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The previous blog quoted Candy Gunther Brown’s claim that the recruitment of mindfulness into the medical mainstream followed a similar model to the attempted recruitment of Transcendental Meditation (TM): “translation into Western language and settings, popular recognition, adoption within scientific research in powerful institutions, and the use of sophisticated marketing public relations techniques”. ‘Mindfulness’ was the word chosen to represent a form of meditation in early English translations of Pali and Sanskrit Buddhist texts. It gained credibility through the advocacy of Western Buddhist converts with academic credentials in science and psychology. The medical breakthrough is credited to Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) programme. Further popularising occurred through the support of high-profile peace activists, celebrities, and media.
In contrast to mindfulness, the medical promotion of TM failed. TM was not presented as a simple stress-reduction technique but retained its explicit connections to Hindu religion and supernaturalism. In tracing the East-West translation process, it is necessary to recognise that in Buddhist religious contexts mindfulness also has a definite ‘supernatural’ orientation. The key points on this I take from Jeff Wilson, Associate Professor of Religious Studies and East Asian Studies, University of Waterloo, in his book Mindful America - The Mutual Transformation of Buddhist Meditation and American Culture (Oxford University Press, 2014).
In traditional Buddhism, meditation is not a normal part of life for lay-people. It is a pursuit for monastics, those who have reached an advanced stage through multiple reincarnations, and for whom Enlightenment may be within reach. Meditation is carried out under instruction in religious community and balanced with philosophical study and real world ethics. ‘Mindfulness’ is but one form of meditation among many and it is associated with
“…the highest concentrative trance meditative states; supernatural
powers of hearing and sight; recollection of thousands of past lives…
mind reading, the ability to multiply one’s body; invisibility; the ability to
pass through walls, dive into the earth and walk on water;
supernatural flight…etc”. (Wilson, 106).
Strange or supernatural experiences were not unknown to the earliest advocates of medical mindfulness. In a PhD thesis exploring the psychological impacts of intensive mindfulness meditation and mindfulness retreats, which was submitted in 1977, Jack Kornfield reported that mindfulness can result in disturbing emotional experiences including “nightmares, anger, pain, mood swings, fear, paranoia, hatred, uncontrollable body movements, hallucinations, and psychological tension”. Wilson comments
“Another class of effects erased from current scientific discussions
of mindfulness is psychic phenomena. Significant numbers of mindfulness
practitioners on retreat reported manifestations of telepathy,
precognition, or out-of-body experiences”. (Wilson, 82-83).
Kornfield’s research also reported positive effects including reductions of stress and anxiety and suggested the application of mindfulness for pain reduction, before Kabat-Zinn presented MBSR to the world. Wilson notes that whilst this dissertation is “...thoroughly psychological...” it is “...also thoroughly Buddhist... Though Buddhism is framed as psychology, it is also overtly and indelibly religious in his presentation” (Wilson, 82-83).
Elsewhere, Kornfield has acknowledged that in South East Asia, monks who are meditation masters are “revered for their qualities of mind, their purity and saintliness, and in many cases the powers they are believed to possess”. However, Wilson says that Kornfield follows Asian tradition by deliberately avoiding discussion of “powers” developed through meditation. He:
“…acknowledges that powers are common among Asian meditators,
and that this accounts for a significant portion of their popularity, but
refuses to discuss them with his English-reading American audience”.
It is unnecessary for Asian mindfulness teachers to talk about these ‘magical’ phenomena because “they live in cultures that already expect meditation teachers to manifest such powers”. This is widely recognised by mindfulness teachers with experience of practice in Asia. Teachers and students trained exclusively in the West are, says Wilson, “often completely unaware that mindfulness is embedded in magical contexts in Asia” (Wilson 107).
Western mindfulness teachers acknowledge that mindfulness has religious, Buddhist origins, without ever going into detail regarding what those origins entailed. They rely heavily on the claim that Jon Kabat-Zinn secularised mindfulness by removing it from this religious Buddhist context, thus making it ‘accessible to people of all faiths and none’. So what exactly did Kabat-Zinn do? Trained as a microbiologist, Kabat-Zinn’s first encounter with Buddhism was at MIT in 1966. He began meditating every day and received further training when he accepted the role of Director at the Cambridge Zen Centre, becoming a student of Korean Zen Master, Seung Sahn. Kabat-Zinn struggled with a sense of disjunction between his day-job as a biology lecturer and his meditation teaching and practice.
In his own words:
“In 1976, I went to work at the almost brand-new University of Massachusetts
Medical School. All the while, my koan about what I was really supposed to be
doing with my life in terms of right livelihood was unfolding in the background.”
(A ‘koan’ is a kind of paradoxical riddle used in some forms of Buddhism to move one’s thinking away from ignorance and towards enlightenment).
“On a two-week vipassana retreat at the Insight Meditation Society (IMS)
in Barre, Massachusetts, in the Spring of 1979, while sitting in my room
one afternoon about Day 10 of the retreat, I had a ‘vision’ that lasted maybe
10 seconds. I don’t really know what to call it, so I call it a vision. It was
rich in detail and more like an instantaneous seeing of vivid, almost inevitable
connections and their implications. It did not come as a reverie or a thought
stream, but rather something quite different, which to this day I cannot fully
explain and don’t feel the need to.
I saw in a flash not only a model that could be put in place, but also the longterm
implications of what might happen if the basic idea was sound and could be
implemented in one test environment—namely that it would spark new fields
of scientific and clinical investigation, and would spread to hospitals and medical
centres and clinics across the country and around the world, and provide right
livelihood for thousands of practitioners. Because it was so weird, I hardly ever
mentioned this experience to others. But after that retreat, I did have a better
sense of what my karmic assignment might be. It was so compelling that I
decided to take it on wholeheartedly as best I could. Pretty much everything
I saw in that 10 seconds has come to pass…”
He explains how he proceeded in this karmic assignment.
“…From the beginning of MBSR, I bent over backward to”
avoid “the risk of it being seen as Buddhist, ‘New Age,’
‘Eastern Mysticism’ or just plain ‘flakey’.”
This was difficult because:
“…the entire curriculum is based on relatively… intensive training
and practice of meditation and yoga, and meditation and yoga
pretty much defined one element of the ‘New Age’.”
He remained fully committed to teaching the Buddhist ‘dharma’ which aims:
“...to elucidate the nature of suffering and its root causes, as well
as provide a practical liberation from suffering”.
However, in the public sphere:
“this is to be undertaken, of course,
without ever mentioning the word ‘dharma’”.
(J. Kabat-Zinn, "Some Reflections on the Origins of MBSR, Skillful Means, and the Trouble with Maps," Contemporary Buddhism 12 (1 2011): 282, 287-288).
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