One was that the evening talks seldom related the practice of mindfulness meditation we were engaged in during the day to the actual teachings of the Buddha. Exception made of some excellent talks in a more traditional style by Joseph Goldstein, the teachers said virtually nothing about the backdrop to the practice of mindfulness meditation as we find it described in the Pāli Canon, which I had studied in Sri Lanka. There was no talk about our bondage to the beginning less cycle of rebirths; nothing about the role of kamma, understood as the impact of our volitional actions from one life to the next; nothing about the goal of the practice as release from the round of rebirths. All these topics, central to the Dhamma, were simply passed over in silence, or at most treated as metaphors. The Buddha’s discourses were seldom taken up as themes for the evening talks, and if on occasion the Buddha was quoted, it was only by selecting snippets from the suttas, individual lines that would be cited out of context and freely interpreted by the speakers, somewhat in the manner a jazz musician might improvise on a tune by Cole Porter……..
…….Numerous times I heard things that even jarred my sensibility, such as: “The Buddha didn’t teach Buddhism; he taught the Dharma.” The implication of this, it seemed, was that all the other sages and saints being quoted were teaching the same thing as the Buddha, and despite the vast diversity in their expressions, what they were all teaching could be reduced to present-moment awareness…
………………purpose in maintaining present-moment awareness, in so far as it was directed toward any goal beyond itself, was to enhance appreciation of the present moment. The actual purpose for which the Buddha taught the way of mindfulness, I learned, was to help us to live in the present, to savor each moment in its immediacy, to ride the ever-changing flow of events with uncluttered minds, letting whatever arises take its course without clinging to anything…
..We began to hear about such things as mindful business strategies, mindful shopping, mindful dating, mindful sex, mindful investing, mindful sports, mindful politics, and mindful military training. One would never have imagined that mindfulness would travel so far from the ancient monasteries where it was first proclaimed as “the direct way for the purification of beings and the realization of nibbāna.”
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