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Religion & Secularism

Buddha Travels West

Peter Abbs follows Buddhism’s path towards becoming a Western humanism.

Some years ago, I started a course of meditation. Although ‘mindfulness’ was in the air and meditation programmes were being offered in almost every other institution, I knew virtually nothing about meditation or mindfulness or the Buddhist traditions from which they came. ‘Mindfulness’ seemed obviously a good thing, for it was the opposite of mindlessness. Who could oppose that? But what exactly did it mean? How had it become so widely esteemed across so many institutions in the West? And what was happening to Buddhism itself as it entered our highly eclectic postmodern Western culture?

My Buddhist course was practical. It was about physical posture and following the breath in various ways.

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