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When you see mindfulness taught and promoted like some sort of relaxation technique or that if you just think mindfully you’re going to cope with stress better,

When you see mindfulness taught and promoted like some sort of relaxation technique or that if you just think mindfully you’re going to cope with stress better, then it’s easy for someone coming from a Buddhist practice to say, that’s not mindfulness—at least not in the same spirit of the word. I took transmission of the precepts twice and the 2nd time was with Thich Nhat Hanh who called them the “Mindfulness Trainings” instead of the “Precepts”. That’s how I came to know mindfulness. It is intertwined with refuge, the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha. It’s a faith in the precepts. It’s not a practice one can do on their own nor a practice that’s separate from meditation. If you relate corporate mindfulness with Buddhism, it is a perversion. It’s a different practice and it’s dishonest to promote it otherwise. Call the practice whatever you want, call it mindfulness, call it prayer, call it feel-goodness, but it’s deceptive to call it a Buddhist practice if you ignore its underpinnings.

vidarh 7y ago
My impression is that most people promoting mindfulness are often keen to avoid the association to Buddhism or at least downplay it, not exploit it, to avoid a resistance to picking up a religious practice. Gil Fronsdal in his "Introduction to Mindfulness Meditation" jokingly talk about how organizations holding courses in "Mindfulness based stress deduction" carefully avoid the "B-word", and then go on to give a pratical introduction that barely mentions Buddhism. Quite a bit of mindfulness meditation material has been published by Buddhist monks and teachers that have taken care to stress their utility as methods separated from the Buddhist tradition. Fronsdal's courses is one example. Bhante Henepola Gunaratana's Mindfulness in Plain English is another popular example that takes great care to explain its position in Buddhist practice and then promptly point out that his book is a practical guide to the meditation practice, not a guide to the spiritual aspects, and mostly ignores Buddhism from then on. When talking about mindfulness in a secularised form, we are usually talking specifically about mindfulness based meditation, not the other aspects, or at least to a lesser extent other aspects. To me that was what made it palatable, as I'd had a casual interest for a long time, but found spiritually focused descriptions very off-putting.

vidarh 7y ago

My impression is that most people promoting mindfulness are often keen to avoid the association to Buddhism or at least downplay it, not exploit it, to avoid a resistance to picking up a religious practice. Gil Fronsdal in his "Introduction to Mindfulness Meditation" jokingly talk about how organizations holding courses in "Mindfulness based stress deduction" carefully avoid the "B-word", and then go on to give a pratical introduction that barely mentions Buddhism. Quite a bit of mindfulness meditation material has been published by Buddhist monks and teachers that have taken care to stress their utility as methods separated from the Buddhist tradition. Fronsdal's courses is one example. Bhante Henepola Gunaratana's Mindfulness in Plain English is another popular example that takes great care to explain its position in Buddhist practice and then promptly point out that his book is a practical guide to the meditation practice, not a guide to the spiritual aspects, and mostly ignores Buddhism from then on. When talking about mindfulness in a secularised form, we are usually talking specifically about mindfulness based meditation, not the other aspects, or at least to a lesser extent other aspects. To me that was what made it palatable, as I'd had a casual interest for a long time, but found spiritually focused descriptions very off-putting.