Do I have a self? (and other useful questions from Buddhist mindfulness)

Scientific interest in mindfulness has grown exponentially over the past two decades, and a number of Mindfulness Based Interventions (MBIs) have been widely disseminated. Western MBIs, including Kabat-Zinn’s seminal Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), are explicitly grounded in Buddhism. There are longstanding concerns that mindfulness may be denatured when removed from its original Buddhist context. A recent ANZJP Debate (Van Gordon et al., 2015) speaks to this issue by introducing MBIs that adopt a more traditional Buddhist approach (‘Buddhist MBIs’ for the present purposes). The aim of this paper is to encourage further critical discussion of mindfulness by unpacking some issues raised by that article