Let's Stop Dismissing Mindfulness Meditation Because It's Buddhist
Catholics keep flogging their tired old nag of a gripe about mindfulness meditation, even though heavyweights like Peter Kreeft and Kevin Majeres have given it their thumbs-up. Their big beef? “The Buddhists kicked it off!” Cue the pearl-clutching and incense-waving, as if that’s a knockout punch. It’s the same dim-witted jab they throw at Austrian economics: “The Jews started it!” Murray Rothbard and Ludwig von Mises—agnostic Jews, mind you—so naturally, the whole edifice of market logic must be a synagogue-stained sham.
The reasoning’s as watertight as a rust-eaten trailer roof. Von Mises didn’t buy the God bit, so anyone who thinks economics runs on natural laws is obviously a heretic bound for the stake. Same deal with Galileo—greedy, vain little peacock that he was—so heliocentrism’s just a parade of jackasses chasing their own tails. It all hangs together like a drunk’s alibi.
By that logic, since Buddhists cooked up mindfulness, every poor sap trying to quiet their rattled skull is a card-carrying nihilist. Never mind that the East—teeming with more bodies and older bones than our own crumbling West—might’ve coughed up something useful amid its sprawl of rice paddies and pagodas. Perish the thought! While we’re at it, let’s chuck silk shirts and paper books into the bonfire too—Eastern inventions, after all.
This anti-mindfulness tripe is more worn out and threadbare than the last pair of shorts that look decent on a middle-aged housewife in August.
And let’s not kid ourselves: the Buddhists probably didn’t even invent mindfulness. It’s more likely one of those notions that flared up like a brushfire across the globe during that wild stretch Charles Taylor dubbed “The Great Disembedding,” circa 500 BC. The Buddha was navel-gazing under his bodhi tree, Lao-Tse was scribbling cryptic one-liners, Jeremiah was raging at Jerusalem’s walls, Pythagoras was getting mystical about geometry—all in the same cosmic heartbeat, all flirting in their own way with mindfulness meditation.
And heck, Elijah may have gotten to mindfulness hundreds of years before any of them.
That old prophet didn’t weather a literal earthquake, hurricane, or fire—no, those were the tempests tearing through his head after he smoked the prophets of Baal and Jezebel put a bounty on his scalp. Holed up in that cave, his mind was a howling mess, bucking like a man caught in a twister or a blaze. Then he wrestled it down—stilled the shaking, hushed the roaring—until he could hear God in a whisper, soft as a breeze through dead grass.
If that ain’t mindfulness, I’ll eat that middle-aged woman's ratty shorts.
