Sit in a secular frame: mindful awareness without a cosmology

Practise ordinary mindfulness and insight meditation as a way of meeting this life more clearly, using methods taught elsewhere on this site.

Pourquoi ça marche

Secular Buddhists keep meditation at the centre; one group leader quoted by the Secular Buddhist Network calls mindful awareness of daily experience “the primary method” for coming to terms with life’s pleasures and pains. The methods are largely those of the Insight Meditation movement and of satipaṭṭhāna, not new techniques; what changes is the frame — attention serves the four tasks in this life rather than progress toward release from rebirth. Scholars note that this frame has a history: Robert Sharf traces “bare attention” to twentieth-century Burmese reform movements, and David McMahan describes modern meditation as detraditionalised and privatised.

Comment faire

1. Choose one established method: breath-centred sitting, the body scan, or noting. See the Vipassana, Ānāpānasati and Satipaṭṭhāna pages for full instructions.
2. Sit for a set time — ten to twenty minutes is plenty to start — at a regular time of day.
3. Before you begin, recall the task you are working with this week, for example letting a particular reactivity be.
4. After sitting, note one thing you saw about how your mind reacts, in plain words.
5. Carry one moment of the same attention into ordinary activity — a meal, a walk, a conversation.

Données probantes

Meditation’s place in secular practice is as the Secular Buddhist Network’s contributors describe it. Sharf’s article traces the modern bare-attention approach to Burmese reform movements and notes it is arguably at odds with more traditional Theravāda doctrine and practice; McMahan’s chapter documents how meditation has been unmoored from institutional authority. Trials of mindfulness programmes test MBSR and MBCT, related clinical programmes rather than secular Buddhist practice — see those pages for that evidence. (anecdotal)

No study has tested meditation practised specifically within a secular Buddhist frame, and the clinical evidence for MBSR and MBCT should not be transferred to it. Sharf’s and McMahan’s work is historical analysis, and Sharf notes that such reforms were met with suspicion from traditional quarters.

Sources

• Secular Buddhist Network (2022). What are the core elements of a secular approach to the dharma? (perspectives from secular Buddhist group leaders).
• Sharf, R. H. (2014). Is mindfulness Buddhist? (and why it matters). Transcultural Psychiatry, 52(4), 470–484.
• McMahan, D. L. Meditation and Modernity. In The Making of Buddhist Modernism (pp. 183–214). New York: Oxford University Press (Oxford Academic edition, 2009).
• Gleig, A. (2019). Meditation and Awakening in the American Vipassana Network. In American Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Modernity (pp. 111–138). New Haven: Yale University Press.

Erreur fréquente

Assuming the secular frame makes meditation a neutral relaxation technique. Secular Buddhists describe it as serving ethical and existential tasks; drop those and what remains is closer to stress management, which is a different thing.