Phenomenological Reflections on Mindfulness in the Buddhist Tradition

<p>This book offers an original phenomenological description of mindfulness and related phenomena such as concentration (<i>sam?dhi</i>) and the practice of insight (<i>vipassan?</i>). It demonstrates that phenomenological method has the power to reanimate ancient Buddhist texts giving new life to the phenomena at which those texts point.</p><p>Beginning with descriptions of how mindfulness is encountered in everyday pre-philosophical life the book moves on to an analysis of how the Pali Nik?yas of Theravada Buddhism define mindfulness and the practice of cultivating it. It then offers a critique of the contemporary attempts to explain mindfulness as a kind of attention. The author argues that mindfulness is not attention nor can it be understood as a mere modification of the attentive process. Rather becoming mindful involves a radical shift in perspective. According to the author’s account being mindful is the feeling of being tuned-in to the open horizon which is contrasted with Edmund Husserl’s transcendental horizon. The book also elucidates the difference between the practice of cultivating mindfulness with the practice of the phenomenological <i>epoché</i> which reveals new possibilities for the practice of phenomenology itself.</p><p><em>Phenomenological Reflections on Mindfulness in the Buddhist Tradition</em> will appeal to scholars and advanced students interested in phenomenology Buddhist philosophy and comparative philosophy.</p>