Ethics, Mindfulness, and Consciousness: A Study of Their Relation in Early Buddhism

Abstract

Scholarly discussions of mindfulness normally treat the term as reflecting a specific, independent, psychological function. Here, mindfulness is placed within a broader understanding of the Buddhist cultivation of consciousness, with special attention to the ethical aspects of mindfulness. Focusing on sources from early Buddhism, the article demonstrates how ethics was thought to have a positive, indeed a necessary, effect on a successful practice of mindfulness. The article moves beyond the Sati-paṭṭhāna-sutta (“The Foundations of Mindfulness”), which has been emphasized in scholarship, to related texts in the Middle Length Discourses (Majjhima-Nikāya) and beyond them to other Pāli sources. Here, we learn that “You should cultivate the four applications of mindfulness based on ethics, established in ethics.” While the emphasis on ethics in these sources reminds us of the conceptual dimensions of mindfulness, it also allows scholars to see both ethics and mindfulness as partaking in the broader attempt to enrich consciousness and make it healthier, softer, and more lucid. Buddhist practice works to change the structures of subjectivity and make them more conducive to liberation, in whatever way it may be defined. Thus, the Buddhist contemplative tradition can be seen to participate in an effort to change the quality of consciousness, rather than being a mere attempt to reach an annihilation of “suffering.” These considerations allow us to see mindfulness as a form of ethical activity in itself.