Are We Forgetting Sati? Memory and the Benefits of Mindfulness from a Non-Buddhist Viewpoint

Excerpt

In a recent paper, Levman (2017) advocated “putting remembrance back into mindfulness,” which spawned an exchange of comments (Anālayo 2018a, b, c; Levman 2018a, b; Rapgay 2019) that discussed in depth what may have been the precise meaning of the Pali word sati (commonly translated as “mindfulness”) in the traditional Buddhist texts. I found the discussion highly interesting from a historical and religious perspective, but also quite disconcerting in one respect: Levman claimed that this discussion about the word sati “has implications not just for Buddhist practitioners, but also for the modern mindfulness movement, for mindfulness divorced from memory and wisdom is mindfulness divorced from the teachings, and will accordingly [emphasis added] have only limited benefit” (2018b, p. 1985), without specifying which benefits he has in mind, to whom this applies, nor why this should be the case. Assertions like this, or “Since sati is such an important subject today, both for Buddhist meditation practice and its secular applications, the discourse on what it actually means takes on a pressing relevance” (Levman 2018a, p. 1043), come without any restrictions or qualifications. They are thereby implicitly claimed to apply also to non-Buddhists and/or when considering outcomes of interest to non-Buddhists, which suggests a fundamental confusion. …