Buddhist-Derived Meditation Resonates with Non-Buddhist Students, but Not All Practices Feel Equal

Mindfulness has travelled a long way from the monasteries of ancient India to the seminar rooms of modern universities, yet a persistent question has shadowed its journey: can people with no religious connection to Buddhism genuinely engage with practices drawn from that tradition? A new qualitative study published in the journal Mindfulness suggests the answer is a qualified yes, with an important caveat. Non-Buddhist university students in China were largely able to find meaning in Buddhist-derived contemplative practices, but not every practice proved equally accessible, and the specific mix of techniques an intervention contains appears to shape what participants actually experience.

The research, conducted by Matthew Furnell, James Elander and William Van Gordon of the University of Derby, compared two eight-week second-generation mindfulness-based interventions, or SG-MBIs. Unlike first-generation programmes such as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, which centre almost exclusively on attentional training, second-generation approaches explicitly incorporate practices derived from Buddhist ethics and wisdom traditions. The study exploited a novel threefold classification system grounded in the Buddhist three trainings of concentration (samādhi), ethics (śīla) and wisdom (prajñā). One intervention, labelled MBI-CE, combined concentration-based practices such as breath-focused awareness with ethics-based practices including loving-kindness and compassion meditation. The second, MBI-CEW, retained those elements but replaced three weeks of ethics training with wisdom-based practices exploring impermanence, attachment and interdependence.

Participants were 38 non-Buddhist students aged 18 to 24 at a British overseas university in mainland China, none of whom had previously completed a formal mindfulness programme. The researchers gathered written course reflections from the entire cohort as exploratory scoping material, then conducted semi-structured interviews with twelve randomly selected participants, six from each condition. Interview transcripts were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis, a method that treats the researcher’s own perspective as an explicit part of the interpretive process rather than a bias to be eliminated. The lead analyst, himself a Buddhist meditation practitioner and the designer of both interventions, documented how his familiarity with the material might have shaped what he noticed in the data, and deliberately attended to accounts of confusion, ambivalence and difficulty alongside positive reports.

Four themes emerged from the analysis. The first was that Buddhist-derived concepts were experienced as meaningful but not uniformly accessible. Far from recoiling from explicitly Buddhist content, participants frequently described it as helpful and educational, clarifying the purpose of the meditations rather than obscuring it. Storytelling played a striking role here: parables such as A Chinese Farmer (Maybe) and The Meaning of True Tranquillity helped translate abstract philosophy into relatable narrative. One participant captured the prevailing sentiment neatly, explaining that the course was not about believing in Buddhism but about showing very good perspectives on how this philosophy can positively impact life. The concepts functioned as an educational resource, not a religious demand.

Yet accessibility varied considerably across practice types. Some students found the later ethics-based practices, which asked them to extend gratitude and kindness towards strangers, conceptually and emotionally harder than simple breath focus. One participant admitted confusion about why one should feel grateful for strangers and difficulty feeling into the body during those meditations, remarking that it would be easier to just focus on the breath. In the wisdom-based condition, another student described the content as positive but difficult because it stressed the inside self. These accounts point to uneven terrain rather than outright rejection: practices probing the nature of self, long regarded as among the most demanding dimensions of Buddhist training, asked participants to entertain ideas that their existing frameworks did not necessarily accommodate.

Cultural and linguistic context added further layers. Several participants noted that Buddhist-derived practices felt culturally familiar because of their deep historical roots in Chinese philosophy, yet they distinguished between surface familiarity and genuine understanding, with one observing that many people in China know of the Buddha without knowing what the teachings actually contain. Language mattered too: one participant highlighted how the Chinese term zhèngniàn, often translated as mindfulness, carries nuances that English struggles to capture. The study’s setting is significant, since the students lived within a culture historically shaped by Buddhist ideas but also by Confucian ethical traditions, which prioritise hierarchical obligations to family and close relations in ways that can sit uneasily with the Buddhist ideal of extending compassion equally to all beings. That tension may partly explain why kindness towards strangers proved challenging for some.

The second major theme concerned well-being, awareness and connectedness. Participants in both conditions reported that the practices helped them regulate anger, exhaustion and academic pressure, with several describing short meditative breaks used to defuse stress between study sessions. Crucially, the benefits did not stop at stress reduction. Students in the wisdom-based condition described contemplations of impermanence prompting them to question the stability of their own identity, with one participant noting that the class led them to think about philosophy concerning who they really are. Participants in both groups also reported heightened attentiveness to other people’s emotions, but the flavour of connectedness differed. The ethics-focused group tended to describe empathy and observation of others’ feelings, while the wisdom group more often articulated a broader sense of interdependence extending to family, community, nature and the environment, with one student describing how meditation practice shifted her attention from rushing down the street to noticing trees and birds.

The third theme offered a small but revealing behavioural window. At the end of the course, participants entered a raffle for 1000 RMB and could keep their ticket or donate it to the World Food Programme. Many framed their donation as an expression of connection, care and even moral responsibility, with one student stating simply that he felt responsible to make the world more kind, and another linking the decision to the course’s opening primer, which framed meditation as a practice undertaken to better oneself, one’s family and one’s community. Not every participant reasoned in these terms, however; one cited the low odds of winning, a reminder that prosocial behaviour rarely follows a single motivational script.

The fourth theme concerned structure. Students valued the eight-week, two-hour format as a protected space they might otherwise have filled with less meaningful activity, and one first-year student credited the course with easing her transition into university life more effectively than a standard induction week. But the programme’s limits were also visible. The weekly meditation journal, intended as a reflective tool, sometimes felt like homework, with one participant confessing to making up entries when time ran short. Others felt the course was too compressed to explore certain practices in real depth, exposing a tension between the breadth of the contemplative repertoire and the time available to embody it.

The study’s broader message is methodological as much as practical. Because the two interventions produced distinct experiential patterns, with ethics-based practices aligning with empathy and interpersonal warmth and wisdom-based practices aligning with existential reflection and ecological connectedness, the authors argue that second-generation MBIs should not be treated as an interchangeable category. Grouping interventions with different contemplative compositions under one label risks masking meaningful variation in both content and outcome. At the same time, the findings suggest no trade-off: adding ethics and wisdom elements did not erode the stress-regulation and attentional benefits associated with classical mindfulness training, and a companion quantitative study found greater improvements in well-being, connectedness and prosocial attitudes in the wisdom-inclusive condition. The researchers caution that their sample was culturally homogeneous and the interview sub-samples small, so the findings remain exploratory. But the core insight travels well: what people get from meditation depends substantially on what, precisely, they are asked to practise, and careful pedagogical framing, through stories, metaphors and experiential activities, may matter as much as the practices themselves.

Subject of Research: Participant experience of second-generation mindfulness-based interventions incorporating Buddhist-derived ethics- and wisdom-based practices among non-Buddhist university students

Article Title: How Practice Differences Shape Participant Experience in Second-Generation Mindfulness-Based Interventions: A Qualitative Study of Non-Buddhist University Students

Article References: Furnell, M., Elander, J., & Van Gordon, W. (2026). How Practice Differences Shape Participant Experience in Second-Generation Mindfulness-Based Interventions: A Qualitative Study of Non-Buddhist University Students. Mindfulness. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-026-02997-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12671-026-02997-2

Keywords: mindfulness, meditation, Buddhism, second-generation mindfulness-based interventions, qualitative research, university students, loving-kindness, wisdom practices, prosocial behaviour, well-being, connectedness, thematic analysis