our model of mental health in the first place. And this, I submit, is the real challenge for those interested in the causal relationship between traditional forms of Buddhist meditation and the psychological and behavioral outcomes that such meditation is assumed to produce.