Mindfulness De- or Recontextualized? Traditional Buddhist and Contemporary Perspectives

Abstract

In the past few decades, mindfulness meditation and other techniques of Buddhist origin have been rapidly gaining in recognition as means of facilitating psychophysical health and well-being. However, this growing enthusiasm has recently been checked by a host of criticism that questions the ways mindfulness has been (mis)construed and (mis)appropriated in Western culture. Critics have been especially vocal about the dangers of ＂mystifying mindfulness＂: extracting it from its traditional framework and transforming it into a watered-down, decontextualized self-help method. Although sympathetic to its main thrust, we believe such criticism must be appropriately qualified. To begin with, what critics often neglect is the fact that Buddhism is not a homogenous tradition, but exhibits great diversity. For the most part, critics base their claims on Abhidamma Buddhism and tend to ignore the contribution of other (particularly Northern and East Asian) Buddhist traditions. Drawing on recent work on Mahamudra in Tibetan Buddhism and early Chan in Chinese Buddhism, the paper argues that contemporary conceptions of mindfulness have telling historical precedents, which have important implications for current debates. Specifically, we suggest that the inclusion of Northern and East Asian Buddhist traditions provides us with a more nuanced conception of the process of contextualization and allows us to distinguish between the narrow context of formal practice (during meditation sessions) and the broad context of informal practice (between meditation sessions). It is then argued that contemporary approaches need to be more heedful of the latter and give up on the naive essentialist notion of absolute decontextualization. Finally, we make a tentative case for an existentialist (re)contextualization of mindfulness based on a broader conception of suffering and existential transformation.