MINDFULNESS or WHOLEHEARTEDNESS?

Mindfulness is everywhere.

When a movement is so popular, it (1) has something going for it and (2) will bring out detractors.  Cue Barbara Ehrenreich and a chapter entitled “The Madness of Mindfulness.”  Distractedness is a real problem. But, “mindfulness” as a solution?  The economic dimension, as usual with Ehrenreich, dominates. Mindfulness has been co-opted by commerce.  Smartphones foster distractedness. We might, therefore, be wary of purchasing any of the plentiful

mindfulness apps that bind us even more to our glowing rectangles.  There is also the disconnection from roots in Buddhism. Mindfulness is now understood as a tool for solving specific problems. It’s not a practice that gives rise to an enlightened awareness that might challenge the entire context that occasioned the problems in the first place.  Finally, she asserts that scientific support is weak. While recognizing “neuroplasticity,”she claims the benefits of mindfulness can be arrived at by other means: muscle relaxation, medication, and psychotherapy.

Ehrenreich overreaches with her blanket condemnation. After all, if it brings benefits, without drugs or psychotherapy, why not appreciate mindfulness?  She is on stronger ground when she emphasizes how mindfulness has shed much its Buddhist context.

Her way of phrasing it, though, is questionable. Mindfulness, she says, has been “drained of all reference to the transcendent.”  This is a very Western way of identifying the religious dimension, i.e. associating it with a higher power in a different realm. One of the great Zen texts is the work of Dōgen (1200-1253) who

introduced a form of Zen to Japan. It’s called Instructions for the Zen Cook. He focuses on the here and now, on humble activities involved in food preparation.  As the book’s introduction puts it, Zazen is neither an escape from the world, nor an attempt to achieve a separate goal. In fact, the practice is “tainted” if it aims  at some external, separate gain.

Eating, if not cooking, was central to  contemporary mindfulness. The source of

it all,  Jon Kabat-Zinn, suggested a simple initial exercise: eating a raisin mindfully.

The raisin example  highlights a difference with  Dōgen’s cook. Learning to savor a raisin means training the mind.  Dōgen emphasizes concrete practices involving the entire person: cleaning/sorting rice, getting/heating water, actually cooking food for a group of people.  Such an involvement, in turn, is not separated from natural and social circumstances. It’s not: me, alone, learning to savor a raisin.

Since “mindfulness” can suggest a withdrawal into one’s conscious self, Dōgen’s translator suggests “wholeheartedness” as an alternative.  The entire person, situated in a natural and social context, and engaged in magnanimous and caring practices is the focus.

Ehrenreich’s criticism, focused on attention deficit, misses a deeper pathology.  Today’s technological wonders do not just encourage truncated, limited attention. They also intensify something that has been central since the Renaissance: conceiving ourselves as, at bottom, self-sufficient and autonomous. Martin Luther’s criticism of this tendency

was harsh, insisting that the activity of turning in on oneself, incurvatus in se, was the heart of sinfulness.    

Buddhism, also concerned about incurvatus in se, challenges the tendency at its very roots.  Its guiding assumption: nothing is autonomous. Everything is connected to everything else.  Buddhists also emphasizes anatman, “no self.” By this they do not mean that humans are not unique persons in the world. Anatman indicates that the non-connected, non-dependent self is an illusion. The so-called “self-made” man,  would, if he examined his life in detail, find loans from banks (with money deposited by lots of other people), architects. engineers and contractors to build edifices and make machines,  employees, clients, a legal system allowing him to operate, and many other ways of being connected to and dependent on others.

Belief in the autonomous self has been prominent in Western thought since the 16th century. There are even people who extol “individualism.” This is not to be confused with respect for this or that particular person.  It is rather the conscious belief that one is fundamentally self-sufficient. It’s a belief that culminates in today’s culture of loneliness.

When cooks practice their craft wholeheartedly, with loving attentiveness, they recognize lots of connections: to the gifts of nature: sun, soil, rain, bacteria, worms; to the gifts of other humans: people who plant, till, harvest, ship; to the gifts of technology:  cleavers, pots, stoves, dishes.The tenzo ( Dōgen’s “cook”) cannot work as a non-connected, non-dependent individual.

 Mindfulness, isolated from its Buddhist roots, might help counteract attention deficit, but it can also worsen rather than challenge the faulty picture of ourselves as self-sufficient individuals.