On Mindfulness

Abstract

from Emotional Awareness, by Paul Ekman and His Holiness the Dalai Lama Mindfulness has become an increasingly popular term in the west due to the influence of several prominent meditation teachers and authors, including Thich Nhat Hanh, Jon Kabat-Zinn, and Jack Kornfield. Thich Nhat Hanh, world-renowned Vietnamese Zen master, poet and peace activist, defines mindfulness as " the miracle which can call back in a flash our dispersed mind and restore it to wholeness so that we can live each minute of life " . 1 Jon Kabat-Zinn, author and founder of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, widely taught in secular settings including health care, education and business worldwide, writes " Mindfulness can be thought of as moment-to-moment, non-judgmental awareness, cultivated by paying attention in a specific way, that is, in the present moment, as non-reactively, and as openheartedly as possible. " 2 Jack Kornfield, co-founder of two primary mindfulness meditation centers in the U.S. has described mindfulness as " an innate human capacity to deliberately pay full attention to where we are, to our actual experience, and to learn from it. " 3 Nyanaponika Thera, Buddhist monk, teacher and scholar in the mid 20 th century, wrote a book in which he named mindfulness as the heart of Buddhist meditation. 4 All these definitions refer to a quality of mind or way of being which is not only aware in the present, but wholesome insofar as it is " open-hearted " , " restores wholeness " and permits learning. Historically, the Pali word sati has been translated as mindfulness but, according to B. Alan Wallace, Buddhist scholar and writer, the root meaning of sati is simply that of recollection, of memory. 5 In the Theravadan Abhidhamma (Buddhist psychology), sati is precisely defined as one of nineteen " beautiful " mental factors whose function is the " absence of confusion or non-forgetfulness. " 6 In the context of the Nikaya (Buddha's Discourse) sati is referred to as a " kind of attentiveness that . . . is good, skilful or right " 7 and can become a shorthand for satipatthana which is usually translated as the establishment of sati but also refers to the complete methodology in which this establishment is accomplished. Bikkhu Bodhi, Buddhist monk, scholar and student of