Abstract
Many objections have been leveled against what Purser and Loy have coined ‘McMindfulness,’ the widely popularized use of mindfulness extracted from Buddhism. These include the claims that meditation (a) fails to attempt to try to change the world, (b) is guilty by association with other ends to which its use is applied, (c) ought not to be separated from its Buddhist ethical framework, and, among others, (d) is not as important to Buddhism as Westerners think it is, as evidenced by the relatively few Buddhist practitioners. I defend mindfulness against these objections directly, but I also put them in dialogue with each other. My general responses to these objections are, respectively, that (a) it is not the purpose of meditation to change the world, although it may be put to that end, (b) the uses to which any form of cognitive development is put (as means to certain ends) do not necessarily impugn such forms of cognitive development, but rather it is the ends to which such forms of development are put that ought to be evaluated as such, (c) although everything may in principle have ethical implications and we ought to be mindful of them, there is no serious ethical principle that invalidates the potential merits of working with meditation practices outside the Buddhist ethical framework, in one’s own or some other ethical framework, or in an amoral context, and (d) the extent to which mindfulness meditation matters to or is practiced by Buddhists is irrelevant to its merits.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
- 3.
For an insider’s informal expose of what has analogously been dubbed ‘McYoga,’ see Seligson (2015); see also Guthrie (2002), for an early use of the term ‘McYoga,’ indicating that the ‘Mc’ prefix attached to spiritual practices gone viral had been used several years before Purser and Loy (2013) coined the term ‘McMindfulness.’ See also Marchildon (2012), for a recent defense of McYoga.
- 4.
Personal (Facebook) communication (August 8, 2014).
- 5.
Thompson has criticized contemplative neuroscience research for its reductionism in investigating meditation through brain studies, which he sees as analogous to thinking a bird’s flight is somehow located in its wings (Heuman 2014). His objection is framed within a rich understanding of the subject, however, as evident in Thompson (2014).
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I cannot find an authoritative cite for this tale, but here is one reference: ‘Stories from around the World: The Thief (Buddhism),’ http://mythologystories.wordpress.com/2013/01/09/thief/.
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University of California—San Diego (2014)
- 8.
Ram Dass’s lectures are available online at www.ramdass.org.
- 9.
On the claim that it all the rage, see Forbes (2012).
- 10.
Sharf (2012).
- 11.
Sharf expressed this aspect of the view in a talk he gave at an NEH Summer Institute that I attended, ‘Investigating Consciousness: Buddhist and Contemporary Philosophical Perspectives,’ at the College of Charleston (Summer 2012).
- 12.
At the NEH 2012 Summer Institute, ‘Investigating Consciousness: Buddhist and Contemporary Philosophical Perspectives,’ several philosophers and scholars expressed support for some version or another of this claim, most emphatically Robert Sharf.
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Repetti, R. (2016). Meditation Matters: Replies to the Anti-McMindfulness Bandwagon!. In: Purser, R., Forbes, D., Burke, A. (eds) Handbook of Mindfulness. Mindfulness in Behavioral Health. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44019-4_32
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