In his recent book, Why I Am Not a Buddhist, Evan Thompson ventures to examine Buddhist modernism, Buddhist exceptionalism, and neural Buddhism. Specifically, Thompson identifies as the goals of his book the desire to present a “philosophical critique of Buddhist modernism” (p. 19) and to argue “for cosmopolitanism, the idea that all human beings belong to a single human community” (p. 21). To Thompson, these two goals are intrinsically intertwined since Buddhist modernists seem to conflate science, especially neuroscience, with what is referred to as Buddhist mindfulness practices…
Tag: mindfulness
Review: Mind Cure
Mind Cure: How Meditation Became Medicine. By Wakoh Shannon Hickey. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. 324 pages. $29.95 (hardcover). ISBN 978-0190864248. The primary concern of Mind Cure is the broad, diffuse Mindfulness movement that includes Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) developed by the microbiologist Jon Kabat-Zinn and “all the therapeutic derivatives of MBSR, collectively called MBIs [Mindfulness-Based Interventions]” (p. 8).…
Presenting the Dharma Essence in an American Vocabulary: Apologetic Strategies in the Writings of Jon Kabat-Zinn
By first tracing the development of Kabat-Zinn’s understanding and placing it within the broader intellectual context of Buddhist modernism, this paper demonstrates the logic at work in Kabat-Zinn’s apologetic strategy for MBSR.