a religious attitude, where the original is some form of sacred revelation, or it could be a species of a philological attitude, in which the original is simply the real version of something that later becomes confused, contaminated, or confounded by the interpretations of others. Human history, if you like, takes us further and further away from Truth, not progressive closer towards it.
These issues are especially relevant to the ways in which Westerners have talked about Buddhism, Daoism, Hinduism and other religious or spiritual traditions that seem to have developed outside the European context.
Does it matter if ‘construct Mindfulness’ has cobbled together an eclectic and inconsistent sense of its origins in a representation of Buddhism (that mixes various Buddhist and nonBuddhist traditions together because of their ostensible ‘Easternness’)? After all, ‘construct Mindfulness’ is a modern construction that constantly seeks to improve and refine its effectiveness by testing and incorporating new ideas and components. Its point is not philosophical or spiritual fidelity or conservatism, it’s not ideological respectability, but rather its point is to be maximally effective as a therapeutic or life-style intervention today.
It’s worth sitting with this insight for a little while: yes, all Buddhists should practice Mindfulness, but that doesn’t mean that everyone who practices Mindfulness is a Buddhist … It doesn’t even mean that these practices should be the same.
One of the really liberating lessons from this is that the task of philosophy in the field of the Science of Mindfulness is not to attempt to map (or even to justify an assumed map between) construct Mindfulness and, say, the Buddhist concept of Sati. Instead, the contribution of philosophy is to help us identify resources that enliven our understanding of the meaning and potentials of the modern (transnational) construct. This immediately opens the field to investigations of other (nonBuddhist) bodies of thought. We might consider Daoism, for instance, as we will in this module, or Stoicism or Quietism or any number of other philosophical movements. We might look at contemporary philosophy in different parts of the world, or we might consider the valuable philosophical contributions made by literature or poetry or art.
While ‘Mindfulness’ has become the conventional translation, it’s quite clear that the meaning of sati in Pali tends towards something more like remembering, in at least two important senses.
The first is in the way that it suggests a ‘bringing to mind’ and a ‘keeping in mind’ – so, remembering in the sense of not forgetting the object of a meditation, for instance.
The second, which is quite often overlooked, is in the way that it suggests a bringing into the body; when we remember, we remember, which is significantly different from re-collecting or recalling in that it involves embodiment. This sense of sati comes close to what we might call incorporation, in the way that it brings events into our corporeal being.
Since the earliest sutta (scripture), the canonical concept of sati appears as one of the key qualities that must be cultivated on the path to Awakening (or Enlightenment), which is the goal of Buddhist training. Indeed, it is one the five basic faculties (alongside faith, vigor, concentration, and wisdom), and it features (alongside right concentration) as one of the steps in the Eightfold Path. Here, the idea of cultivating ‘right mindfulness’ seems to suggest that there is also the possibility of ‘wrong mindfulness, ’ which is something that will trouble people (and us) later on.
The earliest and most influential treatment of sati, in the Satipatthana Sutta, seeks to elaborate the meaning and practice of sati through four kinds of meditation. You can read it for yourself in the course materials for this this module, but in an iconic passage at the very start of the sutta, these are outlined by the Buddha in basic terms: he explains to his bhikkhus (followers) that these four foundations of mindfulness constitute a complete path
for the purification of beings, for the overcoming of sorrow and lamentation, for the destruction of suffering and grief, and for reaching the right path and attaining Awakening.
When he is asked what these four might be, the Buddha replies concisely: first, we must live observing the body as a body – by being ardent, fully knowing and mindful of the body in this way, we can overcome our covetousness, longing, and discontents with the world. Then, continuing in a similar manner, by observing feelings as feelings, thoughts as thoughts, mental events as mental events etc., and by doing this with ardent discipline and attention, we can overcome our covetousness, longing, and discontents with the world.
In other words, the cultivation of the four foundations of sati require us to exert our discipline to pay attention to all the things we would usually not notice in the performance of everyday activities. This means everything that happens inside our mindbody and everything that happens outside it too, until eventually we deconstruct ourselves into the constant parade of experiential phenomena themselves, and we adopt the standpoint of an observer watching and contemplating that parade.
The first is often described as ‘concentration,’ or ‘single-pointed,’ or sometimes ‘calm-abiding’ meditation. This is what is usually meant when we use the Pali term samatha.
Likewise, the assertion of a direct or exclusive association between vipassana and the cultivation of sati seems to be more problematic in practice than is often appreciated. One of the reasons for this is that the Satipatthana Sutta, which we considered in the last session, makes little attempt to draw a distinction between concentration and insight.
The idea of two separate paths of meditation seems to arise in the commentaries and interpretations of the sutta, rather than in the sutta themselves.
The first is simply that our ability to hold an event or sensation in mind seems to rely on our capacity for focus and concentration on that event or sensation.
The second way in which these paths seem to interact places them on more equal footing, making them into two aspects of a common enterprise. For instance, it seems to be the case that the practice of the four foundations of sati (that we considered in the last session), can themselves constitute a form of concentration meditation, leading to a state of calm-abiding.
That is, just as in the performance of samatha meditations, the cultivation of mindfulness might be measured by our progressive accomplishment of the four jhana (or stages) of absorption that lead eventually to a condition of perfect equanimity and awareness.
While the Vipassana Movement has not gone as far along the road to instrumentalization as what we have seen as construct Mindfulness, it has moved in a non-sectarian direction and is frequently associated with the provision of secular mindfulness training for general populations who are seeking help to deal with various forms of dukkha (dis-ease). Indeed, the Vipassana Movement allows for a difference between ‘elementary mindfulness’ (which approximately corresponds with the cultivation of a secular skill or technology) and a more religiously motivated ‘right mindfulness’
This potential distinction between elementary and right mindfulness really helps us to understand one of the ways in which construct Mindfulness differs fundamentally from Buddhist sati: while Buddhist sati must be embedded within an overall practice that moves progressively through the cultivation of proper moral conduct, the cultivation of deep states of meditative absorption, and then the accomplishment of a wise understanding of the nature of reality (indeed, these are the three broad-brush stages of the Eight-Fold Path), construct Mindfulness posits that the practice of mindfulness can be extracted from this overall pathway and cultivated on its own with a number of measurable benefits.
One of the other ways in which the contemporary, scientific, construct of Mindfulness seeks to position itself in this complicated landscape is by emphasising the possibility of making use of the ideal-type distinctions between samatha and vipassana to indicate a certain tone of practice.
Mindfulness is often characterised in terms of opening to whatever is present and allowing whatever arises to arise. It is in this way that practitioners can be told that we are not doing anything wrong (and certainly not failing in the practice) if our minds wander off – the practice resides in inviting the attention back once it has gone.
samatha meditation is sometimes used as a foil to emphasise the appropriate attitude for construct Mindfulness. Unlike Mindfulness, we say, which is characterised by an attitude of allowing and opening, concentration meditations are characterised by the feeling of narrowing and closing. Rather than being gently curious about whatever arises and then compassionately attentive to this arising of myriad events, concentration meditations are about commanding the attention and excluding distractions. In a concentration practice, once your mind wanders, you’ve failed and you must start again.
A very simple example (that is often used to make this point) is a breath-counting meditation, in which we focus our attention on our breath and count these breaths in cycles of 9. If/when our mind wanders from our breath (distracted by any sensation, thought, or feeling that may arise), then we must start again at one. The idea is that we can measure our progress very directly and literally by seeing how many counts we can do before we fail. Someone who gets to 9 four times is better at the exercise than someone who struggles to get to the number 2 even once.
As we’ve seen, this kind of attitude of competitive measurement and striving is exactly the kind of thing we’re trying to avoid in modern Mindfulness interventions. However, we’ve also seen that these kinds of characterization of samatha and vipassana are close to being caricatures developed for reasons of illustration
Buddhist themes that is emphasised with great clarity in the Zen tradition is the idea that much of human suffering is caused by faulty ways of looking at the world around us. That is, our way of observing and understanding the world is one of the causes of our suffering in it.
Humanity literally divorces itself from its true nature through the exercise of wilful, instrumental reason. Because of our preoccupation with doing, we forget how to be. Hence the only way to see through to the truth of the world is for us to shed our clever discriminations and judgements and just allow reality as it really is to arise within and around us.
Partially in dialogue with ideas like this, Chan/Zen Buddhism expounded the position that the human mind is naturally pristine and clear – indeed, that all humans (or even all life) contain the perfected Buddha-nature itself – but that our minds are clouded, sullied, and distorted by delusional discriminations and judgements that we incorporate as we live our lives.
By allowing such mental events to pass without inviting them in or engaging with them, such events eventually settle and cease by themselves. And, as such disturbances cease, so our mind settles into peace. What is left is the undisturbed mind or the True Mind – like an unsullied and pristine surface of water – perfectly reflective – which we experience as our intrinsically pure nature. This is right mindfulness (shōnen), and it is this that we should cultivate and protect during meditation practices.
Shikantaza is closely associated with the Japanese monk Dōgen and the Sōtō school that he originated in the Thirteenth Century. Dōgen emphasised shikantaza – or ‘just sitting practice’ (or nothing but meditation) – as a form of silent illumination. Unlike other schools of Buddhism and even other schools of Zen, Dōgen insisted that ‘just sitting’ should be enough as a practice, without the need for supplementary activities.
In practice, shikantaza shares much in common with those practices we saw in the Satipatthana Sutta in earlier sessions. And, just like we saw in the case of the cultivation of sati, so it is also the case that shikantaza seems to incorporate elements of both the samatha (concentration) and vipassana (insight) pathways.
In general, shikantaza is less structured than sati-practices, and certainly less structured than we see in modern Mindfulness Interventions like MBSR and MBCT, where a teacher carefully guides us through various foundations of mindfulness (as you’ve experienced in our meditation labs).
Shikantaza is typically silent, and practitioners discipline themselves to observe whatever arises from (what we have called) a metacognitive or meta-aware standpoint. One of the controversial issues arising from this kind of practice (and some of those we’ve considered in earlier sessions) is the way in which judgement and discrimination appear to be seen as irredeemable problems for humans.
That is, the endpoint of the practice is the dropping away of mind and body themselves in the accomplishment of freedom from the arising of events and phenomena (which constitute suffering). As we saw earlier, this sounds like the attainment of a form of non-self or non-mind (mushin – jp.), which may be a wonderful spiritual destination, but which might not be suitable as a goal in modern, therapeutic contexts.
Given Zen’s unusually powerful and explicit emphasis on the realization of this ‘original enlightenment’ or True Mind, it has also found itself at the heart of many controversies. In Zen, it is not only the case that right Mindfulness enables us to operate more skilfully from a more spacious standpoint of metaawareness; in Zen there is also the sense that the objects of awareness are themselves delusions or blemishes that should be polished away.
Hence, an important controversy concerns how we can sustain morality if all our judgements (even our moral judgements) are delusions – if we should not discriminate between good and bad (because the act of discrimination already involves us in an unnatural attachment to events and phenomena, which is therefore bad in itself), how can we act well?
In other words, what is the connection between ‘right Mindfulness’ and moral action? How can this concept and practice of Mindfulness contribute to improving society around us?
Looking back to one of the foundational texts of Daoism – the Dao De Jing – we quickly find descriptions of the relationship between human beings and the world around them that resonate closely with those already familiar to us from Mindfulness. In particular, early philosophical Daoism draws our attention to the idea that it is in our awareness of the world – rather than necessarily in the objective conditions of the world itself – that our suffering and dis-ease really begins.
Hence, rather than waging war or engaging in violence to bring about an end to conditions that we dislike, we should instead seek a form of internal equilibrium of consciousness that will help us to think and act more skilfully. The Dao De Jing talks about this kind of awareness as a way of experiencing what is special about a particular event by simultaneously experiencing that single event in the context of the whole. Rather than cultivating a narrow conceptual focus, it calls on us to view events and mental events in as broad and spacious a manner as possible, stepping back from them (and opening up to them) to give us space to recognise the way in which the particular should move in accordance with the general or universal. Vitally, this kind of holistic awareness – which the texts often gloss as our awareness of the inextricability of the one and the many – is always immediate and direct, both spatially and temporally (both in terms of space and time).
That is, proper awareness of the world is always our awareness of the here and now, and of the context of this ‘here and now’ as the one amongst the many. The cultivation of this kind of awareness is the beginning of the possibility of living with a kind of skilful, creative, and productive harmony with/in this world.
Perhaps the most famous and influential concepts from philosophical Daoism are what are sometimes called the wu-forms, where the Chinese character wu stands for a form of negation or nothingness. For instance, many of you will already know the (much misunderstood) term wuwei – non-action – which might better be understood as a form of non-coercive action. But since we’re interested primarily in questions of awareness today, we should give a little more attention to the concept of wuzhi – nonthought or non-knowledge. Indeed, the historical record suggests that ‘mindfulness’ (sati) was first translated into Chinese using wuwei and wuzhi.
The everyday meaning of the word wuzhi is simply ‘ignorance,’ and the reasons for this are interesting for us: All of the wu-forms rest upon the premise that humans spend a lot of our time and energy engaged with abstract concepts and mediated experiences created by artificial (ie. invented) technical knowledge. That is, instead of engaging with the world directly, we engage with a kind veneer – a construction – that has been spread over the top of it by human cleverness, separating us from the world as it really is and preventing us from touching it directly.
If you like: it sanitizes our connection with nature like a window. This means that our experience of the world is transformed – or even perverted – by the ways that our cognitive processes work to keep reality away from us. Even worse, we use up a great deal of our energy (and health) struggling to deal with these cognitive fabrications rather than with the world itself.
Perhaps you’ll recognise elements of this model of experience and awareness from our earlier sessions about Buddhism? One of the key insights in Daoism, however, is not so much about freeing ourselves from suffering by seeing through a layer of delusion (that itself causes us so much unnecessary pain), rather it’s about seeing through to how things really are so that we can think and act more skilfully. Here, the idea of ‘being skilful’ involves thinking and acting in a way that is naturally harmonious with the whole (and the real) picture. It involves cultivating the ability mentally to stand back from ourselves into a more spacious and open standpoint, to see directly, free of mediation and abstraction (including the abstractions of our own desires and theories), and to see how a particular event or phenomenon is an aspect of a universal, organic whole.
And if this sounds rather anti-social (or perhaps anti-cultural) to you, then you might be right. There is a real sense in philosophical Daoism that human civilization per se might be the origin of all our suffering, clumsiness, and immorality. Humans are maladapted to their own civilizations. Institutionalized human cleverness (or ‘civilization’!) is precisely that layer of veneer that prevents us from directly accessing reality. It conditions us from the day we’re born to think in terms of categories, discriminations, and judgements that (pre)occupy our attention in place of direct experiences of the world around us. Our civilizations condition us to devalue our direct experience (as primitive and naïve) and to privilege abstract, reasoned interpretations of that experience in its place. Hence, there’s a sense in which the cultivation of Mindfulness – or wuzhi – is an attempt to free ourselves from the confines of (the idea of) society itself. Indeed, the social implications of early Daoist philosophy are the subject of great debate and controversy
Like the Buddhists, Daoists have always been very much aware that this kind of insight pushes inquirers right to the edges of the possibilities of language and reason to express (since language and reason are themselves artefacts of society). Hence, the language of texts like the Dao De Jing is full of contradictions and paradoxes – they often seem poetic rather than systematic – just as we see in many Zen texts. And, just like many Buddhist texts, these Daoists place primary emphasis on the importance of experiential knowledge as the only way to see through to the truth.
Hence, wuzhi, like right Mindfulness, is not something you can accomplish by (for instance) listening to me explain it to you. Instead, you need to cultivate it yourself in various formal exercises (like meditations or qi gong or the martial arts) and in the way you live your life everyday. Looking ahead to our next session (on Stoicism), we might see wuzhi as a concept that relies upon the practice of spiritual exercises
When we talk about Stoicism, what we are talking about? In general, we’re talking about the philosophical movement that emerged in the work of Zeno (3-4th century BCE) and was then developed by Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius (1-2nd century CE).
Unlike many other philosophical movements, which treat philosophy as a theoretical abstraction or even as a curious pastime, the Stoics understood philosophy primarily as a form of practice, or as a way of life. Philosophy is a kind of exercise (askêsis) in which we engage in order to make ourselves into better people. The premise here is that once we properly understand what the world is really like, we will find ourselves completely transformed. This self-transformation arises from the way that Stoicism brings together philosophical inquiry into the nature of things and psychological discipline and commitment to live in accord with that nature
Hence, classic texts of the Stoic tradition, such as the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, are often mixtures of philosophical exploration and psychological instruction – explaining what kinds of exercises the author practices in order to live more closely in accord with the principles of nature, and often showing how the author reproaches himself for failing to fully incorporate (that is, bring into his body) the principles that he has reasoned to be true. In this way, Stoicism emerges with a strongly therapeutic aspect, not only for its readers but also for the authors of the classical texts.
Like the Buddhists and the Daoists, the Stoics disdain those philosophers who imagine that their ideas and their lives are different things. Instead, they imagine the ideal sage as one whose philosophy is most perfectly expressed in their intentions and actions everyday. Philosophy is a way of life, not an abstract or purely academic pursuit. Indeed, the idea that philosophy can be abstracted from life is not only ethically dangerous but also nonsense – philosophy that isn’t embodied just isn’t philosophy. A philosopher who doesn’t make his/her arguments with their being is simply failing to make their argument at all.
On the face of it, then, there do seem to be some important and interesting points of contact between Stoicism and Mindfulness, especially in their practical orientations and their therapeutic aspects. Indeed, it also seems, at least at first glance, that they might participate in similar epistemologies (theories of knowledge) and similar ethical standpoints.
In particular, Stoicism appears to invest in the idea that our greatest obstacle to flourishing and virtuousness is our imperfect ability to properly understand the world as it really is – our understanding is constantly being sullied and perverted by our ‘excessive impulses’ (ie. passions or emotions such as appetite (pleasure) and fear (distress)), and by our tendency to ruminate on these and lose sight of the world. Indeed, the characteristic Stoic prescription for a life of flourishing and virtue (ie. a life without suffering), is to ‘live in agreement with nature’ or, in the words of Chrysippus (died 206bce), to live ‘in accordance with the experience of what happens by nature.’
So, rather than trying to impose our will onto the world, virtue and flourishing result from observing the world properly (a quality the Stoics sometimes call ‘watchfulness’), ascertaining how the world will develop (because of the nature of the world itself), and then acting in accordance with (rather than attempting to resist or overcome) that natural flow.
One of the ways in which Stoics suggest that we can differentiate between false judgements and true judgements is by the way they feel to us: unlike Plato and others who asserted that our thinking happens only in our heads, the Stoics maintained that our commanding faculty is actually in our hearts. Hence, they suggest that when we pay attention properly we can feel when our opinion is mobilized by fear or aversion because there are sensations of contraction and shrinkage in our bodies; when our opinions are mobilized by desire or delight there are sensations of expansion and swelling.
As we’ve seen, Mindfulness in Buddhism and Daoism rests upon our ability to allow our rationality and discriminatory faculties to fall away, hence revealing a form of pristine reality unsullied by our desires and fears.
On the other hand, while watchfulness in Stoicism also includes a shedding of excessive impulses (passions and emotions) in order to enable a clear view of things as they really are (which is sometimes called the cultivation of apathy), Stoics are absolutely clear that our ability to properly perceive, understand, and act upon what we find in that state relies entirely upon our command of reason and rationality. Rather than being one of the obstacles that must be cast aside in order to get down to things as they really are, our rationality and our discriminatory faculties (unclouded by excessive impulses) are the basis of our human nature and thus of our proper place in the world
Hence, while the Stoics were often disruptive elements in ancient societies, because they challenged the specific hierarchies of values of those societies (disparaging health, wealth, and power as legitimate goals of human flourishing and instead showing them to be obstacles to human virtue and genuine happiness), unlike the Daoists they did not challenge the very idea of human civilization per se.
While the Daoists and some of the Buddhists (especially in Zen) saw the cultivation and progression of rationality in human society as a process of human decline from our essential nature as a spontaneous and intuitive element of the natural order, the Stoics saw the development and refinement of rationality as a process of uncovering and deepening man’s natural place in the world. For the Daoists and Buddhists, the natural word of which humans should be Mindful is an organic and fluid place of impermanence and change, resistant to rational explanation because reason arises later as a artefact within it. For the Stoics, the natural world is a fully rational expression of a rational God, and living in harmony with it requires cultivating our own rationality through progressively refined watchfulness and reason.
In the end, then, it’s clear that while there appear to be some intriguing similarities, there are also some important and significant differences between Stoicism and the kinds of Mindfulness that we have associated with Buddhism and Daoism. And this should not be surprising, given the radically different contexts in which these traditions emerged and developed. However, given that we have seen contemporary ‘construct Mindfulness’ as a continuously developing concept that draws upon ideas and resources because of their utility for particular populations (rather than because of their historical continuity with Buddhism), it is worth taking some time to think about how you feel about issues like rationality, discrimination, value-judgement and the principles of the natural world. Perhaps contemporary Mindfulness can make use of Stoicism to help some people to find greater resonance with it?
In other words, in the absence of careful introspection, we risk being mistaken about the nature and content of our experiences (and thus of our real place in the world). We easily (and routinely) confuse our responses to experiences for the experiences themselves. As we’ve seen, in today’s world, this insight is fundamental to all kinds of therapeutic interventions, including Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and MBCT. James’ most famous foreshadowing of these ideas was his (controversial) contention that the common sense position about the sequence of our experiences and emotions is wrong.
He argues that ‘Common-sense says, we lose our fortune, are sorry and weep; we meet a bear, are frightened and run; we are insulted by a rival, are angry and strike.’ (Principles of Psychology, 1890, p.1065). In fact, he contends that the order should not be: experience, emotion, action, but instead should be understood as: experience and action, followed by emotion. ‘The hypothesis here to be defended says that this order of sequence is incorrect … that we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble …’ (pp. 1065–6)
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