In her 2015-04-14 New York Times Magazine column on language — "The Muddied Meaning of 'Mindfulness'" — Virginia Heffernan throws dozens of snark-grenades. Interestingly, they all miss. (Is it that hard to make fun of awakening?) But between the pokes and jokes there's fascinating historical background:
... In the late 19th century, the heyday of both the British Empire and Victorian Orientalism, a British magistrate in Galle, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), with the formidable name of Thomas William Rhys Davids, found himself charged with adjudicating Buddhist ecclesiastical disputes. He set out to learn Pali, a Middle Indo-Aryan tongue and the liturgical language of Theravada, an early branch of Buddhism. In 1881, he thus pulled out "mindfulness" — a synonym for "attention" from 1530 — as an approximate translation of the Buddhist concept of sati.
The translation was indeed rough. Sati, which Buddhists consider the first of seven factors of enlightenment, means, more nearly, "memory of the present," which didn't track in tense-preoccupied English. ...
Heffernan quotes Jon Kabat-Zinn's working definition of modern, secular mindfulness:
| "The awareness that arises through paying attention on purpose in the present moment, and non-judgmentally." |
(That leaves out the ultimate Kabat-Zinn-Zen footnote: "Ultimately, it stops being on purpose.")
Heffernan goes on to list a host of other uses of the word "mindfulness":
- "... an intimately attentive frame of mind ..."
- "... a relaxed-alert frame of mind ..."
- "... equanimity ..."
- "... a form of the rigorous Buddhist meditation called vipassana ('insight') ..."
- "... a form of another kind of Buddhist meditation known as anapanasmrti ("awareness of the breath') ..."
- "... M.B.S.R. therapy (mindfulness-based stress reduction) ..."
- "... just kind of stopping to smell the roses ..."
Not bad! And Heffernan does strike a blow against commercialization and faddishness. But overall, well, perhaps her target was too high and far away to hit ...
(cf. Present-Moment Reality (2008-11-05), Finding the Quiet (2009-12-05), Just Sitting (2011-05-21), Core Buddhism (2011-10-17), Notice and Return (2013-03-11), Mindfulness for Beginners (2013-07-13), Beginning Mindfulness (2013-09-22), Intentional Attention (2014-07-29), 0-1 (2014-08-29), ...) - ^z - 2015-05-11