How did this ancient religious term end up in modern parlance? In the 1970s, Jon Kabat-Zinn was a professor of medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and also a practitioner of Zen meditation. According to the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, or “Discourse on the Establishing of Mindfulness”-an ancient text on which many modern meditation movements are based-the practitioner is supposed to cultivate mindfulness of the body, sensations, the mind, and mental qualities this is supposed to be the only way “for the purification of beings, for the overcoming of sorrow and lamentation, for the destruction of suffering and grief, for reaching the right path, for the attainment of Nirvana.” It is one of the eight practices of the Noble Eightfold Path, which a Buddhist must follow in order to attain enlightenment. Not many people know that mindfulness is a translation of sati, a Pāli term used in the scriptures of the Theravāda school of Buddhism. In 2016, Time produced a special issue on mindfulness and many articles tout the benefits of mindfulness, including “mindful sex” and “mindful diets.” military to Silicon Valley corporations-Google, for example, now has a mindfulness program called “Search Inside Yourself.” Mindfulness has received a lot of attention from journalists too. And mindfulness programs have been adapted to a range of uses, from classrooms to the U.S. An increasingly popular subject of clinical research, with 1,153 studies published on it in 2020 alone, mindfulness has been said to reduce stress and enhance emotional regulation, to alleviate symptoms of depression, anxiety, addiction, chronic pain, and eating disorders, to increase attention span, and to improve immune system function.

The concept is typically defined as “a kind of nonelaborative, nonjudgmental, present-centered awareness in which each thought, feeling, or sensation that arises in the attentional field is acknowledged and accepted as it is.” It is a skill that one cultivates through meditation practice, whereby one learns to pay attention to the phenomena of one’s experience from a detached perspective. Finally, many scientists who study meditation have their own meditation practices, and they use their research to better understand-or even to legitimize-those practices. Westerners and Asian Buddhists strategically reconfigured Buddhism as a “rational” and “scientific” religion, an idea that still influences scientists and even some Buddhists today. Third, from a historical perspective, a novel form of Buddhism known as “Buddhist modernism” emerged in the nineteenth century as a hybrid of Buddhist and Western discourses. This discourse is of great interest to neuroscientists and psychologists, who are in desperate need of anything that might help alleviate America’s mental health crisis. Second, the Buddhist tradition contains an extensive discourse on the nature of the mind. How did scientists become interested in Buddhist-derived meditation? First, Jon Kabat-Zinn, the creator of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, veiled Buddhist concepts with psychological and biological language and thereby created a standardized, replicable program of meditation, ready for export. And some even integrate concepts from Buddhist psychology and philosophy into their research. They develop clinical meditation programs, such as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, to treat psychopathologies. They conduct brain scans of monks meditating in fMRI machines. The scientists-whom New York Times columnist David Brooks has called “the neural Buddhists”-study the effects of meditation. It has also brought “mindfulness” into Western popular culture. This dialog has produced thousands of scientific papers on the neurological and clinical effects of meditation. Benson’s research stunned many in the West and paved the way for several decades of scientific interest in Buddhist or Buddhist-derived meditation. Some could even spend a night on a rocky ledge at an elevation of 15,000 feet in the Himalayas, where temperatures fell to zero degrees Fahrenheit, while they wore only woolen or cotton shawls. They could raise the temperature of their fingers and toes by as much as 17 degrees. They could use their body heat to dry wet towels placed around them, where most people would shiver uncontrollably. In meditative states, the monks had remarkable control over their body temperature and oxygen intake.

Cap of the undisturbed mind