How To Be An Agnostic
suffering from them. Claims for its benefi ts are backed up by
a growing body of evidence derived from scientifi c trials, and
there’s no doubt value in it too.
But there are ironies inherent in this turn to science. Trials
are appealed to partly in order to validate the insights, while at
the same time, the science is patronised, soto voce, for only just
beginning to grapple with the deep things that the Buddhist tra-
dition has otherwise known for centuries. Again, maybe it’s just
a question of strategy: advocates of mindfulness are bound to
turn to the forms of language and investigation that have cur-
rency in the West. Science controls the imprimatur. But there’s
a further concern.
As mindfulness submits to the assessment of neuroscience,
and deploys the language of psychology to understand and
promote itself, it also risks being formed by the instrumental
worldview of these sciences. It will have to prove itself success-
ful at alleviating suffering, at delivering measurable results, at
being cost-effective – all of which may well be at odds with
what the broader Buddhist tradition has held, not least that life
is not fi xed by a six-week course but – if you hold to reincar-
nation – perhaps over countless rebirths. It’d be hard to secure
government funding for that.
If this tendency to turn to science is a product of the possibil-
ity that Buddhism can only really make sense in the West as a
mind cure technique, then it seems destined to become dimin-
ished and to dissatisfy like any other form of self-help. If Jung
is right, as well as the Buddha for that matter, then the psycho-
logical approach to life alone is not enough. We seek that which
addresses us as whole persons. We need the spiritual dimension.
Socratic mindfulness
Stephen Batchelor is fond of noting that it took 500 years for a
distinctly Chinese Buddhism to emerge, when the religion left
the Indian subcontinent and made it’s way east. It found an
audience because Confucian communitarianism had created a