Introduction
The term mindfulness is now widespread in both popular culture and academic literature. Though it is often considered to have its roots in Eastern traditions, especially Buddhism, the core ideas of mindfulness can be found in many other philosophical and religious traditions. If we consider the full range of secular and religious mindfulness traditions we find that there are varied, and perhaps even contradictory, definitions. This can make the jobs of both teachers and researchers difficult. Meanwhile, modern efforts to provide fully secular footing for definitions and practices of mindfulness raise questions about what might be lost in the absence of moral frameworks such as those provided by Buddhism.
In this essay, I hope to clarify my own approach to mindfulness as both practitioner and future teacher by reviewing the variety of definitions from ancient traditions to modern scholarship. Having come to meditation through Buddhism, I want to honor the richness and rigor of the Buddhist tradition of mindfulness and meditation. At the same, I recognize the need for a secular and inclusive definition, especially for bringing into professional and academic settings.
Conceptual Overview
Historical Roots and Evolution
Mindfulness is not limited to Eastern traditions. That said, as it is practiced today in the West, mindfulness has its roots primarily in Buddhist tradition. As Bodhi (2013) puts it, “At the heart of all classical systems of Buddhist meditation is a particular discipline that has come to be known as mindfulness.”
The Buddha emphasized the importance of mindfulness in many of his teachings. In his first teaching on the Four Noble Truths, the Buddha included “right mindfulness” (samma-sati) as one of the spokes on the eightfold path. Later teachings include mindfulness in relationship to other virtues and qualities, such as the seven factors of awakening. But, perhaps the most influential of the Buddha’s teachings on mindfulness as concerns modern MBIs comes out of the Satipatthana Sutta: “The Discourse on the Establishment of Mindfulness” (Bodhi 2013).
The Satipatthana Sutta begins with the following description of its purpose and methodology:
Monks, this is the one-way path for the purification of beings, for the overcoming of sorrow and lamentation, for the passing away of pain and displeasure, for the achievement of the method, for the realization of nibbana, that is, the four establishments of mindfulness. What four? Here, a monk dwells contemplating the body in the body … feelings in feelings … mind in mind … phenomena in phenomena, ardent, clearly comprehending, mindful, having removed covetousness and displeasure in regard to the world. This, monks, is the one-way path for the purification of beings … for the realization of nibbana, that is, the four establishments of mindfulness.
Bodhi highlights the fact that, in the Satipatthana Sutta, mindfulness occurs as part of contemplation or observation. He concludes that mindfulness might best be described as “lucid awareness of the phenomenal field.”
Contemporary Understanding
If we fast-forward to modern mindfulness discourse, we find that Jon Kabat-Zinn’s definition is often taken as the starting point for MBIs: “paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally” (Kabat-Zinn and Hanh 2009, 19). Kabat-Zinn’s definition can be seen as an attempt to secularize the Buddhist conception of mindfulness while still honoring its roots.
S. L. Shapiro et al. (2006) present an axiomatic model of mindfulness, which aligns with and expands Kabat-Zinn’s definition with added rigor. The three axioms are intention (on purpose), attention (paying attention), and attitude (in a particular way).
In this model, intention is an essential ingredient in the sense that one needs a personal vision or guiding set of values that is both dynamic and evolving. In a 1992 study Shapiro found that “as meditators continue to practice, their intentions shift, along a continuum from self regulation, to self exploration, and finally to self liberation” (D. H. Shapiro 1992). Outcomes in this study correlated with intentions.
Attention is what the philosopher Husserl refers to as “to return to things themselves.” In Buddhist language, this is to observe things in their suchness. We suspend our ways of interpretation and our conceptual projections to attend to the experience itself. Cognitive psychology describes a variety of aspects of attentional ability, including the capacity to attend to one object for a long period of time as in focusing attention on the breath in meditation (Posner and Rothbart 1992), the ability to shift between objects of attention (Posner, Snyder, and Davidson 1980), and the ability to inhibit the proliferation of secondary elaboration of thoughts, feelings, or sensations (Williams, Mathews, and MacLeod 1996).
Finally, the attitudinal foundations of mindfulness are the qualities that we bring to our attention. The Japanese character for mindfulness includes the character for Heart. This gives us a translation closer to “heart-mindfulness.” While bare attention - another common translation of mindfulness - might give the sense of cold indifference, in this view mindfulness is accompanied with a sense of warmth and welcoming of the whole of experience. Rumi’s poem “the guesthouse” - used in nearly every MBR program - beautifully captures this sense of welcoming both positive and negative experiences as they arise.
Despite the ubiquity of the Buddhist-rooted definitions of mindfulness used in most MBIs, it is not a uniquely Buddhist concept. Ellen Langer (1989) proposed the definition of mindfulness based on her study of its opposite — mindlessness. In one of her more well-known studies, residents in a nursing home were provided a plant that they were expected to care for. There was a control group who were told that the staff would take care of the plant for them. The group that cared for their plants had radically better health outcomes, and a mortality rate less than half of that of the control group.
Langer defined mindlessness in terms of what she called premature cognitive commitment. In other words, mindlessness arises from a sense of already knowing. By contrast, mindfulness emerges from not knowing (McCown 2013). Here, we can see parallels with the Zen Buddhist concept of beginners mind at work. As Suzuki (2020) puts it, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”
Challenges in Defining Mindfulness
Variability
The Pali word most often translated as mindfulness is sati. Even within the early Buddhist texts on the practice of meditation, sati takes on different connotations. According to Gethin (2011), one of the earliest translations of sati came from Gogerly (1845), who translated samma-sati as “correct meditation.” However, it was T. W. Rhys Davis who, according to Gethin, first introduced the translation of sati as mindfulness. Though this may be the most common translation, others have focused on remembrance as the gist on sati. However, Bodhi (2013) argues that, while in Indian psychology smrti (the Sanskrit equivalent of the Pail sati) typically means memory, the Buddha assigned sati a new meaning in line with his system of practice and psychology. Similarly, Dryden and Still (2006) say
[Sati] is the Pali equivalent of the Sanskrit smrti, which is usually translated as ‘memory’. But sati also carries the connotation of attention, and to capture this complex of meanings one of the translators into English of the Buddhist Pali text had originally chosen ‘self-possession’ as the best translation in English. (p. 18)
They go on to say that mindfulness is one of the most difficult words in Buddhist psychology to translate. Beyond mindfulness as remembrance, the variety of translations and descriptions of sati also includes awareness, bare attention, and presence.
One final point on the translation of sati is the question of whether and to what extent contemporary definitions ought to honor the classical Buddhist definition. Wilson (2014) refers to the process of “mystifying mindfulness.” He describes this as a process of appropriation in which the Buddhist heritage of mindfulness is diminished in order to make it more accessible or comprehensible as a commodity marketed to a largely white base.
In an effort to catalog the core elements of mindfulness found in the variety of traditions and research literature, Nilsson and Kazemi (2016) performed a thematic analysis of mindfulness definitions. They identified five themes among the thirty-three definitions they analyzed:
- Attention and awareness: These terms are often used interchangeably in ways that the authors deem problematic.
- Present-centeredness: This refers to being “in the moment” as in Kabat-Zinn’s definition.
- External events: External events is an umbrella term capturing stimuli from outside the body.
- Cultivation: In the Western sense of the word, this refers to developing character. The Buddhist term bhavana encompasses tranquility and insight.
- Ethical mindedness: This is the social dimension of mindfulness.
The authors conclude by defining mindfulness as follows:
a particular type of social practice that leads the practitioner to an ethically minded awareness, intentionally situated in the here and now (p. 190)
If we compare this definition with the three axioms laid out by S. L. Shapiro et al. (2006), we find all three present:
- Intention: “intentionally situated”
- Awareness: “awareness”
- Attitude: “ethically minded”
But, there is an added emphasis on mindfulness as a social practice. McCown (2013) calls for a view of mindfulness as co-created by the relationships within a group. He suggests that “[this] conception of co-creation not only moves what was considered to be inside, outside, it also softens the hard boundaries of the different definitions of mindfulness above” (p. 82). The practice, in his view, is the pedagogy of mindfulness rather than mindfulness itself because there is no single definition that encompasses mindfulness for all practitioners in all contexts.
Operationalizing Mindfulness for Scientific Research
The Need for Operationalization
The religious and spiritual roots of mindfulness may make operationalizing a definition for scientific research difficult (Hayes and Shenk 2004). On the one hand, religious experience is typically viewed as outside the bounds of scientific inquiry. On the other hand, given the roots of mindfulness (or at least the Buddhist-inflected mindfulness of many MBIs), to strip mindfulness down to something satisfactorily secular may rob participants of the full depth of the what is on offer.
In the Buddhist literature, mindfulness was described first as part of the eightfold path and later as one of the factors of enlightenment. Both as a practice and as a concept, mindfulness was inherently interrelated with other practices and concepts. This again points to the challenge of operationalizing a definition of mindfulness itself. Grossman and Van Dam (2013) suggest that “attempts to delineate discrete components of mindfulness…are not likely capture the inherent interrelationships…seen as synergistic and mutually reinforcing.”
Attempts at Operationalization
Jon Kabat-Zinn’s definition of mindfulness as “paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally” may be one of the first attempts at operationalizing a definition. As we have seen, many of the attempts that followed built on his original definition. Bishop et al. (2004) provided another early attempt at an operational definition of mindfulness, which has two components:
- Self-regulation of attention on immediate experience
- Adopting an orientation toward one’s experience characterized by curiosity, openness, and acceptance
Both of these definitions fit in with the three axiom approach of S. L. Shapiro et al. (2006), which included intention, attention, and attitude. And all of these definitions are contained within the five themes outlined by Nilsson and Kazemi (2016), though none of them captures all five themes.
There have also been efforts to measure mindfulness. Tools like the Mindful Attention Awareness Scale (Brown and Ryan 2003) and the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (Christopher et al. 2012) endeavor to do just that. These tools represent attempts to quantify mindfulness and to focus on specific dimensions such as attention, awareness, non-judging, observing, etc.
On the one hand, these types of operational definitions and related attempts to quantify the effectiveness of mindfulness practice may diminish the depth of what is on offer in Buddhist traditions. Forbes (2012) puts it this way:
My concern is that mindfulness may fall victim to its own success. Mindfulness is not about stress reduction, maintaining a steady state of bliss, helping an individual act with more control or an organization run more smoothly and efficiently. Even after we’re de-stressed and feeling great, we still need to ask: how do we live now? We’re in control and are more efficient, but toward what end?
Anālayo (2020), a Buddhist monk and scholar, addresses these concerns:
More importantly, perhaps, is that the goal set by the historical Buddha for mindfulness practice, as testified by the “early discourses,” the source material to which we nowadays still have access to reconstruct early Buddhism (Anālayo 2012), is not insight into interdependence. The goal is rather to bring to cessation the specific conditions delineated in the teaching on dependent arising… The notion of a general interconnectedness of phenomena appears to become prominent only with Buddhavataṃsaka/Huayan Buddhism (Schmithausen 1997), many centuries after the time when the Buddha lived.
Here, Anālayo is acknowledging that what the Buddha taught was the cessation of suffering. Though there are concerns about rigor and replicability in some cases, the body of research demonstrating the positive psychological and physical effects (reductions in suffering) of mindfulness is growing rapidly. At the same time, the scientific study of mindfulness has also shed light on the challenges that can arise in teaching and practicing mindfulness (Van Dam et al. 2018). High quality research on such topics requires clear definitions. Though an operational definition of mindfulness may inevitably require concessions, as Nilsson and Kazemi (2016) showed, it is possible to narrow down recurrent themes in definitions of mindfulness in the interest of operational definitions and measures.
Conclusion
Since first trying meditation twenty years ago, my understanding of mindfulness has been in a state of constant evolution. This evolution has not been one of gaining knowledge about what mindfulness is but of shedding ideas about what mindfulness is. For example, I once thought of mindfulness in terms of self-mastery, as a way of gaining control over my thoughts and emotions. I now see it as practice of letting go of the attachment to self, of accepting that I have much less control over the mind’s machinations that I might like to think.
One of the teachers who helped me see the value of unlearning in this way was Stephan Bodian. I studied with Bodian one-on-one as part of mentorship program he offers. He spent many years as a Zen monk before studying with Jean Klein, a teacher of Advaita Vedanta. One of the most illuminating conversations we had was on how to view moral frameworks like the Buddhist precepts. Stephan said that rather than thinking of them as prescriptions for how one must live to find enlightenment, we ought to think of them as descriptions of how an enlightened being would behave. This idea of moving from a prescriptive view to a descriptive one has reshaped my whole approach to contemplative practice, including mindfulness.
In this essay, I have reviewed only a sliver of the dizzying variety of definitions and interpretations of mindfulness as they exist in Eastern and Western traditions, modern mindfulness based interventions, and academic research. If as practitioners or teachers we are looking for a single, complete, correct prescription for what mindfulness is, I do not believe we will find one. Instead, we can look at the sheer variety of definitions and interpretations as library of possible descriptions.
As McCown (2013) suggests, mindfulness is co-created by the relationships within a given group. As a teacher, my goal is not to deliver a fully formed definition of mindfulness but to nurture an environment of curiosity, openness, and safety in which the meaning of mindfulness is co-created. The many definitions and frameworks covered here are valuable in that they provide language that might help others clarify and describe their experiences in the practice.
The Buddha himself said “ehipassiko” - “come and see” (Fleischman 2005). As McCown puts it, the pedagogy is the practice. With this in mind, my practice of teaching mindfulness will be one of ehipassiko: let’s sit together and see what comes up.
References
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