Mindfulness Is Not the Meditation of the East

At the level of the individual, the sinking surfaces as a restlessness one cannot put into words, as burnout. Burnout grows in proportion to how thoroughly one avoids introspection. Turning to mindfulness as a palliative at that point only sinks you deeper into the mire. I am strongly convinced that mindfulness as we know it today is not the Eastern tradition of meditation itself.

Once meditation and its materials are packaged as mindfulness, the essence of meditation is gone, for it was never so gentle. The "intense pain" that real meditation carries is the most important fruit of introspection. But mindfulness has to strip this out completely if it is to be versatile, which is to say marketable, and so it ignores it. What remains is a hollowed-out trend.

Seen this way, it becomes clear that currents like today's mindfulness have strayed far from the essence; they serve a world of consumption, they are selfish, and they will go no further. We can no longer afford to stall there.

In our daily lives today, we are constantly exposed through our smartphones to a muddy torrent of information, and in response, symptomatic remedies such as digital detoxes and mindfulness have come into fashion. Yet whatever method is proposed, how many people realize that all of it is merely symptomatic treatment? It is nothing more than a temporary shelter.

In this way, modern life intensifies our tilt toward one pole, until we can no longer sustain their inseparability and the two split apart. To patch up whichever side has been severed, people turn to digital detoxes or mindfulness. Why do these fail to deliver their full effect? Because people do not perceive the state of separation itself.

Much of what is spoken of today in the context of mindfulness — with Zen meditation as its emblem — seems to set its goal as clearing away stray thoughts in order to reach a state of nothingness, mu (無).

Yet trying to rid oneself of stray thoughts because they arise in meditation is itself a selfish desire; we need to recognize that even the desire to be rid of desire is still desire.

If you see Zen as mindfulness, you will not understand what makes Soto so radical. Knowing it, you begin to see how radical Zen in fact was. To know it we must look, above all, at the founder himself.

Then the eighth picture, "Both Ox and Self Forgotten" (人牛倶忘). Here the ox and the man both vanish, and the picture is nothing but a single circle. But this is the source of a great misstep. For a picture like this is inevitably glorified as the state of awakening in Zen, a troublesome image that keeps being reproduced to this day. In fact, what I think when I look at it is that the mindfulness industry has made this one picture its highest point of arrival. Frankly, that is wrong.

So the blank drawn at the end of the eighth picture is not an end point. It is merely a waystation, just before putting on the hat and going out.

The last picture of the journey of awakening is neither retreat to a mountain or a hut nor immersion in the blank of nothing. It is the bustle of everyday life.

Having arrived at that satori, what does Zen do? It simply lives the everyday with attentiveness. Even today, many people mistakenly believe that Zen requires visiting temples, reading sutras, attending lectures, or reading commentaries. It does not even require meditation. What matters is simply inhabiting your daily life with deep care. If you find quiet daily meditation helpful, you may sit in silence—nothing more is required. But be careful: "living attentively" is entirely different from "trying to live attentively."