I can’t believe it’s not Buddha!
What is the connection between Buddhism and Mindfulness meditation? And Yoga?
Meditation has been a feature of many religions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam for thousands of years. So, where does mindfulness actually come from?
In an article published in The Spectator in 2014, the writer Melanie McDonagh refers to mindfulness as a form of “Buddhism Lite”, claiming it is Buddhism. Is she right?
So how did mindfulness evolve?
There’s no doubt that Eastern forms of meditation started to become more of a mainstream interest to Westerners in the 60s and 70s (think Beatles with their guru the Maharishi) - but largely stripped of their religious connections. It was Buddhism, in particular though, that brought about the development of what we know as mindfulness and it’s possible to identify three significant influences: the establishment of the Insight Meditation Centre in Massachusetts in 1976; the work of the Buddhist monk, exiled from Vietnam, Thich Nhat Hanh, and the American academic, Jon Kabat-Zinn, who has probably had the greatest effect on the development of modern mindfulness programmes.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
The thing that marked out Dr Jon Kabat-Zinn as different was that he developed mindfulness in a clinical setting. A micro-biologist by training, he opened a Stress Reduction Clinic in the basement of the University of Massachusetts Medical School in 1979 to help patients who seemed to be beyond the help of their doctors. Now, he is not, himself, a Buddhist but he had been a practitioner of Insight meditation, or, in the ancient Pali language of Buddhism, Vipassana meditation. Vipassana means seeing things as they really are. The concept of mindfulness also traces to a Pali word, sati – awareness, attention or alertness. All of these attitudes of mind are embedded in the training offered through Kabat-Zinn’s Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction programme (MBSR) which he developed over the next 10 years or so. But all of this does not mean that Mindfulness is a form Budddhism.
Where does Yoga fit in?
Kabat-Zinn’s course focuses on the practice of mindful meditation and Hatha yoga.
Yoga has been part of the spiritual discipline of both Hinduism and Buddhism for thousands of years, developed, it is said, by ancient seers in the course of their meditative practice. Nita Patel describes it as “an ancient philosophical discipline, harmonising the mind, body and spirit” ("Total Yoga" 2003). The word Yoga is a Sanskrit word meaning “to yoke”, “to unite” or “to be whole” and, depending on how it is practised, it is a way of reconnecting the mind and body through movement and breath control. “Yoga is meditation” says Kabat-Zinn in his book "Full Catastrophe Living". You don't, however, have to be a yogi to practise mindfulness - any form of movement can be carried out in a mindful way.
For an introduction to Kabat-Zinn, you might find the following interesting as a starting point:
