All is burning : Buddhist mindfulness as radical reflection

Vörös, Sebastjan (author)

This paper consists of two parts. In the first part (Section 1, part of Section 2), I put forward a critique of what I refer to as the ‘received’ or ‘standard’ view of mindfulness in the Western cultural milieu. According to the received view, mindfulness is the acontextual ‘core’ of Buddhism whose determining characteristic is bare (present-oriented, non-judgmental) attention to the flow and content of experience. As noted by many researchers, this conception is in stark contrast to the traditional Buddhist understanding, where mindfulness is not only embedded in a broader context that provides it with a specific philosophico-existential orientation (normative aspect) but is also construed as a reflective activity (noetic aspect). In the second part (part of Sections 2–4), I argue that one of the main issues with the standard view is that it frames experience in terms of what Maurice Merleau-Ponty calls ‘objective thought’ (using objectivity, or ‘thinghood’, as an onto-epistemological standard of reality), which makes the two aspects of the traditional conception (normative and noetic) unintelligible. I then provide an alternative view based on the phenomenological work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty that attempts to integrate the two aspects into a broader conception of experience. By drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s notions of ‘phenomenal field’ and ‘radical reflection’, I argue that mindfulness needs to be understood as a reflective attitude that allows one to discern not only the content but also, and primarily, the context of each experience, and that this also includes seeing itself—the act of reflection—as an act that stems from, and returns back into, the pre-reflective current of existence.

• Language: English
• Keywords: philosophy, phenomenology, Buddhism, mindfulness, reflection, Maurice Merleau-Ponty
• Work type: Article
• Typology: 1.01 - Original Scientific Article
• Organization: FF - Faculty of Arts
• Publication status: Published
• Publication version: Version of Record
• Year: 2021
• Number of pages: 18 str.
• Numbering: Vol. 12, iss. 12, art. 1092
• PID: 20.500.12556/RUL-136614
• UDC: 24:159.955
• ISSN on article: 2077-1444
• DOI: 10.3390/rel12121092
• COBISS.SI-ID: 92300035
• Publication date in RUL: 12.05.2022

Record is a part of a journal

• Title: Religions
• Shortened title: Religions
• Publisher: MDPI AG
• ISSN: 2077-1444
• COBISS.SI-ID: 520261657

Licences

• License: CC BY 4.0, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
• Link: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Description: This is the standard Creative Commons license that gives others maximum freedom to do what they want with the work as long as they credit the author.
• Licensing start date: 10.12.2021

Secondary language

• Language: Slovenian
• Keywords: filozofija, fenomenologija, budizem, čuječnost, refleksija, Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Projects

• Funder: ARRS - Slovenian Research Agency
• Project number: P6-0252
• Name: Filozofske raziskave