The Canon · No. 123
Secular Buddhism & the Mindfulness Movement
MBSR; modern mindfulness
1979 CE – present · Non-Theistic / Philosophical · Living · US, UK, Europe, Australia; increasingly global
VIII. POSTWAR & CONTEMPORARY — 1945 – PRESENT
How many
Tens of millions have taken a mindfulness course or use a meditation app; almost none regard it as religion. Headspace and Calm alone report tens of millions of downloads.
Who began it
Jon Kabat-Zinn (b. 1944), a molecular biologist and Zen and vipassana practitioner, who created Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in 1979. Stephen Batchelor is the leading exponent of secular Buddhism as an explicit position.
What it is for
To extract what its advocates regard as the effective core of Buddhist practice — attention training — and make it available without doctrine, ritual, ordination or belief.
What it worships
None.
What it holds
Batchelor's secular Buddhism keeps the Four Noble Truths as a practical framework, treats them as tasks rather than propositions, and sets aside karma, rebirth and the metaphysics as culturally inherited rather than essential. The mindfulness movement generally goes further and keeps almost nothing but the technique, presenting it as a secular, evidence-based intervention.
What it does
Eight-week MBSR courses: body scan, sitting meditation, mindful movement, a day of silence. MBCT for recurrent depression, which is recommended by the UK's NICE guidelines. Apps delivering guided sessions. Programmes in schools, prisons, hospitals, the military and corporations.
After death
None taught. This is the decisive break. Traditional Buddhism is organised around escaping rebirth; remove rebirth and the entire soteriological structure goes with it, leaving a technique for managing stress. Whether what remains is still Buddhism is the central argument in the field, and traditional teachers in Asia and the West have made the objection forcefully.
Its texts
Kabat-Zinn's Full Catastrophe Living (1990) and Wherever You Go, There You Are. Batchelor's Buddhism Without Beliefs (1997) and After Buddhism (2015).
Its branches
MBSR and MBCT clinical lineages; secular Buddhism as a doctrinal position; app-delivered mindfulness; the traditional Buddhist teachers who reject the whole project.
Of note
This is the clearest live case of a practice migrating out of a religion. It raises the question the whole dossier keeps circling: how much of a religion can you remove before what is left is something else, and who gets to decide.
Its timeline
- 1970s CE Vipassana teachers Goldstein, Kornfield and Salzberg found the Insight Meditation Society, presenting practice in largely secular terms.
- 1979 CE MBSR founded at UMass.
- 1990 CE Full Catastrophe Living published; PBS coverage brings it to a mass audience.
- 1997 CE Batchelor's Buddhism Without Beliefs.
- 2000s CE MBCT validated in clinical trials for relapse prevention in depression.
- 2010s CE Explosive growth: Headspace (2010) and Calm (2012); mindfulness in the US Marine Corps, the UK Parliament and Google's internal training.
- <strong>2015–present</strong> The critique matures. Ronald Purser's McMindfulness (2019) argues that stripping the ethical framework turns a liberation practice into a corporate tool for making unbearable conditions bearable. Replication reviews find effect sizes smaller than early enthusiasm claimed, though real for stress and depression relapse. Reports of meditation-induced adverse events, long known in Buddhist monastic contexts, receive systematic study for the first time.
Sources
Not yet checked against named sources. This entry is the house's reading; until it is checked, treat each claim as unverified. Correct it, with a source.