In a recent paper, Levman (
2017) advocated “putting remembrance back into mindfulness,” which spawned an exchange of comments (Anālayo
2018a,
b,
c; Levman
2018a,
b; Rapgay
2019) that discussed in depth what may have been the precise meaning of the Pali word
sati (commonly translated as “mindfulness”) in the traditional Buddhist texts. I found the discussion highly interesting from a historical and religious perspective, but also quite disconcerting in one respect: Levman claimed that this discussion about the word
sati “has implications not just for Buddhist practitioners, but also for the modern mindfulness movement, for mindfulness divorced from memory and wisdom is mindfulness divorced from the teachings, and will
accordingly [emphasis added] have only limited benefit” (
2018b, p. 1985), without specifying which benefits he has in mind, to whom this applies, nor why this should be the case. Assertions like this, or “Since
sati is such an important subject today, both for Buddhist meditation practice and its secular applications, the discourse on what it actually means takes on a pressing relevance” (Levman
2018a, p. 1043), come without any restrictions or qualifications. They are thereby implicitly claimed to apply also to non-Buddhists and/or when considering outcomes of interest to non-Buddhists, which suggests a fundamental confusion. …
