Skepticism about meditation research

The Mission to Spread Buddhism to the West

Mindfulness research has a surprising amount of embedded Buddhist philosophy.
Why? Early researchers decided to play the long game. It might seem incredible, but the apocryphal tale I have been told is that the Dalai Lama charged Richie Davidson and Cliff Saron with bringing Buddhism to the West. The understanding was that the format Western civilization respects is science so science was adopted as the next vehicle for expanding Buddhism.

Secularizing Mindfulness

If the approach had been too openly Buddhist, it would have been rejected.
In the 1990s, one could not openly preach Buddhism as therapy in the West and expect to get very far. One could certainly not expect to get much funding from secular government agencies for spreading Buddhism, either.

What one could do instead is rework Buddhist philosophies and techniques with a secular framing. This approach applied Western science to Buddhist practices, which allowed the belief systems to pass into Western culture more freely.

Unfortunately, the science of mindfulness has a lot of problems.
A lot of the research is of very low quality: not pre-registered, small samples, biased samples, lack of control conditions, abundant data-collection with incomplete reporting, dubious statistics, overclaiming on results, non-replicable findings, conflicts of interest from financial incentives, etc. Even some basic findings, like whether meditation actually improves attention, have been called into question by skeptical authors.

The Lack of Non-Buddhist Research

The Buddhist influence on meditation research is also apparent in what isn't present: meditation research that is not Buddhist.

The overwhelming majority of the literature has a strong Buddhist dimension.
It is common for researchers to privately endorse Buddhist perspectives and to quote passages from Buddhist texts, such as the Visuddhimagga. In contrast, nobody seems to quote similar bodies of work from other traditions, such as the Vedas and Upanishads or the poetry of Sufis or Christian mystics.

I have attended several Mind & Life and other meditation conferences.
At least half a dozen Buddhist monks attended each of these events. By contrast, I have never seen a single Guru, Sadhu, Christian monk, Sufi, or representative of any non-Buddhist meditation tradition. These conferences also tend to have "Dharma talks", which offer explicitly Buddhist content.

The exception is Transcendental Meditation (TM), which has its origins in Hinduism.

TM was big in the 1960s.
Transcendental Meditation is the meditation of The Beatles, Jerry Seinfeld, and plenty of other celebrities. To this day, TM retains a lot of its more obvious Hindu origins, especially in its teaching ceremony and in its perspective on the way reality works. TM came to the West during the counter-cultural era, a time of great cultural upheaval, but may have been too different for widespread adoption.

The Transcendental Meditation movement also communicates through science.
There is plenty of research on TM dating back to the 1960s. However, almost all of this research has been conducted by TM teachers or practitioners, often at universities founded by the international TM organization. Despite numerous scientific studies and in-school programs, TM hasn't attained the widespread appeal or acceptance of mindfulness. If one looks into the TM organization, it quickly becomes easy to see some factors limiting adoption: to any layperson, it looks like a cult. I'm not saying that it is a cult, but the TM movement definitely has a certain vibe.

Other than TM, there is very little research on meditation outside the Buddhist context.
There is a little bit here and there, but the vast majority is Buddhist-inspired.

The Paths Not Taken

Have you noticed that mindfulness research often focuses on breath-focused attention?

Focusing on the breath is one of many meditation practices, but most of the mindfulness literature started out with this anchor of attention. The breath is easy to make secular. In Western societies, there is nothing innately religious or philosophical about the breath.

After breath-focused mindfulness grew in acceptance, researchers began introducing "loving kindness" and "compassion" meditation. Both of these meditations explicitly promote Buddhist values. They are Buddhist meditation practices.

Notably, researchers did not become interested in secular "values-based meditation".

One could imagine a secular medication wherein a patient worked with a therapist to identify a specific value that personally resonated with the patient. This value could then become the subject of a personalized meditation practice. To me, this approach seems like it would be more consistent with secular Western individualism.

This didn't happen, though.
Rather than adopt a secular version, researchers slowly introduced Buddhist concepts.

The wrongheaded charge of "Appropriation"

A Buddhist attempting a wholesale import Buddhism into Western society would fail.
The full system would have been rejected, as it had been in the past (see below).

A forward-thinking Buddhist could learn which kind of arguments Westerners find persuasive (e.g. science) and understand the pain-points of Western people (e.g. depression, anxiety), then leverage that cultural awareness to bring Buddhism into Western culture in a way that could be culturally adopted according to the accepted norms of the existing culture (e.g. as an evidence-based therapy).

Therapy provided a "foot in the door" that eventually developed into a Western branch of the underlying Buddhist belief system.

Some might call this "appropriation".
Others might call this a very clever strategy to slowly integrate a foreign belief system into the culture.

The history of Buddhism is filled with this strategy!

Buddhists have been exporting and changing Buddhism throughout history.
Buddhists left India, travelling North and East. This is how local variants of Buddhism came to be. Tibetan Buddhism is a mix of Buddhism and the local Bön religion. The Buddhisms of China, including Pure Land Buddhism, are very different than other sects of Buddhism. There was also Chinese Chan Buddhism, which became Seon Buddhism in Korea, Thiền Buddhism in Vietnam, and Zen Buddhism in Japan. Buddhism also flourished on the Silk Road.

Buddhism has a rich history of exporting and adapting itself.

Some consider Buddhism itself to be an export-oriented version of Hinduism.
The two share many of the same practices and ideas, like meditation and liberation from rebirth, but Buddhism dropped the India-specific context and stories, e.g. the epic tales of the Mahabharata, which would not necessarily appeal to foreign audiences in foreign lands.

Buddhists even interacted with the Roman Empire!
There are historical accounts describing Indian ambassadors, including an Indian religious man named Zarmanochegas. To demonstrate his faith, Zarmanochegas burned himself alive in Athens. If that sounds familiar, that's because it is: self-immolation is a recurring protest strategy, particularly among Buddhists. Unfortunately for Zarmanochegas, setting himself on fire turned out to be an ineffective recruitment strategy in antiquity.

In the current age, with greater religious freedoms and increasing globalization, Buddhism found its way back to the West.
Eminent German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer wrote about Buddhist ideals, as did the American Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson. Fast-forward to the early 21st century: Western Buddhism has become a branch and Buddhist thought has made its way into modern therapy by way of "science".

What an impressive spread of culture!

I don't think it is historically reasonable to label this most latest spread Buddhism "appropriation". The Buddhists spreading and adapting Buddhist ideas were trying to spread their own culture. Nobody stole Buddhism; Buddhism —insofar as a cultural idea can 'want'— wants to spread.

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