Dhamma Wheel Buddhist Forum

Lazy_eye wrote:My argument would be that we should distinguish between mindfulness programs that do not claim to be Buddhist, and centers/programs/teachers that do. I can't see much basis for objecting to the former. Buddhists don't have a monopoly on meditation practices, even if some of these practices originated in a Buddhist context.

Yet these programs were developed by acknowledged Buddhist practitioners, presenting a contemplative methodology lifted straight out of the Vipassanā traditions where they were taught, and taught in themselves. The connection between traditional and mainstream is this background, and the use of the term ‘mindfulness’ for the clinical modality.

It is a pity that Albert Ellis didn’t make a Buddhist contemplative application to RET in his day, because I daresay that he was innovative enough to have come up with his own application of it and signature term for it other than ‘mindfulness’. This hypothetical would be more honest than what is presented in MBSR/MBCT which in part came out of RET.

ancientbuddhism wrote:It is a pity that Albert Ellis didn’t make a Buddhist contemplative application to RET in his day, because I daresay that he was innovative enough to have come up with his own application of it and signature term for it other than ‘mindfulness’. This hypothetical would be more honest than what is presented in MBSR/MBCT which in part came out of RET.

It would have been something from Stoicism, I'll wager. Most of these modern mindfulness trends are in fact more Stoic than Dhammic, in my estimation.

Perhaps Buddhists would have to give 'meditation' (and even 'enlightenment') to the emerging secular meditation movements, and focus on using 'bhavana', 'satipatthana', 'vipassana', & 'nibbana' and relevant English (~development, ~rooted/grounded awareness, ~discrimination*, ~extinguishment) etc.

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* patisambhidāmagga -> Path of Perspicuity, perhaps, in such a world...