Handbook of Mindfulness by Ronald E. Purser David Forbes & Adam Burke

Author:Ronald E. Purser, David Forbes & Adam Burke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

The Secular Frame

MBSR, CBCT, and SCT all openly trace their roots to various Buddhist contemplative traditions, yet they also explicitly emphasize the secular nature of their programs. Although they each consider their programs to be secular, the founders of MBSR, CBCT, and SCT construct and employ the rhetoric of the secular in different ways. As I will suggest below, these diverse frames variously permit and constrain these programs’ goals, practices, and possibilities for healing.

The process and legitimacy of “secularizing” Buddhist-based contemplative practices is one of the most debated issues in the field (see, for example, Monteiro et al. 2015: Purser 2015; Brown 2014). On my view, a number of the issues at stake in this debate hinge on the ways in which the category of the secular is understood and employed. There is no singular definition of the secular, in the same way that there is no singular definition of religion. The categories of the religious and secular are mutually constituted, and the (often blurry) lines between them are drawn in different ways in different times and places. In some contexts, the secular signals what is common to people of diverse or of no religious or spiritual traditions. In other contexts, the secular signals a separation or outright rejection of religion or what might be considered the supernatural (Taylor 2007; Calhoun 2010; Lama 2011).

These two distinct conceptions of the secular—what I call “open” and “closed” models of the secular borrowing from Taylor (2007)—shape current thinking and the debate about the secularization of contemplative practice. Although they do not represent the full range of interpretations of the secular, (nor do they necessarily reflect the ways in which the proponents of MBSR, CBCT, and SCT understand themselves to be secular), they are useful heuristic tools for helping to uncover and analyze the secular frames that are at least implicitly employed in these modern contemplative program.

The “open” model of the secular rests on the simple separation thesis. What counts as religious or secular, however, may vary between open models. Programs that employ extremely open models of the secular, for example, would tend to permit, hold, and attempt to negotiate a variety of worldviews and belief systems. Programs that employ moderately open models of the secular would tend to bracket out religious beliefs, but not outright reject or dismiss them. The “closed” model of the secular hinges on the sociological secularization thesis. On this model, secularization is understood to mark a progressive transformation from the so-called “primitive” religious systems to the modern secular worldview (Casanova 2006). The closed secular frame implies a naturalistic framework that is explicitly contrasted with the supernatural and thus most often entails an outright rejection of religion altogether. Closed models tend to define the secular in more universalizing terms, as a space, or set of views and practices that are free from the trappings of particular cultural and religious beliefs, rituals, and institutions. Below we will briefly consider ways in which MBSR, CBCT, and SCT employ these different secular frames.

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