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 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.