There's a lot that I would say is troubling about this number.
Psychotherapists have been prescribing mindfulness-based interventions at increasing rates in the past few decades. You can't escape mindfulness, you'll hear about it everywhere you go. Yet, most of the literature about mindfulness or meditation and its impact on health is written in Sanskrit. Some of it is translated, and some of the translations make their way into English-language papers in psychotherapy or psychology journals, but it's such a small amount.
Rather that dig through Buddhist texts, we have created our own, new set of practices called "mindfulness meditation", prescribing it left and right, going on vipassana retreats, reading books on transcendental meditation, etc.
Mindfulness meditation is a western invention assembled out of pieces, taken out of context, of Buddhist and other traditions. Transcendental meditation was invented by a yogi in the 1950s. To be clear, I'm not talking about how recent these are in order to imply that older traditions are better--but older practices are better studied and we don't read about the older practices.
You can find a ton of studies in western medical journals about the benefits of various MBIs, but these studies, taken as a whole, are somewhat troubling. One troubling aspect is that many of the benefits are based on data which is self-reported, and the nature of questions in a self-reported study is limited. This is normal and expected in these kinds of studies, but it gives us a very narrow selection of observations about the effects of MBIs, and these questions / observations are often selected in order to prove positive effects--researchers, of course, want to prove positive effects of MBIs.
Meanwhile, there's two millenia of scholarly work, including descriptions of negative outcomes from meditation--what those negative outcomes were and how to structure the practice of meditation to prevent those negative outcomes--but these scholarly works are, again, not written in English and you hardly ever see literature reviews of these works in western medical journals.
Anyway. As a metaphor, it seems like we're exploring a continent, and there are people already living here, but we're ignoring them because they speak Sanskrit, and some of us are getting hurt. It's not even really the ancient texts, but modern texts, even modern texts with English translations.
I'm not sure how much scientific value can be found in texts written before the scientific method was developed. Aristotle's writings on biology and cosmology are almost entirely nonsense, for example.
MBIs are based on pre-scientific practices to begin with. Wouldn't it be a bit weird to say that MBIs are effective, but then say that all of the associated literature from 3,000 years is probably nonsense and not worth investigating?
We like to talk about how smart the ancient Greeks are. Greeks invented geometry, Greeks theorized that the Earth is round and measured its diameter, Greeks theorized that matter was made of atoms. Dalton gets credit for proving atomism experimentally, but he started out by gathering information from previous thinkers and experimenters.
The same is true of other cultures besides the Greeks and other theories besides atomism. It's easy to pick on Aristotle. He said some really stupid things; he said that men have more teeth than women. We can find plenty of quacks from the 20th century like Freud and Jung, plenty of barbarism like when Egas Moniz who cut up people's brains to change their behavior. Meanwhile, we keep discovering practices performed by various "primitive" peoples that are effective, and with investigation, we can understand the reason why it is effective. You don't need to read a 2,000-year-old Sanskrit text and take it at face value, but if you are studying the effects of meditation, it seems completely natural that you might want to do a literature review!
This sounds like a fascinating unexplored area. Are there any English texts (books/journals/theses) exploring this? I’d love to look into what limited analysis of this large reserve of literature does exist in English.
It's a weird area. There's a continuum between research in Buddhism and research in psychology & psychotherapy, and in the middle you get journals like Psychology of Religion and Spirituality or Mental Health, Religion, and Culture. Interdisciplinary research, for various reasons, just seems so difficult, journals that cover interdisciplinary topics are not as prestigious, and most researchers are loathe to give up their specialty even though they agree that interdisciplinary research is important.
I've seen some articles in these interdisciplinary journals that talk about MBIs and have citations that point towards western clinical practices as well as citations that point towards Buddhist texts... and I find it difficult to follow the citations in both directions.
It reminds me a bit of the divides between machine learning and statistics, or biostatistics and clinical research, etc. Someone who does clinical research will say, "Yes, biostatistics is very important," and then turn around and run another clinical study without talking to their colleagues at the same university in the biostatistics department.
Psychotherapists have been prescribing mindfulness-based interventions at increasing rates in the past few decades. You can't escape mindfulness, you'll hear about it everywhere you go. Yet, most of the literature about mindfulness or meditation and its impact on health is written in Sanskrit. Some of it is translated, and some of the translations make their way into English-language papers in psychotherapy or psychology journals, but it's such a small amount.
Rather that dig through Buddhist texts, we have created our own, new set of practices called "mindfulness meditation", prescribing it left and right, going on vipassana retreats, reading books on transcendental meditation, etc.
Mindfulness meditation is a western invention assembled out of pieces, taken out of context, of Buddhist and other traditions. Transcendental meditation was invented by a yogi in the 1950s. To be clear, I'm not talking about how recent these are in order to imply that older traditions are better--but older practices are better studied and we don't read about the older practices.
You can find a ton of studies in western medical journals about the benefits of various MBIs, but these studies, taken as a whole, are somewhat troubling. One troubling aspect is that many of the benefits are based on data which is self-reported, and the nature of questions in a self-reported study is limited. This is normal and expected in these kinds of studies, but it gives us a very narrow selection of observations about the effects of MBIs, and these questions / observations are often selected in order to prove positive effects--researchers, of course, want to prove positive effects of MBIs.
Meanwhile, there's two millenia of scholarly work, including descriptions of negative outcomes from meditation--what those negative outcomes were and how to structure the practice of meditation to prevent those negative outcomes--but these scholarly works are, again, not written in English and you hardly ever see literature reviews of these works in western medical journals.
Anyway. As a metaphor, it seems like we're exploring a continent, and there are people already living here, but we're ignoring them because they speak Sanskrit, and some of us are getting hurt. It's not even really the ancient texts, but modern texts, even modern texts with English translations.