Still Exploring the Middle Path: a Response to Commentaries

Abstract

This article is a response to commentaries on our paper (Monteiro et al. 2015) about the relationship between traditional and contemporary mindfulness, or rather Buddhist versus secular mindfulness. In our paper, we focused on the question of ethics (sila), considering questions such as whether ethics teaching is integral to Buddhist mindfulness can be merely implicit in secular mindfulness trainings, or whether it should be expressly taught. We argued for a middle path between these tangled concerns maintaining that the goals and intentions of Buddhist versus secular mindfulness might not be identical but that there are significant areas of overlap, and a healthy and continued dialog between the different streams is mutually beneficial. Our article prompted many rich and learned responses that have deepened and nuanced the issues. Many authors seemed basically in alignment with our message. Van Gordon et al. (2015), for example, echoed our call that Buddhist and scientific communities work more closely together, and Davis (2015) supported a continued dialog between Buddhist and secular communities about Bhow it is best for human beings to be.^ Others gave examples of how Buddhist teachings make helpful contributions to the development and efficacy of secular mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs). Amaro (2015), for example, argued that while Theravada Buddhist teachings do not have a proprietary claim on mindfulness, they nevertheless offer a holistic model for maximizing wellbeing (one that recognizes the importance of the well-being of others) that may be of benefit for developing secular interventions. Amaro (2015), Mikulas (2015), and Greenberg and Mitra (2015) focused on how the different parsings and understandings of the term mindfulness from Buddhist traditions can help secular mindfulness practitioners or teachings become more aware of potential ethical issues. Taking a different perspective, both Lindahl (2015) and Baer (2015) found merit in the exchange of ideas between Buddhism and secular mindfulness, but both sounded cautionary notes about making untested assumptions that secular mindfulness brings benefits insofar as it is brought into line with the traditional Buddhism. In a similar vein, Baer argued that the key question is not how we can make MBIs more consistent with Buddhism, but how we can maximize their benefits for the broadest spectrum of people, and the way to discover this is through testing available methods and hypotheses through empirical findings and psychological science. A critique of this kind of position is implied by Grossman (2015) who argued that Buddhist mindfulness is part of an embodied ethic and, in this respect, diverges radically from Western psychology, which tends to focus on cognition in isolation from ethical values. If this is the case, then attempts to fathom Buddhist mindfulness from the perspective of Western psychology are doomed because the lens is not wide enough to view what is being observed—the contours of the model are too tight. In a similar vein, Purser (2015) argued against loosening mindfulness from its Buddhist moorings, suggesting that such a decontextualization is both philosophically and ethically problematic. In this paper, we engage this area of the discussion about the contextualization of mindfulness within traditional Buddhism. * Jane Compson jcompson@uw.edu