Over the past three decades, ''mindfulness'' has evolved from an
Asian religious technique largely unknown in the west to a popular
cure-all and a money-making industry. America has seen a rise in
advocacy for and practice of mindful eating, mindful sex, mindful
parenting, mindfulness at work, mindful sports, mindful divorce
lawyers, mindfulness-based stress relief, and mindfulness-based
addiction recovery. Mindfulness is being taught in the public
schools, the hospitals, and now even in the military. In the first
comprehensive study of this phenomenon, Jeff Wilson explores how
mindfulness came to be applied to so many non-traditional concerns,
how it has been reconceptualized, and where it fits in American
Buddhism while increasingly influencing and being appropriated by
non-Buddhists. Wilson demonstrates that the concept of mindfulness
in America is a perfect example of how Buddhism enters new cultures
and becomes domesticated: in each case, the new culture takes from
Buddhism what they believe will relieve their specific distresses
and concerns, in the process producing new Buddhisms adapted to
their needs. In Japan, where concerns were dangerous ghosts and
capricious elemental deities, Buddhism became funerary and
exorcistic; in modern America the concerns are secular and
therapeutic, with an orientation toward personal fulfillment and
lifestyle management, but the underlying pattern is the same.
Drawing on case studies focused on mindful eating, sexual intimacy,
addiction, work, and parenting, Wilson shows how Buddhism shed its
counter-cultural quality and was assimilated into common American
lifestyles. He also examines the economics of the mindfulness
movement, as embodied by services and products such as smartphone
applications. Mindful America provides critical insight into the
origins of mindfulness meditation practices in Asian Buddhist
history, and shows how mindfulness meditation came to be popular
(especially among the laity) in American Buddhism.
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