Right Recollection: Beyond Mindfulness in the New Year

I just got some junk mail for a magazine about “mindfulness”:

Mindful celebrates mindfulness, awareness, and compassion in all aspects of life—through Mindful magazine, Mindful.org, events, and collaborations.

Mindfulness is big these days. Not just as a pop culture phenomenon, but big business. Some folks are making big money teaching corporate raiders to pay attention to what they’re doing, moment by moment. While that’s not awful — maybe a focused corporate raider will do less collateral damage — the way in which mindfulness is being promoted does suggest there’s something incomplete here.

A little history may be useful. Zen was the first school of Buddhism to make much impact in the West. While the Theosophical Society and occultists like Crowley made connections to the Theravada Buddhism of colonized nations like Sri Lanka and Burma, it was the post-WWII interest in Japan that brought Zen to pop-culture prominence in the mid 20th century. (For more about that history, see Why Buddha Touched the Earth.)

Partly this is an accident of history, but partly it’s because the Theravada tradition was more focused on monastic practice, and its insistence on strict adherence to monastic rules laid down in India 2,500 ago made it difficult for it to spread beyond a certain geographic region. (Consider the difficulties of a Theravadan missionary who might wish to cross the mountains from India into China to spread his version of Buddhism, but who also felt compelled to obey a rule the Buddha had laid down limiting his clothing to  few lightweight robes.) When Buddhism met the modern West in the late 19th century, Theravada’s insistence on strict adherence to tradition handicapped it in comparison to the more liberal Mahayana tradition.

But Theravada Buddhists are not stupid or hidebound traditionalists. In the late 20th century, as they saw Zen starting to spread, they changed their approach and started to popularize their own version of mediation, Vipassana, or “insight meditation”, as a practice for laypeople. And Vipassana puts mindfulness to the fore. As one teacher wrote,

Throughout the day you should also be aware of—and mentally note—all other activities, such as stretching, bending your arm, taking a spoon, putting on clothes, brushing your teeth, closing the door, opening the door, closing your eyelids, eating and so forth. All of these activities should be noted with careful awareness and a soft mental label. [Pandita, Sayadaw U. “How to Practice Vipassana Insight Meditation”. Lion’s Roar 2 Dec 2016]

“Mindfulness” as a cultural phenomenon is rooted in the work of the Insight Meditation Society and teachers like Sharon Salzberg and Jack Kornfield — Westerners doing great work interpreting and updating the Theravada tradition.

Now, paying attention to what the heck you’re doing is a very good thing. I could certainly do a better job of it myself.

But “mindfulness” in this sense is not enough.

Let’s consider that example of opening the door. It’s good to notice the body movements involved, the cool feel of the brass doorknob in your hand, the slight stick of the door against its frame. But while doing that, you must not forget that the dog is behind you, ready to run out into the street and lead you on a merry chase.

Or consider mindful eating, something that has almost become a cliche. It is certainly better to pay attention to each bite than to shovel food into your mouth so quickly you don’t even notice that you’ve eaten — and thus end up unsatisfied and eating again an hour later. But if you put a piece of cake in front of me, it might be better for me to recall that I’m trying to drop a few pounds, and that a sugar rush-and-crash makes me feel bad, than to eat that cake with full attention and mindful engagement.

“Now Heart”

The Pali word that gets translated as “mindfulness” is “sati”; in Sanskrit, it’s “smrti”. When Buddhism came to China they wrote it as 念, “nian”; in Japanese it’s pronounced “nen”. That kanji is composed of two pieces; the top half is “now”, the bottom is “heart” or “heart-mind”.

So we have that idea that our heart and mind should be in the present moment — “now mind”. It reminds me of Aldous Huxley’s utopian novel Island, where the inhabitants have taught mynah birds to say “Here and now, boys!” at their own capricious intervals as a reminder of this.

But another way to translate sati is “recollection”. Indeed the first books I read about Buddhism talked about “right recollection” as part of the Eightfold Path, and I was a little mystified when I started seeing references to “right mindfulness”.

I like this translation because inherent in the idea of recollection is the idea of forgetting, of wandering off the path. You know what the right thing to do is, but you don’t do it. You get angry and yell at a loved one. You quit smoking, and yet here you are with a cigarette in your hand. You make a New Year’s resolution and don’t keep up on it.

Then what?

Recall. Return. Come back. This is part of the practice! It is not a tightrope across an abyss that you fall off once and are destroyed. It is a path through the woods, with thorn bushes and mudpits off to the sides; unpleasantness to be sure but you can disentangle yourself, scrape the mud off, and step back on to the path at any time.

That’s another way to read that “now mind”. Right now, you have the choice to step back onto the path. A minute ago, a week ago, ten years ago, you stepped off of it.

But right now, in this present moment, you can remember that this isn’t where you want to be, that there’s a better way to be.

For a more in-depth consideration of “right mindfulness” in Buddhism, I recommend this 2013 Dharma talk by Ven. Tashi Nyima at Awakening Heart.

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