Mindfulness, Literature, and the Affirmation of Ordinary Life

Abstract

Abstract This chapter examines the conditions under which Buddhist practices of mindfulness have come to take on a new significance within the context of modernity’s broad affirmation of the ordinary world. More specifically, modern articulations of mindfulness are informed by modern literature’s valorization of the details of everyday life, its finely tuned descriptions of the flow of consciousness, and its new reverence for ordinary objects and their capacity to reflect the universal. These are reflected in the work of authors like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Herman Hesse, who have been hidden resources for a modern re-interpretation of mindfulness. Further, this understanding provides a distinctively modern way of re-sacralizing and re-enchanting the world without resort to the supernatural, as in the work of Thich Nhat Hanh.