Introducing a Special Collection on the Ethics of Mindfulness

The Special Collection we introduce here on the theme of “The Ethics of Mindfulness” is meant to call for enhanced attention to the ethical dimensions embedded within mindfulness practice and to point out the potential to invoke these toward a more meaningful and influential application of the practice. Mindfulness protocols, especially not only in their diverse indigenous Buddhist contexts, but also in their modern applications in contemporary clinical settings, work within a productive tension between, on the one hand, a calming of the conceptual mind through practices such as paying attention to the body or the breath, and conceptual reflections on the nature of mental life, on the other (Bodhi, 2011; Dreyfus, 2011; Gethin, 2011; Shulman, 2010). Despite the modern notion that mindfulness is non-conceptual (Bishop et al., 2004; Grossman et al., 2004; Kabat-Zinn, 1990, 2011), the very fact that verbal instruction is given, meaning that there is a direction of attention, while thoughts naturally arise within the space of attentive awareness, indicate that the picture is more complex.

In fact, these two modes of reflection can be thought to enhance each other—the grounding of attention in concrete experience allows for deeper reflection, while conceptual understandings can resolve ideological and motivational tensions in order to promote enhanced attention to concrete experience. This correspondence can be seen as a mode of the fruitful exchange in classical Buddhist contexts between Śamatha and Vipassanā, “calm and insight.” With this mutual support of its two driving vectors, the practice of mindfulness recursively works back upon itself in order to become incorporated into the very mental structures through which it is practiced. Thus, these seemingly opposite mental capacities join to offer a richer, fuller, and more satisfying mental life. Our suggestion is that the incorporation of ethical attitudes and reflections into the endeavor, both within the basic framing of the practice and especially so within the reflective exercises themselves, can make this process doubly potent.

The project from which this Special Collection arose is based on a German-Israel Foundation (GIF) grant on “The Ethical Foundations of Buddhist Meditation,” jointly led by Michael Zimmermann at the University of Hamburg and Eviatar Shulman at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The basic rationale of the work was to investigate the intriguing, but partly counterintuitive, claim encountered across Buddhist traditions that an ethical mind is a prerequisite for successful mental concentration in meditation, most classically in samādhi: why would a moral life matter to the ability to make more out of mindfulness practice? Furthermore, scientific conceptions of the mind are still dominated by the computer metaphor, understood within a naturalist paradigm, so the that the mind is taken as a machine that manipulates information in the service of evolutionary survival. This interpretation is often based on models of predictive processing or active inference, which are especially popular in the study of meditation (e.g., Pagnoni, 2019; Laukkonen & Slajter, 2021; Lutz et al., 2025). If this were the case, why should ethical attitudes improve the functioning of the machine? How would they improve the brain’s models of prediction? Will this picture of the mind suffice?

Perhaps it is only our own modernized and fragmented minds, with their habits to assume a mechanistic compartmentalization of mental functions, that found difficulty in seeing why the claim that ethical behavior facilitates mental concentration would make sense within the psychological understanding of meditation. Our design for addressing this issue was first, to treat this question historically within the distinct Buddhist logics of Theravāda and Mahāyāna, which correspond with our particular expertise. However, from the start, the project was designed to work in conversation with contemporary psychological thinking in both clinical and experimental contexts, so as to begin to translate the Buddhist understandings into a contemporary, applicable language. For this reason, the project included Collaborating Investigators Stephan Schmidt (University of Freiburg), Iftah Yovel (Hebrew University), and Ulrich Ott (University of Giessen), while collaborating also with Asaf Federman and Nava Levit-Binnun (IDC-Herzliya), with our workshops addressing both domains of the historical and the applied dimensions of Buddhist meditation. The collection we edited here reflects this dual-strand approach, and, hopefully, provides an example how such collaboration can be fruitful.

From an early stage in the project, it became clear that mindfulness practice would be an excellent focus for discussion. First, the practice is widely studied, with extensive, high-quality work carried out in the field. Second, mindfulness is conducive to analysis within a Buddhist textual framework, since it is more accessible than advanced, potentially alternative, meditative states like the jhānas. The insight that emerged early on was that if modern mindfulness protocols, such as mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR; Kabat-Zinn, 1990), were conducted in indigenous Buddhist cultural settings, they would be informed by broader Buddhist cultural and religious understandings. The particular worlds of thought and practice from which participants come from, with their ethical conceptions, religious attitudes, and ideological dimensions, would shape participants’ cognitive and affective responsive and influence the way the cultivate mindfulness. Ideas such as karma, impermanence, and the benefits of generosity would be active in the hearts and minds of participants; indeed, they would be active in their heart-minds, as in Buddhist traditions consciousness is no less connected to the heart than to “the mind” (Harvey, 1993). At the same time, understandings regarding the primacy of the mind in shaping experience reality, and with it—the dangers of the unethical mind—become ingrained and spontaneous habits of thought and cognition. These mental attitudes, perceptual patterns, affective strategies, and behavioral regulations translate together into an understanding that we can loosely call the ethical mindset of an organic mindfulness practice. We suggest that the formulation of traditional Buddhist mindfulness practices would expect them to be carried out with these cultural attitudes that are cultivated over time.

Contemplate the classic previous life story of the Buddha as a rabbit (Jātaka #316; Fausbøll, vol. 3, p. 51., 1877–1896; translation in Cowell, Vol. 3, p. 34., 1895–1907), who on one holy day (uposatha) selflessly offered himself as a donation of a meal to a visiting Brahmin in the forest by throwing himself into the fire, wishing to bring the virtue of generosity (dāna) to its ultimate expression. In fact, the Brahmin was an appearance adopted by Sakka, King of the Gods (Buddhist Indra), who oversaw the animal’s powerful religious conviction from his superior heaven, directing his attention to the rabbit after his own marble-throne became hot because such an intensified intention as the rabbit’s was active somewhere in the cosmos. This point shows us how Buddhist ethical attitudes—generosity, selflessness—are situated within a comprehensive cosmological understanding in which the world is thoroughly moralized. There is surely a psychological message to be derived from the story—giving is good for us as people, no less for the giver than for the recipient; such action creates positive habits that will condition the mind in beneficial ways, and lead one to better mental realities, and with them also to improved physical and even external ones. However, the story should not be reduced to such a functional image, and its overtones must be taken as an integral part of the message. These include the fact that the world is imbued with ethical quality, so that it is in one’s best interests to cultivate morality.

A Buddhist practitioner of mindfulness would have heard such stories from a very young age. And she would have heard many other similar tales, which would have created particular dispositions of heart. We may even acknowledge that the womb that gave birth to our practitioner is situated in a body that also heard such stories from a very young age. The mother who carries the child would also have practiced care and respect for her parents, and no less so for monks, who embody the practices (for a close view at these Buddhist cultural values, see Hallisey, 2015). We could go further and further into the subtleties of the Buddhist ethical mindset—perhaps taking another story on commitment to truth and non-violence, as in the Buddha’s previous life as the King of the Fish, who saved the creatures in his drying pond by an act of truth, which brought the skies to rain (Jātaka #75; Fausbøll, vol. 1, p. 329., 1877–1896; translation in Cowell, Vol. 1, p. 185., 1895–1907); or his care for his blind mother as the elephant king who was chosen as the royal elephant, but refused to cooperate until his mother was taken care of (Jātaka 455; Fausbøll, vol. 4, p. 90., 1877–1896; translation in Cowell, Vol. 4, p. 58., 1895–1907). Alternatively, we could head to Mahāyāna contexts and delve into the infinite depths of compassion and commitment, as in the vows of Bodhisattvas in foundational Mahāyana sūtras like the Sukhavatīvyūha (“The Land of Bliss”, Gomez, 1996). However, the takeaway point is simple—Buddhist mindfulness emerged from a world that envisioned these values, and saw ethical action as providing the conditions for successful practice.

It is not new to scholarship that there are powerful relations between ethics and mindfulness, and there have been not only articles, but even collections and handbooks on the subject (Monteiro et al., 2017; Stanley, 2015; Stanley et al., 2018). However, the quality of our call is to some degree new. Mindfulness can be treated as a function, objectified, modelled, and studied scientifically, and indeed this has been carried out with some success. Yet it is important to notice that in the process of objectification, something may be lost, something of the soft living texture of the ethical heart, which mindfulness practices thrives on and is meant to enhance. There is an intuitive theory of mind that is active in Buddhist sources and which we may benefit from listening to, despite its being somewhat different from our contemporary instincts. Even if the mind evolved within human evolution and can be understood within a naturalist framework—(can it in fact?)—the tradition that first created mindfulness seems to be telling us that attention to quality of heart and ethical attitudes can greatly impact the success of the practice and its impact on human flourishing. These ideas resonate with certain contemporary thinking on the ethics of attention, which is based on the work of Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch (Freeman, 2015; Panizza, 2022). Within this discourse, attention is by its very nature an ethical activity, which empties selfhood into a receptive mode that is open to the realities of the other. Weil presents such moments of attention as a form of grace, akin to a change in regular patterns of physicality. Here, attention is the purest form of ethical activity (Weil, 1952).

Perhaps it is disingenuous to say that the early Buddhists created mindfulness. Why not admit that mindfulness as we know it is a modern invention, which starts with Jon Kabat-Zinn and has been propelled by so many thinkers and practitioners? Modern mindfulness is surely not identical to early, or later, Buddhist practices that we translate into mindfulness, but are actually sati, smṛti, dren pa, and more. These work within their own organic contexts to generate different soteriological effects than the ones pursued by modern subjects. However, in creating modern mindfulness, much inspiration has been taken from the Buddhist tradition, and Buddhism is surely among the causal forces that have given rise to the contemporary framework. Indeed, the number of studies that discuss the relationship between mindfulness and Buddhism is remarkable (e.g., Kang & Whittingham, 2010; Lewis & Rozelle, 2016; Monteiro, 2015; Murphy, 2016; Valerio, 2016; Wilson, 2014). As such, and within the thriving life of mindfulness today, it seems that an examination of the Buddhist understanding of mindfulness within its broader ethical and philosophical contexts may be helpful. There may be still finer gems to be mined from Buddhist traditions. We suggest that the benefits in situating a healthy and attentive mind within a carefully cultivated ethical heart and mind are one such valuable example.

To recall our prerogative, our project emerges from an interest in the compelling Buddhist idea that ethical practices secure the ability to mentally concentrate. Our suspicion was that human flourishing must have an ethical dimension, and that contemporary adaptations of Buddhist meditative practices should be aware of this. To this end, the different contributions to the Special Collection all address a variety of related issues, moving from more specific concerns regarding the role of ethics within the Buddhist path and the manner in which it facilitates meditative practice, through more general understandings of the Buddhist path and its relation to human flourishing, and to specific, contemporary concerns in experimental, educational, and therapeutic settings. We describe these briefly as follows.