The political origins of mindfulness: what will happen next?

This is a book review of The Birth of Insight: Meditation, Modern Buddhism and the Burmese Monk Ledi Sayadaw, by Eric Braun, University of Chicago press, 2013, which was first published in the Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies.

Did you know that what we've been told about mindfulness is just a story made up for different reasons and for different motivations? This book review explains why mindfulness never was the original method of the Buddha and then how it became a self-help technique. When we can appreciate that we make mindfulness in our own image, we might wonder what it will do to us and the world we have created for ourselves.

The book review

Erik Braun’s book is about how a remarkable man’s leadership came to the rescue of Burmese Buddhist identity and how a very modern Buddhism was born. Around the turn of the twentieth century, colonial power was devastating Burmese institutions of state and religion. The Dhamma itself was under threat and the reality of change demanded adaptation.

An ambitious Burmese Monk, Ledi Sayadaw, born in 1846 of humble origins, applied his considerable intelligence to a career within the corridors of the Sangha’s power. This required excellence in study combined with political judgment. His character was forged and a leader was made.

When the time came and millenarian fears in Burmese society justified decisive action, Ledi Sayadaw could see that democratisation of power through making Buddhist learning accessible to the laity was the means to preserving the Dhamma and renewing hope in a broken Burma. This task required simplification of theory and practice. As a result he created the blueprint for a new expression of Buddhism that could travel to the West.

Of course, nothing exists in isolation and everything depends heavily on its context. This seems obvious, but perhaps we should remember the Buddha’s advice to Ananda when he exclaimed:

?"It's amazing, lord, it's astounding, how deep this dependent co-arising is, and how deep its appearance, and yet to me it seems as clear as clear can be."

?[The Buddha responded:] "Don't say that, Ananda. Don't say that. Deep is this dependent co-arising, and deep its appearance. It's because of not understanding and not penetrating this Dhamma that this generation is like a tangled skein, a knotted ball of string, like matted rushes and reeds, and does not go beyond transmigration, beyond the planes of deprivation, woe, and bad destinations.”

(DN51, Online Translation, Thanissaro Bhikkhu, 1997.)

So let me explain a little about the context in which this review is written: A mixture of surprise and pride came over me when Richard asked me to review this book. I have little by way of the academic credentials that one might expect of someone asked to write such a review for an academic journal, but Richard assured me that I was the person he wanted to do the job.

Not being an academic, I cannot treat Braun’s book as an academic object whose merit stands outside the context of its comprehensibility and usefulness to me.

I apply what I understand of the Buddhist tradition in my life and work. I am looking for credible sources or evidence which provide the foundation for clearly explained ideas. Ideas which interest me are ideas that make sense of the world in which I live and give me a rationale for action. The quality and clarity of writing, well researched source material and the ideas he expresses have made Braun’s book a pleasure for me to read.

I teach “mindfulness” to corporate clients to enhance performance at work and as a stress management tool. What I teach is based on an evidence-based understanding of the psychological benefits of “Buddhist insight meditation” as a therapeutic intervention. In the therapeutic context the “active ingredient” is delivered in an eight-week teaching programme, Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT). MBCT is a secularized, reproducible intervention that has provided opportunities for experimental testing of “mindfulness”. It was found to be effective at reducing the rate of relapse of depression by 40-50%, and was first recommended by NICE (National Institute for Clinical Excellence) for use by the NHS in 2004.

MBCT represents a bridge between an epistemology with Buddhist roots and scientific epistemology. In the scientific context, causes become independent variables, conditions are controlled and effects are dependent variables. All the elements of the processes of a phenomenon under scientific study need to be defined and measurable or controllable. The subject of scientific study becomes an object, which exists independently of the context in which it is studied; hypothesis becomes theory and theory tends to be taken as fact.

When it comes to the scientific study of therapy, subjective experience is taken as objective data. On the other hand, Buddhist knowledge is based entirely on examining experience subjectively. Here, it could be argued that Buddhist knowledge is more about the nature of experience of things than about the nature of things that exist independently of experience.

Braun explains how Buddhism morphed in Burma during the colonial period to meet the needs of its people, state and identity. He charts the life of an exceptional man who played a key role in reshaping Burmese Buddhism to meet the needs of the times.

By his own ingenuity, Ledi Sayadaw took on the role of bridge between a precolonial traditional Burma and modernity in his country. He rose to eminence in the precolonial Sangha by means of his ambition, application and intelligence. He then applied what he had learnt in his early life to translate traditional structures of power into a more democratic sense of responsibility and identity during times of colonial upheaval. He led a popular movement to safeguard Burmese identity and Buddhism when the traditional institutions of King, court and Sangha crumbled.

What I am interested in is how this process adapted Buddhism into a form that then spread to the West. The Abhidhamma needed to be simplified to make it possible to teach to the lay population. In turn, this enabled lay teachers to become the guardians of the teachings and stewards of the Dhamma and Burmese identity. Not only did the theoretical foundations of the Dhamma need exegesis, but the understanding of the function of meditation also needed to shift away from a focus on profound states of concentration, only possible after prolonged practice, to an exercise that could be cultivated by less intensive practice.

A short cut to experiential insight was made possible by stressing the importance of “mindfulness” in the development of what has become understood as “insight meditation”. A stripped down theoretical framework to make “mindfulness” the central function in “insight meditation” came with this form of meditation. Later this made it possible, when it was introduced to the West, to understand “mindfulness” as a means to understand psychological processes so as to reduce the impact of unhelpful thinking and thus turn it into a self-help tool in a humanist context,

Ledi Sayadaw thought that the Abhidamma would engage the scientific mind.? Representing Buddhism as a tradition built on reason could align it to science and therefore give it legitimacy under colonial rule. Ledi Sayadaw’s intent was not to reduce the Dhamma to science, but that is what he may have inadvertently achieved. By starting a movement that has lead to the creation of a simplified approach to Buddhist “insight meditation”, he set in motion a historical process that may have satisfied his nationalist intentions but may also have had the unintended consequence of the colonisation of Buddhism itself.

What I teach takes the active ingredient of “mindfulness” but employs a delivery tool which fits a workplace context. I have converted an eight-week therapy of about 50-60 hours of meditation (MBCT) to a form that asks for about 25% of this commitment. What I teach is front-loaded; psycho-education is based on cognitive models of stress. Ironically this is an accessible conceptual framework for a wide audience today, which echoes Ledi Sayadaw’s efforts to democratise the Dhamma in the early part of the twentieth century. However, though there may be superficial similarities between psychology and the Abhidhamma, they are systems which were shaped in very different contexts and designed with very different objectives in mind. With psycho-education replacing the Abhidhamma as its intellectual framework, is “insight meditation”, when it is delivered in a format informed by modern learning and development theory, Buddhism in a contemporary context, or is it something completely new?

Braun helps the reader to understand that both the form and the content of the Buddhist tradition cannot exist outside a social context. To the reader interested in contemporary mindfulness, his book leads to the realization that the “active ingredient” and the “delivery mechanism” in MBCT may be accidents of history rather than necessary principles of action. This does not fit well with the assumptions implicit in the scientific method or with the views of those in our times who wish to define and practice an original Buddhism as taught by the Buddha himself two and a half thousand years ago.

The next step in understanding the mind within the scientific approach must be built on what has been established by the scientific method. So here is where I? suggest that Braun’s book becomes particularly useful. It tells a story that enables the importance of context to be appreciated in the study of the functions of the human mind. Braun’s book gives us a well-resourced argument that demonstrates that what we might be tempted to believe is an objective “active ingredient” of “insight meditation” is in fact something that has emerged from a historical and cultural context. Furthermore, after reading Braun’s book not only must we come to the conclusion that the “active ingredient” and the “delivery mechanism” of MBCT are not objects carved in stone: we can no longer even be sure that there is a real difference between them. Perhaps it is not so much that the Dhamma has become scientific as that the scientific method may now be understood in the context of Braun’s insights into the history of Buddhist thinking. Perhaps we can now see science, as well as the Dhamma, as social processes subject to the laws of dependent co-arising as taught by the Buddha? long ago.

Epilogue

Mindfulness-Based Organisational Education (MBOE) was trialed with NHS hospital staff in 2016. Outcomes were published (Krushe et al, 2020) and the programme was internationally recognised as the first of a new class of Mindfulness-Based Programmes in 2021. MBOE recognises that stress is a normal reaction to a maladapted society and empowers people to change the culture in a community or organisation. It is a social mindfulness programme.

Reference

Krusche A, Jack C D, Hsu A, & Blunt C, (2020). Mindfulness-Based Organisational Education: an Evaluation of a Mindfulness Course Delivered to Employees at the Royal Orthopaedic Hospital. Mindfulness 11. 362-373.

#socialmindfulness #culturechange #inclusion #wellbeing #mindfulness