Mindfulness and Ethics
This essay explores the role of the two aspects of mindfulness (smṛti and samprajanya) in ethical discipline. It argues that mindfulness understood as the union of these two attitudes is essential to the kind of perception and attention necessary for spontaneous moral engagement with the world. The essay first discusses why mindfulness is so important in Buddhist ethics. It then turns to the importance of spontaneity, first in the Aristotelian and then in the Zen tradition. It closes by showing why spontaneity can be understood as desirable only if infused by the kind of mindfulness philosophers such as Śāntideva recommend, and why mindfulness can be morally efficacious only if it suffuses our perception and action so as to render them spontaneous.