IT’S HARD TO put your finger on the point when the Western stereotype of Buddhist meditation flipped. It was sometime between the 1950s, when Zen Buddhism seeped into the beat generation, and the early 21st century, when mindfulness meditation seeped into Wall Street and Silicon Valley.
One minute founding beatnik Jack Kerouac was spouting arcane Buddhist truths that meditation is said to reveal. “There is no me and no you,” Kerouac wrote. And “space is like a rock because it is empty.” Fast forward half a century, and hedge fund manager David Ford, in an interview with Bloomberg News, was summarizing the benefits of meditation this way: “I react to volatile markets much more calmly now.” Buddhist practice, once seen as subversive and countercultural, now looked like a capitalist tool. It had gone from deepening your insight to sharpening your edge.
GOING UP
IS MINDFULNESS MEDITATION A CAPITALIST TOOL OR A PATH TO ENLIGHTENMENT? YES
by Robert Wright | illustrations by Valero Doval
08.12.17
IT’S HARD TO put your finger on the point when the Western stereotype of Buddhist meditation flipped. It was sometime between the 1950s, when Zen Buddhism seeped into the beat generation, and the early 21st century, when mindfulness meditation seeped into Wall Street and Silicon Valley.
One minute founding beatnik Jack Kerouac was spouting arcane Buddhist truths that meditation is said to reveal. “There is no me and no you,” Kerouac wrote. And “space is like a rock because it is empty.” Fast forward half a century, and hedge fund manager David Ford, in an interview with Bloomberg News, was summarizing the benefits of meditation this way: “I react to volatile markets much more calmly now.” Buddhist practice, once seen as subversive and countercultural, now looked like a capitalist tool. It had gone from deepening your insight to sharpening your edge.
ROBERT WRIGHT
Robert Wright (
Of course, a stereotype is just a stereotype. Most of today’s meditators aren’t following the guidance of the Bloomberg News headline that accompanied Ford’s quote: “To Make a Killing on Wall Street, Start Meditating.” Still, the past decade’s wave of interest in mindfulness meditation has had a utilitarian air. When companies like Goldman Sachs start offering free meditation training to employees, and salesforce.com puts a meditation room on each floor of a San Francisco office building, it’s a safe bet that heightened appreciation of Buddhist metaphysics isn’t the goal. In fact, mindfulness meditation is often packaged in frankly therapeutic terms: “mindfulness-based stress reduction.”
This drift from the philosophical to the practical has inspired two kinds of blowback. First, because goals like stress reduction are so clear, attainable, and gratifying, many people now sing the praises of meditation—which deeply annoys some people who don’t. The author and business guru Adam Grant has complained of being “stalked by meditation evangelists.” Which bothers him all the more because the feats they harp on are so pedestrian. “Every benefit of the practice can be gained through other activities,” Grant says. For example, exercise takes the edge off stress.
The second kind of blowback comes not from Buddhism skeptics but from Buddhism aficionados, who lament that meditation has—in some circles, at least—become so mundane as to invite ridicule from the Adam Grants of the world. These Buddhism purists aren’t against reducing stress. After all, the Buddha preached liberation from suffering. But liberation was supposed to be a spiritual endeavor.
The idea was to penetrate the delusion that pervades ordinary consciousness, to see the world with a clarity that is radical in its implications, a clarity that doesn’t just liberate you from suffering but transforms your view of, and relationship to, reality itself, including your fellow beings. Gaining a deep, experiential understanding of the truths Kerouac had pointed to—obscure but fundamental Buddhist ideas like “not-self” and “emptiness”—was supposed to be central to the contemplative project. The ultimate goal, however hard to reach, and however few people ultimately reached it, was nothing less than “awakening”: enlightenment, liberation, nirvana.
All of which raises a question: Is mindfulness meditation, as it’s practiced by millions of Westerners, bullshit? Not bullshit in the sense of being worthless. Even Adam Grant admits that meditation has benefits and that, for some people, it’s the best way to get them. But has meditation practice strayed so far from its Buddhist roots that we might as well just call it a therapy or a hobby? Should people who trek to weekend meditation retreats at lovely rural locales quit bowing to the statue of the Buddha as they enter the meditation hall? Should all the strivers in Silicon Valley and New York who put in 20 or 30 minutes on the cushion each day switch to SSRIs or beta blockers and use the time saved for valuable networking? Is there any good reason—in ancient Buddhist philosophy or for that matter in modern science—to consider mainstream mindfulness practice truly spiritual?
For years I’ve been on what amounts to an exploration of these questions. I went on my first silent meditation retreat more than a decade ago—mainly out of spiritual curiosity, but happy to accept any therapeutic benefits, which, God knows, I could use. As this quest turned into a book project, the inquiry got more systematic. Now, with the project complete, I’ve talked to lots of meditation teachers, Buddhist monks, and scholars of Buddhism. I’ve read the ancient texts that describe mindfulness meditation and its underlying philosophy. And I’ve gone on more silent retreats—a total of two months’ worth, ranging in length from one to two weeks.
And here, as far as I can tell, is the deal: It’s true, on the one hand, that many devotees of meditation are pursuing the practice in a basically therapeutic spirit. And that includes many who follow Buddhist meditation teachers and even go on extended retreats. It’s also true that mindfulness meditation, as typically taught to these people, bears only a partial resemblance to mindfulness meditation as described in ancient texts.
Nonetheless, the average mindfulness meditator is closer to the ancient contemplative tradition, and to transformative insights, than you might think. Though things like stress reduction or grappling with melancholy or remorse or self-loathing may seem “therapeutic,” they are organically connected to the very roots of Buddhist philosophy. What starts out as a meditation practice with modest aims can easily, and very naturally, go deeper. There is a kind of slippery slope from stress reduction to profound spiritual exploration and radical philosophical reorientation, and many people, even in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street, are further down that slope than they realize.
https://www.wired.com/2017/08/the-science-and-philosophy-of-mindfulness-meditation/