What Happens to the Heart?

Western Buddhism & Its Current Discontents

Leonard Cohen Mural in Montreal

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I was always working steady
But I never called it art
I got my shit together
Meeting Christ and reading Marx
It failed my little fire
But it’s bright the dying spark
Go tell the young messiah
What happens to the heart

There’s a mist of summer kisses
Where I tried to double-park
The rivalry was vicious
The women were in charge
It was nothing, it was business
But it left an ugly mark
I’ve come here to revisit
What happens to the heart

I was selling holy trinkets
I was dressing kind of sharp
Had a pussy in the kitchen
And a panther in the yard

In the prison of the gifted
I was friendly with the guards
So I never had to witness
What happens to the heart

I should have seen it coming
After all I knew the chart
Just to look at her was trouble
It was trouble from the start
Sure we played a stunning couple
But I never liked the part
It ain't pretty, it ain't subtle
What happens to the heart

Now the angel’s got a fiddle
The devil’s got a harp
Every soul is like a minnow
Every mind is like a shark
I’ve broken every window
But the house, the house is dark
I care but very little
What happens to the heart

Then I studied with this beggar
He was filthy, he was scarred
By the claws of many women
He had failed to disregard
No fable here no lesson
No singing meadowlark
Just a filthy beggar guessing
What happens to the heart

I was always working steady
But I never called it art
It was just some old convention
Like the horse before the cart
I had no trouble betting
On the flood, against the ark
You see, I knew about the ending
What happens to the heart

I was handy with a rifle
My father’s .303
I fought for something final
Not the right to disagree

— Leonard Cohen, Happens to the Heart

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I. Introduction

My recent work and reading in contextual behavioral science have drawn me back to the foundational literature on mindfulness and acceptance, and with it to enduring questions about the relationship between contemporary Western psychology and Buddhism. Earlier this summer, in The Future of Contextual Behavioral Science & Role of Theology, I began sketching some of the questions that were starting to emerge around that work. Much of the reading that followed has taken me further, though not always in the directions I expected.

Revisiting the third-wave cognitive behavioral therapies—Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), and Functional Analytic Psychotherapy (FAP)—has returned me to Buddhist questions that have long structured my thought: What changes when we begin to relate differently to our thoughts, emotions, and sense of self? What, if anything, lies beyond psychological flexibility? And how should we understand the relationship between therapeutic transformation and awakening?

The ongoing development of Integral Awareness & Commitment Training (IACT) is part of what has made these questions newly important to me. IACT remains very much a work in progress, and much of this reading belongs to the research through which I am trying to make some of its underlying tensions more visible and explicit. The aim is not to resolve the differences between psychological development and contemplative realization, clinical practice and religious disclosure, adaptation and liberation, or individual and social transformation.

That has meant returning repeatedly to the distinction between psychological development and contemplative realization without assuming they can simply be folded into one another. The clinical traditions offer precise ways of understanding avoidance, flexibility, emotional regulation, values, and how we relate to others; Buddhist practice presses on a different register, calling into question the organization of self and world and the assumptions through which experience is ordinarily divided into subject and object. There are important points of contact, but the two are not simply interchangeable. Part of developing IACT is to keep those distinctions visible while allowing each to illuminate what the other may leave out.

Leonard Cohen hovers somewhere in the background of these questions, which is part of why Happens to the Heart has stayed with me as a title. Cohen spent decades practicing Zen, eventually becoming a monk, without simply ceasing to be Jewish or resolving the tensions among the religious and political worlds that shaped him. His work moves easily among Judaism and Buddhism, Christianity and Zen, Marxism and religious revelation, eros and renunciation, artistic vocation and spiritual discipline.

The song itself moves through much of this terrain. Christ and Marx appear almost side by side; messianic hope sits alongside disappointment; sacred things enter the marketplace; biblical imagery coexists with erotic memory, artistic ambition, political struggle, and the encounter with a wounded spiritual teacher. Cohen moves among religion, ideology, love, art, sex, politics, and contemplative practice without allowing any one of them to provide the final vocabulary for the others.

I do not mean to offer Cohen as some perfected spiritual exemplar—a guru, prophet, or sage in whom these tensions have somehow been resolved. What interests me is almost the opposite. His life and work seem to hold them together without finally overcoming them. The question is not which tradition or framework ultimately wins, but what happens when these forms of commitment, insight, failure, discipline, longing, and belief have to be lived together in one life.

Anchoring much of this inquiry is the commentary on Hakuin by my late Zen teacher, Albert Low: Hakuin on Kensho: The Four Ways of Knowing. Albert’s account has remained important to me because it refuses both easy spiritualism and easy psychologizing. Kensho is not merely an unusual state of consciousness, nor simply a more refined form of mindfulness. It concerns a transformation in the way experience is organized—a change in the relation between self and world that nevertheless leaves psychological development, relationship, history, and the demands of ethical action still to be worked through.

As I detailed in Albert Low & Zen at War, my time at Concordia also exposed me to critical historical scholarship—most notably Brian Victoria’s investigation of Zen’s ties to Japanese militarism and Robert Sharf’s critical readings of modern Zen lineages. Those studies challenged the cleaner story of Buddhist transmission I had inherited and forced a more difficult recognition: profound contemplative insight can coexist with political complicity, institutional compromise, and moral rationalization.

The scandals surrounding prominent Buddhist teachers made these questions harder to ignore. So did the rise of “McMindfulness.” As mindfulness moved into corporate wellness, education, the military, meditation apps, and the wider self-help economy, practices once embedded within ethical formation and oriented toward liberation could be repackaged as techniques for stress reduction, resilience, and productivity.

Those criticisms were necessary, but they can also make the Western story seem more exceptional than it is. Arthur F. Wright’s Buddhism in Chinese History, which I first read years ago, has returned to mind throughout this summer’s reading. Buddhism’s movement into China unfolded over centuries through translation, accommodation, political entanglement, correction, suppression, and transformation. The history does not provide a simple analogy for the modern West, but it does remind us that Buddhism has always been changed by the cultures through which it travels, even as it changes them in return.

As I have worked through these questions, the inquiry has kept widening. Asking what is translated, preserved, or lost when Buddhist practice enters Western therapeutic culture quickly leads beyond psychology alone—to political economy and institutions, religious inheritance, the contemporary left, and eventually to questions of otherness, ethical responsibility, and what transformation asks of us in relation to other people.

What began as a return to contextual behavioral science has increasingly become a question about what kind of Western Buddhism is taking shape—and what resources might allow psychological development, contemplative awakening, social transformation, and religious depth to remain in genuine conversation, each capable of informing and challenging the others without any one becoming the measure of the rest.

II. Mindfulness Without Awakening

Going back to the early third-wave literature after nearly two decades reminded me not only how unusual this material once was within behavioral psychology, but how much intellectual history sits behind it. The familiar language of “first,” “second,” and “third” waves can make that history sound cleaner than it actually was. These were never self-contained schools neatly replacing one another. The metaphor is better understood as marking shifts in dominant assumptions about what psychological suffering consists in, what should change, and how therapy might bring that change about.

The first wave emerged from the behavioral revolution of the mid-twentieth century. Against psychoanalytic explanation and other approaches behaviorists regarded as theoretically extravagant or difficult to test, behavior therapy turned toward observable learning processes and direct intervention. Classical and operant conditioning, exposure, reinforcement, extinction, and functional analysis offered clinicians a disciplined experimental tradition capable of asking what maintained a problem and what actually changed behaviour.

The achievement was considerable, but something narrowed in the process. Steven C. Hayes later acknowledged that some of the analytic, existential, gestalt, and humanistic traditions rejected by early behavior therapy had been concerned with clinically rich questions: what people want from life, how they make meaning, how they relate to themselves and others, and why being human can be so difficult. The behavioral critique was often directed at the speculative or empirically weak answers those traditions provided. Yet in rejecting those answers, behavioral psychology also became less willing to stay with some of the harder questions.

The second wave reopened the interior from another direction. By the late 1960s and 1970s, the cognitive revolution had made thoughts, beliefs, expectations, schemas, and interpretations legitimate objects of psychological inquiry. Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck became emblematic of a cognitive-behavioral synthesis in which suffering could be approached not only through learned behaviour and reinforcement contingencies but through the ways people interpreted themselves and the world. Therapy increasingly involved identifying maladaptive patterns of thought, examining their accuracy, and developing interpretations more capable of supporting adaptive behaviour and emotional life.

The third wave did not simply reject this project. It changed the emphasis. Rather than always asking whether a thought was accurate or how its content might be corrected, ACT, DBT, FAP, Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy, and related approaches increasingly asked what the thought was doing, how the person was relating to it, and what happened in the wider context of a life. A painful thought might remain present without determining behaviour. An emotion might be accepted without being obeyed or eliminated. Values could orient action even when distress remained. The therapeutic relationship itself could become a site in which avoidance, vulnerability, intimacy, courage, and withdrawal appeared in real time.

This is the point in the history that may be especially interesting for readers whose psychological genealogy runs less through behaviorism than through the humanistic, existential, transpersonal, and eventually integral traditions. From that side of psychology, concerns with meaning, values, presence, authenticity, relationship, spirituality, and the whole person never disappeared in the first place. What is striking is that by the 1990s and early 2000s, parts of behavioral psychology were arriving—through a very different philosophical and empirical route—in territory earlier behaviorists had deliberately kept at arm’s length.

FAP makes the reversal particularly visible. Robert Kohlenberg and Mavis Tsai developed a therapy grounded explicitly in radical behaviorism in which an emotionally involved, genuine therapeutic relationship became a primary vehicle of change. ACT was similarly difficult to fit into older stereotypes of behaviorism. It remained thoroughly behavioral while speaking openly about acceptance, values, perspective, self, spirituality, and the problems created by human language itself. DBT brought mindfulness and dialectics into the treatment of forms of suffering that had often defeated conventional clinical approaches.

By 2004, Hayes was describing this as something more than the addition of a few new techniques. Third-wave therapies were moving toward contextual and experiential change, emphasizing the function of psychological events rather than simply their form, and seeking broader and more flexible ways of living rather than the elimination of narrowly defined symptoms. He also recognized something historically striking about the shift: behavior therapy was returning to questions associated with humanistic, existential, gestalt, analytic, and spiritual traditions—questions that had often been excluded during its earlier struggle to establish itself as an empirical science.

That does not mean these traditions had secretly been saying the same thing all along. ACT’s concern with values is not simply existential psychotherapy translated into behavioral language; self-as-context is not merely a behavioral name for a transpersonal Self; and FAP’s emphasis on relationship does not simply reproduce Carl Rogers’s person-centered approach, with its emphasis on empathy, genuineness, and the therapeutic relationship. Likewise, mindfulness inside DBT or ACT cannot simply be identified with Buddhist practice. Their philosophical commitments and explanatory frameworks remain different. If anything, that is what makes the convergence interesting: similar human problems were becoming visible from very different starting points.

Rereading Steven C. Hayes, Victoria M. Follette, and Marsha M. Linehan’s Mindfulness and Acceptance: Expanding the Cognitive-Behavioral Tradition brought this transitional moment back into view. Behavioral psychology was becoming willing to ask about acceptance, awareness, values, relationship, and even spirituality without abandoning its empirical commitments.

Marsha Linehan’s integration of Zen practice into DBT remains a striking example of what Buddhists traditionally call Upaya, or skillful means. Practices developed within a religious and contemplative tradition were translated into a secular clinical language capable of helping people survive severe psychological suffering. Someone in acute distress does not need a theory of enlightenment before learning to tolerate distress, regulate emotion, remain present, or begin building what Linehan called a life worth living.

But Linehan’s own story complicates any clean distinction between psychology and religion. Her spiritual life was already marked by Catholicism, mystical experience, and a persistent search for God before Zen entered the picture. In Wise Mind Meets Big Mind, my review of her memoir, I explored some of the tensions that emerge from the way her life moves between psychology, Catholic formation, mystical experience, Zen practice, and scientific work without allowing those worlds to fall neatly into separate compartments.

I have lingered over that part of her story more than I expected to.

Albert was nevertheless unequivocal on one point: mindfulness is not Buddhism. However useful mindfulness becomes psychologically, Buddhism cannot finally be separated from awakening. Zen does not only ask us to become more attentive to experience, more accepting of difficult emotions, or better able to regulate ourselves within the relative world. It asks a more unsettling question about who or what this self is that supposedly possesses the experience in the first place.

The Western translation of mindfulness therefore changed more than its setting. It changed what the practice was for. Mindfulness travelled easily into psychology, medicine, education, and corporate life because it could be separated from many of the ethical, communal, metaphysical, and soteriological claims surrounding it. What remained could still be useful. The trouble comes when the translation is mistaken for the whole.

This is where Ronald Purser enters the story. Purser is a scholar of management who has also spent years working within and around Buddhist contemplative traditions, which gives his criticism of the contemporary mindfulness movement an unusual angle. His 2019 book, McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality, is not an argument against meditation or mindfulness as such. It is an argument about what happens when practices drawn from Buddhism are extracted from their ethical and communal settings and repackaged within the institutions of contemporary capitalism.

Purser’s target is the version of mindfulness that has become at home in corporate wellness programs, schools, government agencies, the military, and the larger self-help economy. In these settings, mindfulness can become an individualized technology of attention, resilience, and stress reduction. Burnout generated by impossible workloads is reframed as a problem of how well the employee regulates stress; students navigating increasingly competitive and anxious educational environments are taught techniques for managing the distress those environments help produce; even soldiers can be trained to become more attentive and resilient without the purposes or institutional demands surrounding that training necessarily coming into view. The intervention may genuinely help the person cope. Purser’s question is what disappears when coping becomes the primary frame through which the problem itself is understood.

This is the force of the term McMindfulness. The problem is not simply commercialization. Purser is arguing that mindfulness can become standardized, portable, and stripped of much of the ethical and political context that might otherwise allow practitioners to ask why they are suffering in the first place.

His criticism is persuasive, but adaptation itself cannot be the entire problem. Some suffering belongs to finitude—loss, illness, uncertainty, aging, death, loneliness, alienation, and the limits built into our relationships with other people. Other suffering is produced or intensified by economic arrangements, institutions, exploitation, exclusion, and domination. Psychology cannot account for the whole of suffering by looking only at the individual, but neither can politics reduce every form of suffering to structures.

And even restoring politics does not recover everything that disappeared when mindfulness was separated from Buddhism. We can restore institutions, history, ethics, community, power, and social justice and still leave the older religious, awakening, and enlightenment question unanswered.

III. Buddhism in Translation

Purser makes the contemporary problem visible. Arthur F. Wright helped me see that the underlying process is much older.

Wright was a historian of China whose 1959 book Buddhism in Chinese History examined one of the great episodes of religious and cultural translation: the movement of Buddhism from India and Central Asia into China. The book is short and deliberately synthetic, developed from lectures intended for a broad audience. What interested Wright was not simply the spread of a religion. He wanted to understand what happens when a major religious tradition crosses from one civilization into another—how it changes the culture receiving it, and how that culture changes the religion in return.

That is why a book I first read years ago has taken on new relevance for me now. Wright was writing about China across many centuries, not about contemporary Western mindfulness. But the question he was asking bears directly on the problem Purser raises: What happens when a foreign religious tradition has to become intelligible through categories the receiving culture already understands?

Wright organizes the Chinese story around a long process of preparation, domestication, independent development, and eventual appropriation. I do not want to turn those stages into a template for the modern West. The histories are too different for that. But they offer a way of widening the frame. McMindfulness may belong not only to the history of neoliberalism or modern psychology, but to the much older problem of what happens whenever a religious tradition crosses cultural boundaries.

The first challenge was linguistic. Chinese Buddhists had to render an Indian religious and philosophical vocabulary into a conceptual world that had developed for different purposes. Taoist and Confucian terms were recruited to translate Buddhist ones. Wright describes the practice of ko-i, or “matching concepts,” in which unfamiliar Buddhist ideas were paired with apparently analogous indigenous concepts.

The analogy with the Western reception of Buddhism is difficult not to notice. Sati becomes mindfulness; Dukkha, traditionally rendered as suffering or unsatisfactoriness, is increasingly reframed through the therapeutic language of stress; meditation becomes attention training; practices embedded within a path of liberation become therapeutic protocols. Buddhism entering China had to become intelligible through Taoist and Confucian categories. One major strand of Buddhism’s reception in the modern West has had to become intelligible through scientific psychology and therapeutic culture.

I have begun to wonder whether secular mindfulness might be our own form of ko-i.

That does not make psychological translation inherently corrupt. Translation is unavoidable. Stress, cognition, attention, emotion regulation, psychological flexibility, and self-as-context can make dimensions of Buddhist practice intelligible within a modern scientific and therapeutic vocabulary. The question is what the translation allows us to hear, what it edits out, and whether it remains capable of being corrected by what resists translation.

The Chinese story is useful here because its earliest translations were not the final ones. Buddhist thinkers themselves became dissatisfied with forced analogies and inadequate renderings. Later translators and scholars worked to disentangle Buddhist concepts from indigenous categories that had initially made them intelligible but also distorted them. The movement was not from corruption back toward an untouched purity. It was from early approximation toward more adequate forms of translation, carried out over generations.

The history was political as well as conceptual. Buddhism’s development in China involved imperial patronage, monastic institutions, economic power, political suspicion, periods of persecution, and changing relationships with elite culture. Purser’s instinct therefore has a longer history behind it: contemplative traditions do not develop apart from political economy, institutions, and power.

And yet those same centuries eventually produced Ch’an. Whatever qualifications later scholarship requires, the larger point remains difficult to avoid. Zen itself emerged from acculturation. The tradition in which Albert taught, and through which I encountered the idea of kensho, did not develop outside the cultural processes I am now worrying about in the modern West.

That complicates the language of corruption. What appears at one historical moment as dilution or compromise can also become part of the process through which a tradition learns to speak within a new world. Buddhism in China did not simply remain Indian Buddhism in a different language. It became Chinese Buddhism, and eventually Ch’an, through precisely the kinds of transformation that make any simple distinction between preservation and corruption difficult to maintain.

Wright’s final stage—appropriation—raises another problem. Neo-Confucianism eventually absorbed Buddhist questions, practices, and insights while reconstituting an older indigenous tradition as the dominant philosophical and ethical language of Chinese elites. Buddhism had changed Chinese culture, but the receiving culture had also become capable of absorbing much of what Buddhism had introduced.

The Western analogue may not be psychology alone. Psychology is one of several indigenous languages through which Buddhism is being received. Beneath therapeutic culture remains an older Christian inheritance undergoing its own reconstruction after modernity, secularization, historical criticism, and religious pluralism. Alongside both sit capitalism, liberal individualism, modern science, postmodern critique, and newer forms of political identity.

There may be several processes underway at once.

The question is therefore not simply whether Western culture is preserving or corrupting Buddhism. It is what kind of Buddhism will emerge from passing through psychology, capitalism, liberalism, Christianity, modern science, postmodern critique, and the political crises of the West.

That brings the problem directly into the work of David Forbes.

IV. Mindfulness, Religion & the Integral Left

In Mindfulness and Its Discontents: Education, Self, and Social Transformation, David Forbes moves from criticism toward reconstruction. His focus is education, where mindfulness programs can teach students self-regulation while leaving the pressures generated by the educational environment itself largely untouched.

His earlier chapter, “Critical Integral Contemplative Education,” appeared in the 2016 Handbook of Mindfulness: Culture, Context, and Social Engagement, edited by Ronald E. Purser, David Forbes, and Adam Burke. The Handbook is important to the argument here because it explicitly situates mindfulness within broader cultural, historical, institutional, economic, and political contexts rather than treating it simply as a portable psychological technology.

Forbes brings that critique into conversation with Ken Wilber, developmental psychology, critical theory, contemplative practice, and the prophetic traditions of justice. His “critical integral” approach is an attempt to keep interior development and social transformation in view together while resisting the temptation to let either substitute for the other.

Reading Forbes, I kept hearing an argument I had been circling for several years: the still-fragmented history and continuing possibility of an integral left.

My own route into that problem ran largely through the late Michael Brooks and his attempt to develop a left capable of engaging religion, meaning, culture, and human development without abandoning material analysis or democratic commitments. I explored some of that history in A Short History of the Integral Left & Varieties of Integral Traditions Today, and an adjacent line of thought in Towards a New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.

Forbes belongs somewhere in that genealogy—not because he is proposing a political program called the Integral Left. He is not. The overlap lies in the problem itself: how to connect interior development and contemplative practice with culture, institutions, power, and social transformation without reducing one side to the other.

Education makes the problem concrete. Schools are neither collections of isolated minds nor impersonal systems existing apart from the people within them. Education forms selves, relationships, cultures, moral worlds, and institutions at once. A mindfulness program concerned only with individual self-regulation misses much of that ecology. A structural critique that dismisses interior development as bourgeois distraction misses something too.

This leads into another problem I have been circling in my recent writing: the contemporary left’s tendency to cede religious, spiritual, and developmental territory to the conservative right.

In Beyond the Master Signifier, I approached part of the problem through Wilber’s Pre/Trans Fallacy: the confusion of pre-conventional religious dogmatism with post-conventional contemplative development. Because authoritarian forms of religion can be oppressive, religion itself becomes suspect. Because hierarchy can dominate, hierarchy becomes synonymous with domination.

The failures of Western Buddhism make those distinctions harder to hold. Guru scandals exposed abuses of authority, sexuality, hierarchy, and institutional power. Yet it does not follow that lineage, mentorship, disciplined practice, community, or developmental authority are therefore themselves the problem. Traditions can support growth while remaining open to criticism and correction. They can also become structures organized around protecting authority from correction. Learning to tell the difference is part of the work.

I approached another version of this problem in On the Coming Age of the Rose, Facticity of the Cross, & Divine Revelation. The contemporary Catholic revival—particularly where it overlaps with the New Right and post-liberalism—understands something about the formative power of religion that much of the secular left has forgotten. Religious communities possess ritual, inherited moral language, practices of formation, narratives of transcendence, and substantive accounts of the good.

Some of the criticism of liberalism emerging from this revival cannot simply be dismissed. Liberal institutions can thin moral life, privatize questions of meaning, and leave people with little shared vocabulary for the good. Religion, by contrast, can provide ritual, moral formation, shared memory, and a symbolic world capable of binding people together in ways liberal individualism often struggles to reproduce. But parts of the revival also carry a distinctly reactionary impulse: the recovery of religion’s social and cultural role becomes entangled with a desire to recover an earlier moral and political order.

This is where Wright’s account of Neo-Confucianism becomes especially suggestive. Neo-Confucianism was not simply a revival of the Confucianism that existed before Buddhism arrived in China. By the time Confucian thinkers began reconstructing their tradition, centuries of Buddhist philosophy and practice had already transformed the intellectual and religious landscape. Confucianism reasserted itself partly by taking up questions Buddhism had made unavoidable—questions about mind, self-cultivation, ultimate reality, and the nature of moral transformation—while answering them again in recognizably Confucian terms.

That comparison helps clarify what is at stake in the contemporary Catholic revival. Recovering religion’s formative and communal role is not the same as recovering the historical world in which that role once operated. Catholicism has already been changed by modernity, historical criticism, pluralism, psychology, secularization, and its encounters with other religions. There is no way to simply step behind those transformations, any more than Chinese religious culture could erase centuries of encounter with Buddhism. The more difficult question is what forms of religious and communal life can be built now, after those encounters have already changed the world in which the tradition has to speak.

Much of the contemporary right nevertheless seems more willing than the left to take seriously this formative and binding role of religion, even when it mobilizes those resources toward ends I oppose. Large parts of the left remain more comfortable deconstructing religious traditions than asking what a progressive relationship to ritual, moral formation, inherited tradition, and shared meaning might look like. That leaves an increasingly consequential vacuum.

Privatized mindfulness is one expression of that vacuum. Once contemplative practice has been detached from sangha, ethical formation, metaphysical questions, inherited traditions, and a larger account of liberation, it fits easily into the individualized culture Purser criticizes. But the answer cannot simply be to attach meditation to the correct progressive politics. Nor can it be to concede questions of religion, formation, and shared meaning to a right increasingly invested in recovering them through reactionary forms of cultural and political order.

The choice, then, is not between a secular left that abandons religion and a religious right that restores it. Neither Buddhism nor Christianity exists outside the histories through which it has already been transformed. Both continue to change through their encounters with modern psychology, political economy, liberalism, pluralism, historical criticism, and one another.

This intersects with another line of inquiry I explored in Philosophy & Religion after Habermas: how contemplative and religious depth might remain in conversation with political justice without either becoming a substitute for the other.

Forbes is useful here because he keeps these dimensions in view together while leaving their tensions unresolved. His work does not offer a final synthesis, and that may be part of its usefulness. It makes it more difficult to allow individual development, contemplative practice, cultural interpretation, or structural critique to stand in for all the others.

But even if we bring ethics, development, culture, political economy, social justice, institutions, and religious depth back into the mindfulness conversation, another question remains.

Have we recovered Buddhism? Or is something still missing?

V. Awakening & Divine Revelation

That question returned while I was rereading the preface to Purser, Forbes, and Burke’s Handbook of Mindfulness.

The editors insist that mindfulness originally belonged to a wider Buddhist path of ethical development, meditative cultivation, and insight into impermanence, suffering, and the absence of a permanent and separate self. They also cite Wilber’s suggestion that Buddhism may be ripe for a “Fourth Turning”—one capable of incorporating developmental psychology, clinical science, sociology, historical scholarship, neuroscience, and other forms of Western knowledge without abandoning Buddhism’s foundational concerns.

Wright’s history makes the prospect of transformation itself look less unprecedented. Chinese Buddhism did not emerge by remaining unchanged. But transformation raises a harder question: What must remain capable of challenging the receiving culture rather than simply becoming intelligible within it?

This is what brought me back to Wise Mind Meets Big Mind, an earlier essay written largely around the developmental problem Linehan’s work had opened for me. DBT offers a way of thinking about the construction of a functional and psychologically flexible self before too quickly celebrating its transcendence. Wise Mind remains within the relative world: emotion regulation, distress tolerance, interpersonal effectiveness, radical acceptance, and the difficult task of building a life worth living.

But Linehan’s memoir now looks stranger to me than the simple opposition between Wise Mind and Big Mind allowed. Her Catholic formation, mystical experiences, Zen practice, psychology, and scientific work do not fall into separate compartments. Zen enters her therapeutic work, but it also enters an older religious life whose language of God, vocation, revelation, and love never simply disappears.

Cohen sits nearby in my thinking for a similar reason. Zen did not erase the Jewish religious imagination through which he spoke about judgment, mercy, brokenness, desire, and God. Nor did Judaism simply absorb Zen and render it unnecessary. I am less interested in these lives as evidence for some perennial unity of religions than as examples of traditions remaining in contact without becoming interchangeable.

That is one reason the language of revelation keeps returning here.

Kensho and divine revelation are not identical, and I do not want to collapse them. But both resist reduction to changes occurring inside an already-given psychological self. Both retain some claim of disclosure—that something may become apparent about self, world, reality, or God rather than merely a change taking place in how an already constituted self thinks, feels, or behaves.

Big Mind still points somewhere Wise Mind does not.

Albert’s account makes the distinction more precise than I had previously put it. He drew a sharp line between experiences of absorption or unity and kensho itself. Samadhi is an experience; kensho, he insisted, is not an experience in quite the same sense. The distinction matters because the phrase nondual experience can quietly preserve the structure it is trying to overcome: there is still someone who has the experience, remembers it, interprets it, and perhaps tries to recover it.

Albert was pointing toward something more radical. Kensho is not another unusual experience added to the contents of consciousness. It is a turnabout in the way experience itself occurs. The ordinarily unquestioned opposition between “me” and “the world,” subject and object, knower and known, no longer organizes things in quite the same way.

That is more radical than psychological flexibility.

But it is not the end of psychological development.

Hakuin’s Four Ways of Knowing move beyond initial breakthrough toward equality, differentiation, and finally action. Albert repeatedly emphasized that awakening does not complete the work of psychological and character development. Ingrained habits, defensiveness, vanity, and forms of immaturity can remain long after genuine insight. What has been awakened to still has to be worked through and lived.

That changes how I understand the failures of Buddhist teachers. Their failures make it impossible to assume that contemplative realization automatically produces psychological maturity, relational integrity, ethical reliability, or political wisdom. But the opposite conclusion—that psychological or moral failure retroactively invalidates contemplative realization—collapses questions that need to remain distinct.

Awakening and development cannot simply be collapsed into one event.

This was partly what I was trying to work through with the integral language of Waking Up, Growing Up, Cleaning Up, and Showing Up. Awakening does not eliminate psychological development. Psychological development does not replace ethical formation. Neither exempts us from history, politics, relationship, or correction.

We do all of this within facticity—within the given conditions of a particular life—not in escape from it.

Returning to Hakuin has made me think that even this formulation leaves something hanging. It tells us why Big Mind needs Wise Mind. It says less about what Big Mind itself is for.

VI. From Big Mind to Big Heart

Returning to Albert’s work has changed how I understand what I was reaching for in putting Big Mind and Big Heart together. Hakuin had already placed the deeper problem inside the structure of the path. The Four Ways of Knowing do not end with the breakthrough of kensho: the Great Perfect Mirror gives way to equality, differentiation, and eventually what Hakuin calls the perfection of action. Awakening has to find its way back into the differentiated world.

This makes me less inclined to think of Big Heart as something that has to be added to Big Mind from outside Buddhism. Wisdom and compassion are already woven through Buddhist traditions, and Hakuin refuses the idea that realization can remain an interior achievement. What interests me is what that older problem looks like once it is brought into conversation with contemporary psychology and process and dialectical philosophy.

FAP has always interested me because it places the therapeutic relationship itself inside the process of change. Rather than treating the relationship primarily as a supportive setting in which problems are discussed, FAP pays close attention to how the patterns that organize a person’s life begin to appear between therapist and client in real time. Someone who withdraws when intimacy becomes uncomfortable may begin withdrawing from the therapist; someone who struggles to ask for what they need may have difficulty doing so in the session; vulnerability, avoidance, trust, courage, and defensiveness become observable not only as stories about relationships elsewhere, but as events occurring within the relationship in front of us.

The therapeutic encounter can therefore become a place where different ways of relating are actually practiced. A moment of greater openness, a willingness to risk vulnerability, or the capacity to remain present rather than retreat can be noticed and strengthened as it occurs. This is part of what makes FAP important to the argument here. Transformation is not confined to what happens within an isolated individual; it takes shape between people, where our habitual ways of protecting ourselves encounter the presence and response of another person.

In The Language Parasite & the Symbolic Order, I drew on the Awareness, Courage, and Love model that emerged from FAP and that Gareth Holman has helped develop, research, and teach. I have been thinking increasingly about the movement among those three terms. Awareness allows us to notice what is happening. Courage allows us to remain present when what is happening becomes difficult. But Love changes the situation because the other person is no longer merely something to become aware of, understand, tolerate, or manage.

This is where Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas have begun to re-enter the picture for me.

Buber’s distinction between I–Thou and I–It names something psychological language can easily obscure. The other can appear as an object within my experience—someone to explain, diagnose, categorize, or manage—or can be encountered as a Thou whose presence changes the character of the relationship itself. Much of ordinary life necessarily takes place within the I–It world. The point is not to eliminate it. It is that a genuinely dialogical relation cannot be reduced to it. The Thou remains more than my representation of the Thou.

Levinas presses the problem in an even more demanding ethical direction. The Other does not merely enrich my experience or offer another perspective to an already constituted self. The encounter with another person interrupts the tendency to organize the world entirely within my own categories. The face of the Other, in Levinas’s language, makes a claim upon me precisely because the other exceeds my capacity to contain them within what I already know.

That language gets close to something I had already been trying to say. The other person remains other. They cannot be absorbed into my realization of nonduality, my psychological account of their behaviour, or my political explanation of the conditions that produced the conflict. In Buber’s terms, a Thou becomes something different when I reduce it entirely to an It. In Levinas’s terms, the Other exceeds the totality through which I would make them intelligible to myself.

Whatever nonseparation means, it cannot mean that difference disappears.

There is a productive tension here with some forms of nondual language, and I do not want to resolve it prematurely. Buber was suspicious of forms of mystical unity that appeared to dissolve relation. Levinas built much of his philosophy around resistance to any totality capable of absorbing the Other into the Same. Zen begins from a different set of questions.

But that difference may be precisely why Buber and Levinas matter here. They force the question of what becomes of otherness after we have spoken of nonseparation.

This is closer to what I am beginning to mean by Big Heart. Not another developmental stage, and not a corrective imposed on Buddhism by Western psychology or Jewish philosophy. It is a way of asking what awakening demands when it is lived within relationship and interdependence—when nonseparation encounters a Thou who cannot be reduced to an object, or an Other whose claim upon me exceeds my own understanding.

That is where the language of love becomes harder than the language of nonduality. Nonduality is one thing to affirm in the abstract, or even encounter on the cushion. It is something else to remain present when someone tells us we have hurt them, when love requires a limit or refusal, or when the person in front of us remains stubbornly resistant to the story we would prefer to tell about ourselves. Spiritual language can become another defence at exactly this point, including the language of emptiness, non-attachment, and transcendence.

Hakuin suggests that awakening itself has to be carried forward into differentiation and action. Buber and Levinas sharpen another dimension of that return. We do not return merely to a differentiated world of objects. We return to relationship—to other people who address us, resist us, surprise us, place limits on our self-understanding, and sometimes make claims upon us that no account of our own realization can settle in advance.

Big Heart, in this sense, is not what comes after Big Mind. It is what Big Mind looks like when it returns to the facticity of the world—to embodiment, history, relationship, and the resistance of the Real.

VII. What Happens to the Heart?

Cohen does not resolve any of this, and that is precisely what makes him useful here. His work refuses the fantasy that these tensions can be cleanly settled. Religion, politics, eros, artistic vocation, and contemplative practice remain entangled rather than reconciled, offering a way of seeing how very different commitments can remain mutually illuminating, contradictory, and unresolved within a single human existence.

His turn toward Zen did not require him to abandon his Judaic faith. Serious contemplative practice did not remove suffering or contradiction. His devotion to a spiritual teacher did not spare him from the ethical complications that later surrounded that relationship. Nor did his encounter with Buddhism erase the Christian and biblical world that continued to haunt his imagination, or the Marxism and political hopes that had marked an earlier period. These different inheritances and commitments remained in uneasy proximity rather than resolving into a single spiritual or political identity.

That is part of what makes Happens to the Heart feel increasingly appropriate to me. Christ and Marx appear almost side by side because, in Cohen’s world, they never belonged to entirely separate questions. Religion asks what we are ultimately answerable to; politics asks what kind of world we are building together; Buddhism calls into question the self around which both projects can become organized; eros unsettles our attempts at detachment; and art gives these tensions forms that argument alone cannot contain. Cohen moves through abstraction, symbol, confession, irony, and image without allowing any one register to settle the others.

Wright’s history places something similar on a much larger scale. Buddhism did not enter China unchanged, and Chinese culture did not remain unchanged by Buddhism. What eventually emerged—including Ch’an itself—was neither simple preservation nor simple corruption. Traditions changed through encounter while remaining recognizably different from one another.

Something analogous is happening in the modern West. Buddhism has passed through psychology, therapeutic culture, capitalism, progressive politics, and the wider conditions of modernity. Christianity is undergoing its own transformations after historical criticism, secularization, psychology, pluralism, and its encounters with other religious traditions. Neither can simply return to a form untouched by those histories.

This is why neither the secularization of religion nor its reactionary restoration seems adequate to me. The contemporary left too often cedes questions of religious and moral formation to the right, while parts of the contemporary religious revival mistake fidelity for the recovery of an earlier order. One side risks reducing Buddhism to mindfulness and spirituality to wellness; the other risks treating inherited tradition as though history could somehow be reversed.

What interests me instead is something closer to what Fred Dallmayr describes as integral pluralism: a genuinely dialogical encounter in which traditions can address, challenge, and change one another without being absorbed into a synthesis whose terms have already been decided in advance. Buddhism can challenge psychology’s assumptions about the self while psychology can disclose forms of suffering, development, and relational difficulty that contemplative realization does not automatically resolve. Political critique can make institutions and material conditions visible without exhausting the religious questions people bring to them. Religious traditions can make substantive claims without placing themselves beyond historical criticism or dialogue.

This also places a demand on integral thought itself. The integral impulse is understandably drawn toward larger frameworks capable of holding fragmented truths together. There is something valuable in that ambition. But integration can become another form of reduction when everything is granted a place only after being translated into categories the system already possesses.

Buber and Levinas sharpen the danger. The Thou becomes an It; the Other is returned to the Same. Something similar can happen between traditions, disciplines, and forms of transformation. An integral approach worth pursuing therefore requires more than the capacity to include. It also requires the capacity to be interrupted—by another person, another tradition, another history, another form of knowledge, or something in experience that refuses incorporation.

The developing work around IACT sits within this tension. Its task, at least at this stage, is not to reconcile psychology, Buddhism, religion, and social critique into a single account. It is to clarify the different kinds of transformation at stake while asking how they might inform and correct one another without any one becoming the measure of the rest.

Perhaps this is where Big Heart begins to mean something different to me. It is not another stage placed beyond Big Mind or Wise Mind, nor a final synthesis of psychology, spirituality, ethics, and politics. Big Heart names something closer to the return: what happens when whatever has been seen, learned, disclosed, or awakened to encounters the facticity of the world—the body, history, institutions, traditions, relationships, and the irreducible presence of other people.

Hakuin’s movement from kensho toward differentiation and action already tells us that awakening has to return to that world. It does not spare us from contradiction or complete the work of development. Political transformation does not answer every religious question, and religious depth does not release us from ethical or political responsibility. Whatever integration finally means, it cannot make these tensions disappear.

It has to remain open to being changed by what it encounters.

References & Further Reading

Contextual Behavioral Science, Mindfulness & Psychotherapy

Hayes, Steven C. “Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Relational Frame Theory, and the Third Wave of Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies.” Behavior Therapy 35, no. 4 (2004): 639–665.

Hayes, Steven C., Victoria M. Follette, and Marsha M. Linehan, eds. Mindfulness and Acceptance: Expanding the Cognitive-Behavioral Tradition. Guilford Press, 2004.

Hofmann, Stefan G., and Steven C. Hayes. “The Future of Intervention Science: Process-Based Therapy.” Clinical Psychological Science 7, no. 1 (2019): 37–50.

Holman, Gareth I., Jonathan W. Kanter, Mavis Tsai, and Robert J. Kohlenberg. Functional Analytic Psychotherapy Made Simple: A Practical Guide to Therapeutic Relationships. New Harbinger Publications, 2017.

Linehan, Marsha M. Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir. Random House, 2020.

Purser, Ronald E., David Forbes, and Adam Burke, eds. Handbook of Mindfulness: Culture, Context, and Social Engagement. Springer, 2016.

Forbes, David. “Critical Integral Contemplative Education.” In Ronald E. Purser, David Forbes, and Adam Burke, eds., Handbook of Mindfulness: Culture, Context, and Social Engagement, 355–367. Springer, 2016.

Forbes, David. Mindfulness and Its Discontents: Education, Self, and Social Transformation. Fernwood Publishing, 2019.

Purser, Ronald E. McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality. Repeater Books, 2019.

Buddhism, Zen & Cultural Translation

Low, Albert. Hakuin on Kensho: The Four Ways of Knowing. Shambhala Publications, 2006.

Victoria, Brian Daizen. Zen at War. 2nd ed. Rowman & Littlefield, 2006.

Sharf, Robert H. “The Zen of Japanese Nationalism.” History of Religions 33, no. 1 (1993): 1–43.

Wright, Arthur F. Buddhism in Chinese History. Stanford University Press, 1959.

Dialogue, Ethics & Integral Theory

Buber, Martin. I and Thou. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. Scribner, 1970.

Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Duquesne University Press, 1969.

Wilber, Ken. “The Pre/Trans Fallacy.” Journal of Humanistic Psychology 22, no. 2 (1982): 5–43.

Wilber, Ken. Integral Spirituality: A Startling New Role for Religion in the Modern and Postmodern World. Integral Books, 2006.

Leonard Cohen

Cohen, Leonard. “Happens to the Heart,” from Thanks for the Dance. Columbia/Legacy, 2019.

Remnick, David. “Leonard Cohen Makes It Darker.” The New Yorker, October 17, 2016.