Rethinking Meditation

David L. McMahan’s Rethinking Meditation: Buddhist Meditative Practices in Ancient and Modern Worlds is divided into three parts that cumulatively argue against a key Buddhist claim, namely that meditation leads to an objective view of reality as “a pristine, unmediated, unambiguous, and universal Truth” (8). Part 1, entitled “Thinking about Meditation,” argues that all forms of meditation and the contemporary neuroscientific study thereof cannot escape their embeddedness in specific social imaginaries. Part 2, “Meditation in Context,” sketches the social imaginaries as expressed in the Pāli Suttas that represent the “Ancient Worlds” alluded to in the book’s subtitle, especially the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, or Sutta on the Foundations of Mindfulness. Part 3, entitled “Meditation and the Ethical Subject,” delves into Western secular iterations of Buddhist meditative genealogies, with an emphasis on three ethical frameworks: an ethic of appreciation, an ethic of authenticity, and an ethic of autonomy. The section closes with a brief mapping of the potential future of these three ethical frameworks as current feminist, ecological, and antiracist meditative mindfulness practices revisit them. In a postscript, the author raises the question of whether ancient Buddhist meditative practices will continue to impact humanity, as Western secularism might be replaced by new social imaginaries.

Based on these three areas of inquiry, the author marshals his scholarship to debunk any notion that meditation can generate insights and meaning grounded in an “absolute truth” or “objective reality” beyond the realm of a meditator’s social imaginary. At best, Western meditators expand their own social imaginary to include reinterpreted elements of a textually transmitted “ancient” social imaginary. The historical argument for this critique of meditative practice, so the author argues, lies in the rarefied transmission history of Buddhist teachings to the West.

Early Buddhist missionaries to the West and in the West took great care to omit aspects of Buddhist traditions that seemed incongruent with the secularism of 19^th and 20^th century educated Western elites interested in Buddhism. These omissions include Buddhist beliefs in demons, miracles, and supernatural realms and concepts such as karma and rebirth. In the process, Western Buddhism became redefined as non-religious and scientific. Neuroscientific studies of meditation are thus the most recent iterations of this reframing of social imaginaries. According to the author, other indications of Buddhist meditation’s acculturation in the secular West include an emphasis on appreciating daily life with all its materialistic trappings instead of monastic asceticism and world renunciation (the “ethic of appreciation”), the Western search for an authentic self instead of the traditional Buddhist teaching on the illusion of selfhood (the “ethic of authenticity”), and the Western Enlightenment emphasis on individualism (the “ethic of autonomy”).

McMahan's emphasis on the ubiquitous preeminence of social imaginaries and the claim that the human mind is incapable of perceiving “reality as such” offers a sharp critique of Buddhist absolute truth claims and the Buddhist promise of liberation from suffering through meditative practices. The study also generates a critical vocabulary that invites a certain degree of self-reflection among White secular practitioners of mindfulness meditation. As such, it should be welcomed as a contribution to the growing body of literature by Westerners about Buddhist meditation traditions and their Western secular manifestation, mindfulness meditation.

In my view, however, there are serious flaws wired into the construction of the argument that structures Rethinking Meditation as a whole. While McMahan acknowledges his own subject position as “white, middle-aged, middle-class man (me)” (195), he nonetheless fails to analyze how his social location has determined his own authorial social imaginary that forms the lens through which he views his chosen subject matter, including his pick of methodologies and intellectual genealogies. Although he is critical of the Enlightenment’s construct of intellectual independence and objectivity, he writes as if his own reasoning and analysis provides the reader with a great deal of exactly that. The second flaw concerns the author’s construction of the arrival and dissemination of Buddhism in the West.

A fully secular mindfulness meditation movement has a very precise genesis point in Jon Kabat-Zinn’s creation of the mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) clinic at the UMass Medical School in response to the 1979 US General Surgeon’s report, “Healthy People: The Surgeon General’s Report on Health Promotion and Disease Prevention.” As well-known chronic pain researchers such as Fadel Zeidan have demonstrated in a growing number of studies on the effects of mindfulness meditation regimes in complementary medicine, wired into the secular turn is thus also a medical “ethic of health and healing.” I suspect that this ethic is perhaps the greatest “magnet,” to use the author’s metaphor, which attracts contemporary Westerners. It is also a major driving force in antiracist, feminist, and ecological mindfulness writings.

In terms of constructing an accurate portrayal of Buddhism’s arrival in the United States, scholars such as Funie Hsu remind us that Buddhist immigrants of Asian ancestry to the United States encountered systemic White supremacy, yet never reneged on their Buddhist-inspired hospitality to non-Buddhists. The story of Japanese internment camps during World War II constitutes one of many Asian American historical traumas. If the author’s goal is to describe processes of acculturation and conversion with historic accuracy, it certainly stands to reason that these omissions must demand his attention. As the author points out so eloquently, we can never fully escape social imaginaries, including our own. Nonetheless, our academic toolkit allows us to extend and leverage the flexibility inherent in our own social imaginaries. While “reality as such” may be unattainable, the multiple realities of others are certainly within reach and demand an ethical response.

Ulrike Wiethaus is professor emerita in religious studies at Wake Forest University.

Ulrike Wiethaus

Date Of Review:

May 28, 2024