Rev. Danny Fisher

Back in July, the Los Angeles Times ran an article by Nick Street, a Soto Zen priest and fellow with News21, a Carnegie-Knight initiative in journalism education at U.S.C. I’ve been mulling over it since I read it.

In the piece, Street looks at the teaching of meditation in public schools.

Scientists at the University of Massachusetts established the effectiveness of meditation for reducing stress and anxiety in the 1980s. And recent studies at U.C.L.A. concluded that kids with attention-deficit and hyperactivity disorders showed clear improvement in concentration and cognitive abilities after learning techniques similar to those used at the Oakland school.

These studies have lent credibility to a growing movement to introduce meditation and mindfulness programs into the nation’s schools. The number of such programs has jumped from just a handful five years ago to more than 100 at the start of the coming school year. In Southern California, the David Lynch Foundation is sponsoring start-up transcendental meditation programs at two publicly funded schools–one in Inglewood and another in Sun Valley.

The author goes on to consider the potential legal trouble around introducing meditation practice to K-12 students.

“It’s not the business of schools to lead kids to inner peace through a spiritual process,” says Edward Tabash, chairman of the national legal committee for Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. Tabash, a self-described secular humanist, predicts an imminent court battle. “I can quite frankly see a coalition between religious fundamentalists and atheists challenging this.”

Last fall, the Pacific Justice Institute, a legal advocacy group for conservative Christian issues, launched an opening salvo. The institute took up the cause of parents who objected to a TM school program in Marin County, which prompted the Lynch Foundation to withdraw its support.

[...]

“What’s religious about learning to follow your breath?” asks Wendi Caporicci, a devout Catholic and the principal at Oakland’s Emerson Elementary. George Rutherford, the principal at Ideal Academy, takes a similar view of transcendental mediation, which he has practiced for over a decade. “I’m a Baptist, and my wife has a doctorate in Christian education,” he says, adding that TM “is not a religion.”

A federal district court came to a different conclusion in 1979. The court said TM couldn’t be taught in publicly funded schools in New Jersey because the practice–with its ties to a specific spiritual leader–violated the establishment clause of the 1st Amendment.

At this point, Street chimes in with his own views on the constitutionality of teaching meditation in public schools. Some are quite provacative.

The common rallying point for any anti-mindfulness coalition would be opposition to teaching practices that trace their roots to Buddhism and Hinduism in public schools. Why should mantras and meditation be allowed to slip past the formidable barrier of legal precedent that has largely kept prayer out of the schools for the last 50 years?

The short answer to that question: When they’re stripped of their Eastern cultural trappings, meditation and other mindfulness techniques are not religious practices, so there’s no reason to ban them in public schools. Choral music comes out of Christian church traditions, but no one objects to a school choir.

[...]

…The medical study of TM and Buddhist-derived mindfulness techniques has changed both the practices themselves and attitudes toward them. The new “medicalized” meditation and mindfulness programs seem more likely to pass constitutional muster.

The Supreme Court has already weighed in on what counts as a religious practice or belief. In United States vs. Seeger (1965), the court determined that a conscientious objector who justified his claim of exemption from the draft by quoting Plato, Aristotle and Spinoza couldn’t be compelled to serve in the armed forces because his beliefs occupied a place in his life “parallel to that filled by God.” It would be hard to argue that meditation has replaced religion for people like Rutherford and Caporicci.

None of the hallmarks of religious systems–doctrine, cosmology, ethics, clergy, devotion to a deity or reverence for a prophetic teacher–figure into these mindfulness and meditation programs that are beginning to raise the ire of church-state activists. More to the point, these programs teach skills–how to pay attention and regulate the emotions–that many parents and teachers are eager for kids to learn.

It seems to me that from a religious studies vantage point, there are problems with the suggestion that “medicalized” or “secularized” forms of Buddhist and/or Hindu meditation are somehow areligious. Now, don’t get me wrong: I certainly think that these meditation practices have benefits and applications outside of organized religion…but I seriously question the notion that they can ever be completely “stripped” of their “cultural trappings.”

The great Buddhist scholar Richard Gombrich is particularly convincing on this point. Speaking about the “liberal, Protestant” Buddhist movement in modern Sri Lanka, he writes:

The recurrent claim that Buddhism is not a religion on a par with others but something of a different order, maybe a ‘way of life,’ so that the other religions are or may be compatible with it, is, among other things, an attempt to reclaim Buddhist uniqueness. What is being claimed, usually in a very vague and muddled way, can be expressed in my terms: that the other religions are all right on the communal level, but only the Buddha pointed the true way to salvation. [1]

Gombrich goes on to make what I think is an extremely astute observation about what is happening when one attempts to secularize Buddhist meditation, writing:

To use meditation for secular purposes is to try to adapt Buddhist soteriology to life in the world. [2]

The different traditions of meditation that exist in the world–Buddhist or other–were all developed with particular soteriological goals in mind. They certainly didn’t occur in vacuums. Looking specifically at Buddhism again for a moment, even if we want to understand it as some kind of “transhistorical set of techniques for quieting the mind and attaining liberation,” Marilyn Ivy contends that we’re still talking about something that is unmistakably Buddhist:

Perhaps we should talk about post-Buddhism instead, an amalgam of therapy, breath awareness, and mindfulness techniques suited for the inhabitants of postmodernity. Yet as in ‘post’-anything, the post still bears the trace of that which has been superseded: post-Buddhism is still post-Buddhism. [3]

I am a Buddhist practitioner–happily and proudly so. I am also a certified teacher of mindfulness meditation. Do I think mindfulness meditation as it was taught by the Buddha can benefit beings? You better believe it. Do I think it should be taught in schools? No. To my way of thinking, this violates the separation of church and state. (Besides, to echo the sentiments of Edward Tabash of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, I’m not really sure this sort of thing is the providence of public schools anyway.) I am, of course, fine with meditation being taught in before-or-after-school programs that students, faculty, and staff at public schools could choose to be a part of or not, but I think that making a meditation program part of the school day is problematic. (If we were talking about “secular” programs of prayer or worship, would the conversation have gone this far?)

But what do you think? I’m always interested in reader feedback, but I especially want to hear from you on this. Have I missed the mark? Is Street right on the mark? Are neither of us near the mark? What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comments section. (Commenting requires a Blogger account. If you don’t want to create one, you can email me your comments. Just follow the link in my profile page.)

WORKS CITED:

1. Richard Gombrich, Theravada Buddhism: A Social History from Ancient Benares to Modern Colombo (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), 199.
2. Ibid., 208.
3. Marilyn Ivy, “Modernity” in Critical Terms for the Study of Buddhism, ed. Donald S. Lopez, Jr., 328 (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2005)