Still Exploring the Middle Path: a Response to Commentaries

This article is a response to commentaries on our paper (Monteiro et al. 2015) about the relationship between traditional and contemporary mindfulness, or rather Buddhist versus secular mindfulness. In our paper, we focused on the question of ethics (sila), considering questions such as whether ethics teaching is integral to Buddhist mindfulness can be merely implicit in secular mindfulness trainings, or whether it should be expressly taught. We argued for a middle path between these tangled concerns maintaining that the goals and intentions of Buddhist versus secular mindfulness might not be identical but that there are significant areas of overlap, and a healthy and continued dialog between the different streams is mutually beneficial. …