This essay critiques the standard characterization of mindfulness as present-centred non-judgmental awareness, arguing that this account misses same of the central features of mindfulness as described by classical Buddhist accounts, which present mindfulness as being relevant to the past as weil as to the present. I show that for these sources the central feature of mindfulness is not its present foeus but its capacity to hold its object and thus allow for sustained attention, regardless of wh ether the object is present or not. I further show that for these sources mindfulness can be explicitly evaluative, thus demonstrating the degree to which classical Buddhist accounts differ from the modern description of mindfulness as non-judgmental. I conclude that although this modern description may be useful as an operational definition intended for practical instruction, it does not provide an adequate basis for a theoretical analysis of mindfulness, for it fails to emphasize its retentive nature to privilege its alleged nonconceptuality.

It is only a few years aga that I discovered the extent to wh ich the concept of mindfulness had become common within the field of psychology. I was at first pleasantly surprised that a concept so central to Buddhist practice could be used with great effectiveness as a therapeutic tool, but quickly my enthusiasm gave way to a certain unease at the ways in which psychologists treated this topic, taking it as more or less self-evident or discussing it through cursory definitions based on the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn (1990). I was struck by the extent to which these psychological discussions proceeded without any serious reference to the original Buddhist sources from which they were supposed to derive. As a Buddhist scholar I feit that these discussions often missed important points and presented a view of mindfulness that I had trouble recognizing at times. The first temptation for me was to view these presentations as simply inauthentic, failing to be true to the ideas found in the original texts. This did not disqualify them, for I thought that there is nothing wrong with a thorough reinterpretation of old ideas to adapt