Hello and welcome, my name is Richard King and I am Professor of Buddhist and
Asian Studies at the University of Kent and also currently the head of religious
studies. Today I want to talk about the globalisation of mindfulness and offer
some reflections as a scholar of the Buddhist tradition on the ways in which
Buddhist meditation has been transformed in the contemporary era. Because one of
the things we need to appreciate about mindfulness is that it's all the rage in
the early 21st century. We find the NHS and health care systems around the world
adopting a form of mindfulness meditation as a form of therapy, we find
in the business world corporations adopting forms of meditation that they
call mindfulness to both relieve stress and also to train their employees to pay
attention, and thirdly, even in the military realm, we find that the US
military and the Korean military are using mindfulness-based practices both
in some cases to train snipers, so that they will focus intently upon their
action without moral or emotional issues bringing to bear upon what they're doing,
but also to deal with post-traumatic stress disorder for soldiers who've been
in battlefield situations. So, the question is, how did a form of Buddhist
meditation transform and become so popular in the 21st century in this kind
of way. The first thing I want to talk about is
what we actually mean when we talk about meditation because it's worth clarifying
that and I would suggest that there are actually two ways in which in English we
use this word meditation. The first sense of the term is meditation as a calming
down of the mind, this is meditation as chilling out, this
is a very common understanding and use of this notion. But there's a second use
of the term meditation in English that we don't often notice or pay so much
attention to and that's meditation in the sense of deep reflection, reflecting
upon something intently and deeply. For instance, in sentences such as this, 'I
will meditate upon that and get back to you'. So, it involves an element of
reflection and analysis, and what I want to argue and suggest to you today is
that traditional Buddhist forms of meditation encompass both of these
elements, however, the mindfulness based practices that we see them being
translated and transformed into do not always seem to contain both and this is
what I want to try and demonstrate to you today. When we talk about meditation
in a Buddhist context, we are translating a an Indian Sanskrit term and that term
is Bhavana. Now Bhavana literally means mental
training or development and it occurs within a wider framework of Buddhist
Buddhist beliefs and practices, which are widely known as the Eightfold Path of
Buddhism. Now briefly this Eightfold Path has three dimensions to it,
there is right view and right purpose which is associated with the cultivation
of wisdom and understanding about the nature of the world. Then you have three
elements which are about ethical conduct in the world and that's right speech,
right action and right livelihood and then it's this third dimension of
practice, which is called Bhavana or mental training or development and these
are associated with the steps called right effort, right mindfulness and right
concentration. So mindfulness is one of eight steps
that are interconnected in the Buddhist path. So already we can see that Bhavana
in the Buddhist context mental training involves two key elements it involves
the cultivation of concentration, practices designed to calm and
concentrate the mind, but also techniques of right mindfulness, which are about
cultivating and paying attention. Now to understand the Buddhist context of these
practices we obviously have to take seriously the fact that they occur
within certain beliefs, structures and institutions. So, for Buddhists the
practice of meditation is linked to the belief that we are moving through a
cycle of different rebirths and those rebirths according to the Buddhist
tradition are characterised by Dukkha which is a word which we often translate
as suffering, as suffering is is endemic to life in the world and that suffering
is caused fundamentally because of attachments that we develop towards
things and a failure to realise that because everything according to Buddhists
is impermanent, then that attachment is going to cause us mental strife. Now, the
practice of various forms of meditation in Buddhism has always been
traditionally a practice for the monastic community for the monks and
the nuns of the Buddhist tradition and was never really a practice taken
seriously or done in a systematic way by lay followers of Buddhism. And the goal,
the spiritual goal, in the end of such practice is to overcome one's attachment,
to develop bodhi or full awakening, to be present to your experience and by
overcoming that attachment achieve a state known as nirvana, which is
liberation from that attachment and liberation from the
cycle of rebirths, that would be the traditional Buddhist understanding of
the purpose of meditation. So, what we call mindfulness in in the English
language context is a Buddhist practice aimed at cultivating attention and the
term the Buddhist Sanskrit term for mindfulness is 'smrti', a term which
literally means memory but how the Buddhists use it is they use it to mean
holding in the mind, so it's the idea that you have an experience and you hold
it in your mind, you don't let it pass through without really paying attention
to it, that's what mindfulness is about. But the key thing to note is that these
practices always occurred in conjunction with a series of other forms of
meditative practice, which were designed to train your mind to concentrate, to be
able to concentrate on a single topic or object for an extended period of time.
Without that quality the Buddhists argue you couldn't pay attention at all
because you have to train your mind to be able to stay still, otherwise you have
what Buddhists call the monkey mind, which swings from branch to branch
grabbing one thing in the next, flitting about and never really settling. Now, to
talk about how these practices went global, we first of all have to briefly
visit Burma, or what is now known as Myanmar. Now the British colonised Burma
for 124 years from 1824 to 1948 and a key Buddhist figure in in this
transformation was a Buddhist monk by the name of Ledi Sayadaw. Now Sayadaw
was convinced that Buddhism under colonialism was in decline,
he saw the fact that the British were ruling the Burmese people as a sign of
the decline of Buddhism, a decline incidentally
which is predicted in the Buddhist tradition The Buddha is said, that is
said to have said, that everything is impermanent including Buddhism and that
it will too cease to be understood and will require someone in a future period
of time to rediscover this truth in which case they may call it something
else, they probably won't call it Buddhism. So Sayadaw thought his question
was, how can I possibly preserve Buddhism during this period of decline and the
answer that he came up with was that he would teach meditation to lay Buddhists,
remember traditionally Buddhist meditation is a monastic practice not a
practice widely practiced amongst lay Buddhists. Now, over time he trained a
number of followers who continued his teachings and practices and a key one
was his student Mahasi Sayadaw, who in the 20th century continued this
project of taking meditation to the lay people in Burma. He extended this even
further and opened up retreats of a few months to even a week for Westerners who
could come over to Burma and they could learn how to meditate in this new kind
of form. Now what he did in order to achieve this was he simplified his
teachers method. First of all he took away all of those concentration
practices that the Buddhists traditionally took part in and he
focused on what became known as mindfulness only, that is teaching people
how to be mindful but without those concentration practices, and he called
this Suddha-vipassana, pure Insight or Insight-only. Now, through this process
a number of Western pilgrims came over to Burma to learn how to meditate
and then they took back with them to the West these practices that they had
learnt and it's that second step which has led to the development of
mindfulness as a modern secular therapy. Now, the key mover in this context is a
Harvard medical doctor called Jon- Kabat-Zinn who invented something called
Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction, MBSR as it's often known, and for Kabat-Zinn
this was a way in which the therapeutic aspects of Buddhist meditation could be
extended to a much wider range of people and a much wider range of
contexts. This is what Kabat-Zzinn has to say about mindfulness, 'mindfulness', he
says, 'is paying attention in a particular way, on purpose, in the present moment and
non-judgmentally'. Now, I want you to think about that quote because I'm going to
unpack some of the things that he says there and compare it to traditional
Buddhist accounts of meditation. Furthermore, Zinn argues, and I'm quoting
him here, 'mindfulness, the heart of Buddhist meditation is at the core of
being able to live life as if it really matters. It has nothing to do with
Buddhism. It has to do with freedom.' So in that context, Kabat-Zinn takes those
practices a stage further and separates them even more from the Buddhist context
in which they originally developed. Now, if we compare how Kabat-Zinn and others
talk about mindfulness, what I'm calling the modern MBSR view, to traditional
Buddhist meditation or traditional accounts, we can
see some similarities but some differences. For instance, for Kabat-Zinn
mindfulness is primarily a practice driven to reduce stress, however,
traditionally mindfulness in a Buddhist context is about becoming more aware of
the suffering endemic in life and within our experience, becoming more aware of
the impermanent and fluctuating nature of things. Kabat-Zinn pays a great deal
of attention to the idea that mindfulness is about being in the
present moment and this is often an idea that people associate with meditation or
Buddhist meditation. This is, of course, a strong element of traditional Buddhist
ideas of meditation, we do have to pay attention to the present, that's part of
the point. However, for traditional Buddhist accounts of meditation the
present cannot be seen in isolation from the past and the future, the present is
the product of your past mental actions and the future is the product of how you
are and how you think in the present moment, so the present occurs within a
causal network. According to Kabat-Zinn the mindfulness experience should be one
that is without judgment, it should be non-judgmental and, in fact, the emphasis
that he places upon his form of meditation
sounds like meditation as a form of chilling out, that is devoid of judgment
or excessive as he would see it mental analysis and reflection, just being in
the now. And when we come to look at traditional accounts of Buddhist
meditation there is a similarity. Initially, when you
start doing mindfulness practice, you should withhold judgment and watch,
observe the experience as it arises and as it dissipates. However, part of the
purpose of the practice is involving analysis, you should analyse the
causality of your experience, why did that mood or that thought or that image
come to mind, where did that come from? Why is it now dissipating, where is it
going, what is taking its place. So, this isn't about shutting the mind down, this
is about deep reflection upon the present and where it came from and where
it is going. So, to conclude, if we're thinking in terms of these two uses of
the word meditation in English, then we can say that traditional Buddhist
meditation involves both of them. It involves the combined practices of
calming and concentration designed to, if you like, chill out but they also involve
mindfulness, which is not about chilling out in a traditional Buddhist context,
it's about paying attention and analysing your experience. So, cultivating
mindfulness in a traditional sense is an experience that involves initially
withholding your judgment but then engaging in deep reflection and analysis
upon the roots of your experience and the consequences of your experience. In
contrast, the modern secularised approaches to meditation tend to drop
the arduous concentration techniques, for the reasons that we've seen with the
transformations in Burma, those are dropped and mindfulness is treated in
isolation as a practice to be cultivated without training the mind how to
concentrate and the other aspect of it which makes it quite different from
traditional Buddhist meditation is that the role of analysis and of judgment and
precisely of ethical judgment is downplayed in the modern accounts. Thank
you very much.