Remembering the Here and Now

When we cheat on our tax return or secretly waste time on social media at work, we use intelligence, concentration, and attention deliberately in order not to get caught. We use these same abilities when making coffee, cycling to work, playing sports, or caring for our children. Even a sniper makes use of them while carrying out a mission.

Appropriate Concentration and Appropriate Mindfulness, however, are more than mere focus and attention: they belong to a wholesome, ethical path of practice. Their purpose is to reduce suffering and transform our habitual ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving in a wholesome direction. Over recent decades, mindfulness has also spread widely in the West—in other spiritual traditions and in psychological settings, such as mindfulness-based cognitive therapy.

Some currents within Zen place particular emphasis on mindfulness. These include the Rinzai lineage, which traces back to the Chinese master Linji of the ninth century, as well as the Order of Interbeing, Tiếp Hiện, founded by Thich Nhat Hanh.

When we ask what mindfulness practice in Zen really means, we see that mindfulness is made up of countless elements. Just as a vegetable soup consists entirely of elements that are not, in themselves, vegetable soup—water, onions, leeks, carrots, spices, a pot, a stove, a supermarket, a truck, fossil fuel, and a nuclear power plant—mindfulness, too, consists of non-mindfulness elements.

From the perspective of interbeing, mindfulness is not an isolated capacity. To transform our habits of thought, feeling, and behaviour in a wholesome direction, it can help to turn to the Buddhist tradition and to Zen. In the Noble Eightfold Path and the Seven Factors of Awakening, mindfulness appears in a dynamic relationship with wholesome view and intention, wholesome communication and action, a responsible way of earning a livelihood, joy, inner ease, concentration, and equanimity. These aspects support and nourish one another.

A contemporary understanding of this path also includes mindful consumption. What we eat, drink, see, hear, read, and take in through our senses becomes part of the conditions from which our thinking, feeling, and acting arise. To consume mindfully means attending to our sense doors with awareness and asking what nourishes clarity, compassion, and both personal and collective well-being.

In modern translations of Buddhist texts, the Pali word sati is often rendered as mindfulness. Its semantic range includes remembering, calling to mind, and keeping something in mind.

Mindfulness has much to do with remembering. When we direct our attention to the breath, our posture, or a particular activity, it is repeatedly drawn away by outer and inner impulses such as sounds or thoughts. Zen practice does not aim to prevent thoughts from arising or to stop thought altogether. Our consciousness is like a pond. Sometimes the water is clear, sometimes muddy. Sometimes a frog croaks and hops away; sometimes a lotus blooms. At the bottom, mud ferments, and the bubbles that rise resemble our thoughts and feelings. In the Yogācāra tradition of Mahayana Buddhism, this deeper layer of consciousness is called store consciousness.

One thought gives rise to others, leading us down trains of thought in which we construct entire worlds. In doing so, we lose sight of our practice. At some point, we remember that we wanted to practise mindful breathing. This mysterious act of remembering cannot be fully controlled through mental concentration, brought about through ritual, or forced through philosophical strategies. Yet we can create conditions that support it.

The practice is to return to our practice whenever we remember. We come home again: to ourselves, to the here and now.

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