Meditation can serve either to stabilize existing social structures or to challenge them, depending on how it is adopted. The assimilative approach assumes that individual practice naturally leads to social change and has been integrated into schools, hospitals, and politics. The radical approach prioritizes structural change and collective liberation, using meditation as self-care and protest in activist communities. Both currents stem from the modernization of Buddhism during colonialism, which detached meditation from its traditional religious context and re-embedded it in settings focused on social transformation and justice.
The mindfulness movement, though often associated with American Buddhist convert communities, actually belongs to the lineage of scientific rationalism, one of the three main discourses of modern Buddhism. This chapter traces the movement's development from U Ba Khin's modernist reframing of mindfulness as a nonsectarian practice to Jon Kabat-Zinn's scientific universal iteration. Buddhist scholars including McMahan, Wilson, Sharf, and Braun agree that secular mindfulness is an extension and expression of Buddhist modernism. However, Buddhist critiques of mindfulness reveal considerable opposition to core modernist components such as universalism, individualism, an emphasis on the experiential, and the scientific-rational lineage.
Within the American Insight network, a loose affiliation of communities centered on Vipassana meditation and rooted in Burmese and Thai Theravadin lineages, two distinct currents have emerged. One emphasizes a relational, integrative approach drawing heavily on psychotherapeutic discourse, while the other stresses a systematic, goal-oriented path to awakening grounded in traditional Buddhist canonical and commentarial literature. This chapter traces these currents across first- and second-generation convert teachers, examining their orientations toward meditation, preferred practice styles, gendering of meditation, understandings of enlightenment, and strategies of legitimation, before reflecting on their significance for Buddhist modernism in the United States.