Socrates or Buddha?concerning self-renunciation; ‘right speech’, refraining from
grumpiness and gossip (the Christian monk Benedict thought
this a crucial issue too); ‘right action’, about living morally across
all spheres life; ‘right livelihood’, about what job you do and the
social context of your life; ‘right effort’, on how hard this path
is, though conversely right effort is about not taking yourself
too seriously too; ‘right mindfulness’ (number seven: we reach it
at last), about awareness and consciousness of body and mind;
and ‘right concentration’, being focused, in the moment. Several
of the other elements are to do with your engagement with
others and how you are in the world, not the meditation room,
and yet Western Buddhism tends to prioritise what goes on in
there alone. I’ve heard the defence that doing one component
is better than doing none. Though I’m not sure that this is what
the Buddha would have said, partly because practising mindful-
ness alone is of questionable effectiveness and effi cacy: what ten-
sions exist between the attitude you’re attempting to cultivate in
meditation and the opposed ones you unavoidably cultivate at
work, say? Mindfulness alone fails to address our wider cultural
context, which profoundly forges and shapes us, by taking us out
of that embedded context. The net result may be a contemplative
withdrawal. It’s not a risk Socrates ran, as the everyday, and your
presence in it, was the raw material for his philosophy.
This separation is heightened when you fi nd yourself negoti-
ating the cultural hurdles that arise because of Buddhism’s non-
western origins, most strikingly in the religiosity that surrounds
it. Advocates of mindfulness are often careful to minimise
such trappings, aware that, while it is far from a fringe inter-
est anymore, Buddhism in all its diversity can seem pretty alien
in the West, especially if you were brought up in the restrained
Church of England. (We all have our crosses to bear.) But if you
seek more than a beginner’s class, activities such as prostrations
to the bodhisattvas start to creep in, and can become a serious
hurdle. Similarly, you may gradually notice that beliefs in doc-
trines such as reincarnation and karma come to be more or less
assumed. Discussions about this or that sutra, and what the