Mindful Self-Acceptance? Bad Idea According to Ancient Chinese Philosophers. | Michael Puett

Mindfulness is one of the big ideas that’s come in from Asia that’s had a huge impact on America; and basically the idea of mindfulness, as it’s practiced in America, is one of teaching one to accept one’s feelings. If one feels anger or jealousy, just sort of distance oneself from it, and the goal is to allow one to move through the day not being so taken up by these negative emotions. That seems very powerful, but of course the danger of such an approach is that it’s really teaching us not to make any fundamental changes in our life. It’s simply teaching us to accept, and not be so bothered by things, as they occur.

Now, Chinese philosophers will, on the contrary, push strongly that, "No, you actually don’t want to be too comfortable with the world as it is, or with interactions as they are, or with things you’re doing as they currently are being done." They would say, "Oh no, you should actually be training yourself to respond in ways that can actually affect situations for the better — alter your relationships that really alter the situations you’re in." And I would even add, mindfulness, as it was originally practiced, was actually much closer to this idea.

It’s really in America that it’s been turned into a kind of acceptance mantra. Whereas a lot of the Asian philosophies — and this is certainly true of China as well — the focus really is on altering, changing. Changing yourself. Changing your actions. Changing the world in which we exist. We tend to love the idea of nature. We tend to think that our problem as humans is that we’ve become too artificial, and that we should return to nature in some way. Either return to nature as it exists outside of us — so it means taking a nice walk in a park on a weekend, for example — or returning to our nature within ourselves.

So to really stick to who we are, who we fundamentally are, our basic nature that we’re born with, things we’re gifted at doing, and really focus on who we naturally are meant to be. Xunzi would argue that both of these visions of nature are actually potentially dangerous. First of all, let’s begin with the self. The self, sure we’re born with lots of things, but Xunzi would say we’re born with a lot of messy things. We’re born with desires, dispositions, faculties. And we’re all kind of equally born with a bunch of messy stuff.

And the focus shouldn’t be on sticking or returning or embracing that stuff with which we’re born. The goal is actually to change yourself, transform yourself. As Confucius will say, 'overcome this self-meaning, this messy self.' And train yourself to be something better than you were at birth. And Xunzi would even make the same point with the larger natural world around us, pointing out that actually most of what we think of as natural is already quite artificial.

There’s nothing natural about a park. This is an artificial attempt by humans to create a seemingly natural space. To which Xunzi would respond that’s a wonderful thing to do, but let’s be aware that we’ve constructed it, and therefore ask the question with a park, for example, just as we would ask for ourselves, "Have we done a good job of constructing this nature? Have we done a good job of working with this world that we were born into and the stuff that we are born with?"

So his question would always be, 'Don’t return to nature. It’s how you work with things that we are born into, and how you work with the stuff that we were born with.' The danger of thinking that nature is good is that it restrains us. So I’ll give a very typical example. We often like to think that the way to become a good person is to look within, find one’s true self, the sort of natural self that we have.

And once you’ve found that self, that natural thing that you are, the goal is to be sincere and authentic to that true self. So if we stick to what we naturally are meant to be, the gifts that we’re naturally endowed with, that’s how we can be a sincere authentic person. Now, a lot of our Chinese philosophers would say that sou...