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"Explores the Buddhist concept of mindfulness and how it varies in the Buddhist cultures of three Southeast Asia cities in three countries: Chiang Mai, Thailand; Kandy, Sri Lanka; and Mandalay, Burma. The research is from the author's in-depth participant observation and fieldwork and includes the experiences of over 600 monks, psychiatrists, students, and villagers in monasteries, hospitals, and homes in these areas"--

AbstractDiscourse is the typical modus operandi for persuasive practices, but silence also has an important role to play in many religious contexts. In this essay, I examine how silence works as a mechanism of persuasion in Thailand, where Buddhist logics of meditation permeate social life. Through a close analysis of a meditative retreat at Wat Pradhatu Sri Chom Thong Voravihan in Northern Thailand, I suggest three ways that silence comes to create its persuasive effects: it works in contrastive relation to speech; it is symbolic of moral personhood; and it points to interpersonal corporeal attunement. Attention to the corporeal aspect of silence is especially significant, I argue, because it is through the body that the practice in Thailand acts to alter intersubjective space. Such an approach to silence as disciplinary practice, rather than attention just to its supposed effects, allows us to see how religious forms of silent persuasion can be seen as a particularly powerful force for personal and political change.

Mindfulness is increasingly lauded as a mark of well-being around the world, but less often is its opposite, mindlessness, articulated in discussions of mental health. In Thailand, where people follow the kinds of Theravāda forms of Buddhism that have inspired today's global mindfulness movement, "mindlessness" is understood as a culturally salient mark of distress. In this article I address what mindlessness looks like for people in and around the Northern Thai city of Chiang Mai, where mindlessness can be thought of as ephemeral and passing as a fleeting forgetfulness that necessitates re-reading a page in a book, or as long lasting and powerful as a destabilizing condition to be treated in the in-patient ward of a psychiatric hospital. I emphasize local meanings and contexts of mindlessness, and their entanglement with broader discourses in the mindfulness movement, in order to point to mindlessness as a type of local and potentially international idiom of distress. I do this to argue for both the continued importance of cultural concepts of distress in our psychiatric nosology, and for further study into the slippages that can occur when local idioms like mindfulness go global.

This article offers a comparison of some of the meanings of mindfulness in secular US settings and Theravāda Buddhist communities of South and Southeast Asia. Based on ethnographic data gathered from over 700 psychiatrists, Buddhist monks, lay practitioners, and others in Thailand, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and the United States, the article suggests some key mental associations in mindfulness and sati that converge and diverge across different cultural contexts. I call these the "TAPES" of the mind: relationships that mindfulness and sati have to particular conceptions of Temporality, Affect, Power, Ethics, and Selfhood. The article examines each of these "TAPES" and their expressions in the field in turn, from the temporal significance of "remembering the present" to the effects of supernatural and political potencies, to the morality of practice and the ontological status of the self. I argue that when the two terms are used interchangeably some meanings of these associations become privileged, while others are effectively erased. I conclude with a discussion of the problems of hegemonizing discourses about mindfulness, and the implications of the findings for global health and Buddhist studies.

Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Usha Menon and Julia L . Cassaniti. Introduction / Universalism without Uniformity -- Part I: Breaking Down Barriers Through the Study of Culture in the Study of Mind -- Robert A. Levine. One / Challenging Developmental Doctrines through Cross-Cultural Research -- Jonathan Haidt and Paul Rozin. Two / How Cultural Psychology Can Help Us See "Divinity" in a Secular World -- Joan G. Miller. Three / Beyond Universal Taxonomic Frameworks in Cultural Social Psychology -- Roy D'Andrade. Four / From Value to Lifeworld -- Part II: Psychological Processes Across Culture: One Mind, Many Mentalities -- Section 1: Emotion: A Multiplicity of Feeling -- Alan P. Fiske, Thomas Schubert, and Beate Seibt. Five / "Kama Muta" or "Being Moved by Love": A Bootstrapping Approach to the Ontology and Epistemology of an Emotion -- Julia L. Cassaniti. Six / Unsettling Basic States: New Directions in the Cross Cultural Study of Emotion -- Usha Menon. Seven / Rasa and the Cultural Shaping of Human Consciousness -- Section 2: Intersubjectivity: Social Trust, Interpersonal Attachment, and Agency -- Thomas S . Weisner. Eight / The Socialization of Social Trust: Cultural Pluralism in Understanding Attachment and Trust in Children -- Charles W. Nuckolls. Nine / An Attachment-Theoretical Approach to Religious Cognition -- Part III: Implications of Psychological Pluralism for a Multicultural World: "Why Can't We All Just Get Along?" -- Section 1: Challenges to the Modern Nation- State: Globalization's Impact on Morality, Identity, and the Person -- Jacob R. Hickman. Ten / Acculturation, Assimilation, and the "View from Manywheres" in the Hmong Diaspora -- Pinky Hota. Eleven / Vexed Tolerance: Cultural Psychology on Multiculturalism