A Brief History of Hinduism

Hinduism is widely considered to be the oldest extant religion in the world, but it is hard to trace its history. This is because it initially arose as a synthesis of many religious traditions around the historical region that now makes up India. In other words, Hinduism has no single founder and no concrete starting point. In fact, the religious tradition was not even called Hinduism or considered a singular entity until British writers started calling Vedic traditions “Hinduism” in the 1800s. The earliest traditions, which have since been incorporated into Hinduism, arose more than 4,000 years ago in the Indus Valley— now Pakistan. These religious traditions continued to develop in Vedic writings 2,500-3,500 years ago. These writings included rituals and the worship of the gods common to modern-day Hinduism. About 1,500-2,500 years ago, additional texts were composed which are involved in present-day Hinduism, including texts introducing the concepts of dharma and temple worship.

A few hundred years ago, Hinduism experienced some competition in India with the rise of Islam, but 19th-century reformers revitalized Hinduism and helped tie it to the national identity of India. This proved to be successful because middle-class Indians started identifying with Hinduism around the mid-19th century (Hatcher, 2007). This connection was then solidified about a hundred years later with the Indian independence movement.

Mindfulness has been intertwined with Hinduism for millennia. From the Bhagavad Gita’s discussions of yoga to Vedic meditation, the history of Hinduism reads in part like a history of mindfulness. Of course, it is only a partial history—another crucial player in the history of mindfulness is Buddhism and it should be noted that even Buddhism owes a great debt to Hinduism.

How Mindfulness Moved From East to West

Perhaps the biggest influence on bringing mindfulness from the East to the West, at least recently, was Jon Kabat-Zinn. Kabat-Zinn founded the Center for Mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and the Oasis Institute for Mindfulness-Based Professional Education and Training. This is where Kabat-Zinn developed his Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program, an eight-week program aimed at reducing stress. Kabat-Zinn learned about and studied mindfulness under several Buddhist teachers, including Thich Nhat Hanh (an influential and popular figure in Western mindfulness himself). This gave him an Eastern foundation in mindfulness that he integrated with Western science to develop MBSR.

This integration with Western science was a crucial aspect in helping mindfulness gain widespread popularity in the West. MBSR served as an inspiration for another mindfulness-based therapy program, Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT). This therapy is aimed at treating Major Depressive Disorder. This and other integrations of science and mindfulness helped popularize mindfulness in the West, particularly for audiences accustomed to Western science and unfamiliar with Eastern practices.

Aside from academic science, Jack Kornfield, Sharon Salzberg, and Joseph Goldstein also played a crucial role in bringing mindfulness to the West when they founded the Insight Meditation Society (IMS) in 1975. The IMS helped introduce mindfulness meditation to the West, and the combination of mindfulness meditation and MBSR helped popularize mindfulness in the West within both clinical and non-clinical populations. Of course, the IMS is just one of many organizations that have helped popularize mindfulness meditation in the West, and in the United States in particular.

Mindfulness’ Role in (Positive) Psychology

Mindfulness plays an important role in both the greater field of psychology and positive psychology specifically. MBSR and MBCT have become accepted tools for psychologists to treat a variety of patients. Mindfulness meditation has become a useful tool in positive psychology for anyone looking to increase their levels of wellbeing and MBSR has also become popular in non-clinical populations.

Western science has evolved to the point where it can evaluate the effectiveness of practicing mindfulness— making mindfulness an attractive option for those who are skeptical of Eastern traditions. As mindfulness can be practiced in many different ways for many different uses, it is a perfect tool for any practitioner’s toolbox. In fact, a group of researchers recently attempted to directly integrate mindfulness with positive psychology in an intervention they called the Positive Mindfulness Program (Ivtzan et al., 2016). The goal of this study was to combine mindfulness training and positive psychology interventions for the purpose of increasing the wellbeing of participants. The researchers were successful in doing so—showing that positive psychology and mindfulness can be combined in a research setting.

(Source: Joaquín Selva, Bc.S)