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

The stakes of this conceptual confusion are far from academic. When researchers cannot agree on what mindfulness comprises, they cannot reliably interpret the results of mindfulness-based intervention studies, compare findings across trials, or measure whether participants are actually practicing what the intervention intends to teach. The review, led by ZiYoung Kang of Duquesne University together with colleagues at MIT, the New Mind New Life Association in Seoul, and Duquesne’s Gumberg Library, was motivated by a long-running scholarly dispute. Critics drawing on Buddhist sources, including the scholar-monk Bhikkhu Bodhi, have argued for years that the popular definition of mindfulness as present-centered, non-judgmental awareness strips away essential components of the original construct—components that may matter enormously for well-being.

To bring order to this debate, the team conducted a rigorously preregistered scoping review following the Joanna Briggs Institute methodology and reported according to the PRISMA-ScR guidelines, with the protocol registered on the Open Science Framework. A medical librarian developed search strategies across ten databases, including PubMed, Embase, PsycINFO, Scopus, and the Atla Religion Database. The initial searches, conducted in March 2025 with an updated search in June 2026, yielded more than ten thousand records. After removing nearly seven thousand duplicates, the reviewers screened 3,568 records, assessed 950 full-text articles, and ultimately included 120 publications, all drawn from journals ranked in the top quartile of the SCImago Journal Rank system in at least one discipline. Inter-rater agreement between the two independent reviewers, measured with Cohen’s kappa, ranged from almost perfect at the title and abstract stage to moderate during full-text review, with disagreements resolved through discussion.

The included articles, published between 2007 and 2026, revealed a striking trend: scholarly interest in comparing Buddhist and contemporary conceptualizations of mindfulness has accelerated over time, with only nine articles appearing between 2007 and 2011 but forty-eight published between 2022 and 2026. Nearly half of the included articles appeared in the journal Mindfulness itself, with the remainder spread across psychology, philosophy, education, business, medicine, and religious studies. Using inductive content analysis, the researchers treated verbatim excerpts discussing the differences as meaning units, condensed and coded them into 71 codes, and retained for categorization only those codes appearing in at least six articles—a pragmatic threshold designed to focus on recurring patterns rather than isolated arguments.

Four major categories of difference emerged from the analysis. The first and most frequently discussed concerned ethics and transformation: Buddhist conceptualizations of mindfulness are oriented toward ethical behavior and liberating self-transformation, whereas contemporary definitions largely leave these aims unmentioned. The single most common code in the entire analysis—appearing in 71 of the 120 articles—contrasted the ethical dimension emphasized in Buddhist accounts with its de-emphasis in contemporary ones. The second category captured a deep tension over judgment: Buddhist accounts describe mindfulness as involving discerning awareness and wise judgment, informed by recollection and insight into the impermanent, selfless nature of experience, while contemporary definitions foreground bare, present-centered, non-judgmental attention. The third category, appearing in roughly one-third of the articles, noted that in Buddhist frameworks mindfulness is inseparable from an interconnected system of practices, such as the Noble Eightfold Path and the threefold training in ethics, concentration, and wisdom, whereas contemporary treatments present it as a standalone technique. The fourth category highlighted heedfulness—the vigilant guarding of the mind and the remembering of one’s intentions—a quality conspicuously absent from modern definitions.

The recollection question proved especially contentious within the literature itself. The Pāli word sati, conventionally translated as mindfulness, is etymologically related to the verb sarati, to remember, and 34 of the included articles debated what this implies. The scholar Anālayo has argued that mindfulness of breathing does not involve recalling the past, so memory should not be equated with sati. Benjamin Levman countered that sati is recollection conjoined with wisdom, since discerning wholesome from unwholesome states requires comparison against a standard held in mind. Leonard Rapgay proposed a middle path, conceptualizing sati as the active employment of working memory to monitor and adjust ongoing practice. Rather than declaring a winner, the review treats these positions as addressing different functional aspects of the same construct.

From this synthesis, the authors propose a four-component process model designed to be empirically testable and religiously neutral. Component one, sound awareness, preserves the contemporary core: an innate, clear, non-judgmental awareness undistorted by habitual reactions—a quality the authors argue is refined through practice rather than created by it, echoing both Kabat-Zinn’s formulation and Bhikkhu Bodhi’s description of sati as lucid awareness through which objects stand forth vividly before the mind. Component two, discerning awareness and wise judgment, reintroduces the evaluative dimension, allowing practitioners to distinguish wholesome from unwholesome responses, drawing on recollection of the past and consideration of future consequences. Component three, choice and action guided by wise judgment, translates that discernment into ethical conduct and self-transformation. Component four, heedfulness—rooted in the Pāli term appamāda, described by one scholar as awareness suffused with ethical care—acts as an underlying vigilance that keeps the other three components on track by continuously remembering one’s intentions and redirecting attention accordingly.

The model also offers a principled resolution to the apparent contradiction between non-judgmental awareness and judgment. Following earlier proposals, the authors suggest that non-judgmental awareness operates in the background while discriminative, evaluative processes required for daily functioning occur in the foreground. Non-judgmental awareness, in this reading, refers specifically to the absence of habitual, affectively charged reactivity—not the absence of evaluation itself. Sound awareness creates what one quoted study called the spaciousness between stimulus and response that allows wholesome mental states to arise, and it serves as the foundation upon which accurate discernment becomes possible, since distorted perception hinders wise judgment. The threefold training maps neatly onto the model: concentration corresponds to sound awareness, wisdom to discerning judgment, and ethics to guided action.

Perhaps the most exciting implications lie in neuroscience. The authors argue that each component maps onto well-established cognitive processes that can be probed with validated task-based fMRI paradigms. Sound awareness, with its emphasis on de-automatizing habitual reactions, could be investigated using the Stop Signal Task, which engages the right inferior frontal gyrus and pre-supplementary motor area. Discerning awareness and wise judgment could be probed with the Emotional N-back Task, which requires maintaining working memory representations amid emotionally charged distractors and activates the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, and amygdala. Guided choice and action could be assessed with prosocial decision-making games such as the Dictator and Ultimatum Games, which recruit the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and temporoparietal junction. The authors also connect the model to emerging third wave meditation research, which investigates advanced contemplative development—profound insight, enduring shifts in one’s sense of self, and powerful compassion—beyond the therapeutic effects documented in earlier waves of mindfulness science.

The authors are candid about the review’s limitations. Restricting inclusion to top-quartile journals excluded influential monographs and edited volumes where some of the most important scholarship on this topic appears. The review also cannot determine whether contemporary mindfulness practice already implicitly cultivates the complementary components it identifies, and the binary Buddhist-versus-contemporary framework is itself a constructed analytic category—MBSR, after all, emerged through deliberate reframing of Buddhist-derived practices for medical settings. Both categories harbor substantial internal diversity, and the proposed model is offered not as a definitive account of Buddhist mindfulness but as one possible integrative configuration. Still, the ambition is clear: by treating ethical orientation, wise judgment, and heedfulness as complementary components rather than incompatible alternatives, the model could sharpen both the practice and the science of mindfulness, guide the development of new self-report measures and interventions, and help a field that has long been criticized for conceptual muddle finally test, with rigorous methods, whether the full traditional recipe outperforms its modern, stripped-down version.

Subject of Research: Comparing contemporary and Buddhist conceptualizations of mindfulness to develop an integrative process model

Article Title: Bridging the Gap Between Contemporary and Buddhist Definitions of Mindfulness: A Scoping Review

Article References: Bridging the Gap Between Contemporary and Buddhist Definitions of Mindfulness: A Scoping Review. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-026-02979-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12671-026-02979-4

Keywords: mindfulness, Buddhism, scoping review, mindfulness-based interventions, sati, ethics, wise judgment, heedfulness, contemplative neuroscience, MBSR, content analysis, process model

The concept of soft power, famously theorized by Joseph Nye, describes a state’s ability to achieve preferred outcomes through attraction rather than coercion or payment. Tiwary and Gunasekaran apply this framework to a domain that has received comparatively little systematic attention in international relations scholarship: the restoration, conservation, and celebration of Hindu and Buddhist temple sites across Southeast Asia. Their study traces how India’s historical ties with the region, rooted in shared religious traditions and sustained cultural exchange dating back more than a millennium, form the foundation for contemporary diplomatic initiatives. From the Hindu-Buddhist kingdoms that flourished in Cambodia, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Thailand to the circulation of the Ramayana epic across the region, the authors contend that this deep civilizational substrate gives India a distinctive form of cultural capital that few other powers can credibly claim.

The methodological core of the study is a qualitative analysis of key examples of temple restoration projects, cultural exchanges, and educational collaborations. India’s involvement in the conservation of the Angkor Wat complex in Cambodia stands as the most prominent case in this tradition, alongside restoration work at other heritage sites across the region. Such projects, the authors argue, operate on multiple levels simultaneously. At the material level, they transfer technical expertise in archaeology, epigraphy, and conservation science. At the symbolic level, they signal respect for the host nation’s heritage and frame India as a custodian of a shared civilizational legacy rather than a foreign power pursuing narrow strategic interests. The researchers highlight how these initiatives promote mutual understanding and cooperation, generating goodwill that conventional diplomatic instruments often struggle to achieve.

The study situates temple diplomacy within India’s broader foreign policy evolution, from the Look East policy of the 1990s to the more assertive Act East framework of recent decades. Under the current administration, soft power instruments including Buddhism, the diaspora, and yoga have been consciously elevated in Indian diplomacy, and temple diplomacy extends this repertoire into the architectural and ritual domain. The authors note that cultural dimensions have become increasingly central to India’s engagement with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, complementing trade agreements, connectivity projects, and security dialogues. In their assessment, temple diplomacy strengthens India’s soft power while contributing to the broader goals of regional stability and cultural connectivity across Southeast Asia.

What makes the study particularly timely is the competitive context in which it is written. The authors devote significant attention to the challenges India faces, including cultural misunderstandings and competition from other regional powers. China has invested heavily in heritage diplomacy of its own, from the Sinocentric historicisation of transnational World Heritage Sites in Central Asia to Buddhist cultural diplomacy linking Chinese and Thai temples. Japan has long deployed pop-culture diplomacy, South Korea has pursued cultural engagement through its New Southern Policy, and infrastructural competition between India and China plays out across Myanmar, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Against this crowded field of cultural statecraft, the study suggests that India’s advantage lies in authenticity: the temple traditions of Southeast Asia are genuinely intertwined with those of the subcontinent, making Indian engagement in this sphere difficult for rivals to replicate.

The research also engages with the relational dimension of soft power, emphasizing that temple diplomacy works through people-to-people bonds rather than top-down messaging. Educational collaborations, cultural festivals, dance traditions such as those celebrated at Konark in Odisha, and the shared narrative repertoire of the Ramayana all create channels of contact between Indian and Southeast Asian publics. The authors argue that these channels matter because attraction, unlike military capability, cannot simply be decreed by governments; it must be cultivated through sustained, credible interaction. Sacred sites, in this reading, function as what might be called diplomatic infrastructure: physical spaces that anchor recurring pilgrimages, scholarly exchanges, and ceremonial events that keep bilateral relationships warm even when high-level politics cool.

The study does not present temple diplomacy as a panacea. Cultural misunderstandings remain a real risk, since the religious symbolism that resonates with one audience may be misread or contested by another. Southeast Asian nations guard their foreign policy autonomy carefully and are wary of any initiative that appears to assert Indian cultural primacy over their own distinctive traditions. The authors are candid that the effectiveness of these initiatives varies, and that temple diplomacy must be pursued with sensitivity to local ownership of heritage. A restoration project perceived as generous conservation partnership builds goodwill; one perceived as cultural appropriation could damage it. This tension between civilizational narrative and national sovereignty is, in the authors’ view, the central management problem of temple diplomacy.

The geopolitical stakes are considerable. The study situates its analysis within the broader literature on India’s China strategy, minilateral and multilateral soft balancing in the Indo-Pacific, and the evolving geopolitics of India-ASEAN engagement. In this framing, temple diplomacy is not a substitute for hard power but a complement to it, part of a portfolio of instruments through which India constrains the influence of competitors without direct confrontation. The authors draw on recent scholarship describing how geopolitical codes are constructed through both material projects and discursive claims, and temple diplomacy operates precisely at this intersection: it is a material intervention in physical heritage sites that simultaneously makes a discursive claim about who belongs to which civilizational community. The finding that such cultural strategies contribute to regional stability suggests that soft power instruments may play a stabilizing role even amid intensifying great power rivalry.

For the field of international relations, the study contributes to a growing body of work on cultural approaches to diplomacy, joining analyses of gastronomic diplomacy, sport mega-events, film co-productions, and textile heritage as instruments of national branding. Its distinctive contribution is to demonstrate that religious architecture, often treated by political scientists as a static backdrop to politics, can be analyzed as an active variable in diplomatic strategy. The authors conclude that temple diplomacy not only strengthens India’s soft power but also positions India as a pivotal player in the evolving geopolitical landscape of Southeast Asia. As competition for influence in the Indo-Pacific intensifies, the study suggests that the contest may be decided not only in naval deployments and trade negotiations but also in the quiet, patient work of restoring sacred stones that two civilizations have shared for over a thousand years.

Subject of Research: Temple diplomacy as a soft power strategy in India's relations with Southeast Asian nations

Article Title: Temple diplomacy: India’s cultural strategy for enhancing soft power in southeast Asia

Article References: Temple diplomacy: India’s cultural strategy for enhancing soft power in southeast Asia. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01753-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01753-6

Keywords: temple diplomacy, soft power, India, Southeast Asia, cultural diplomacy, religious heritage, Angkor Wat, Act East policy, India-ASEAN relations, Hinduism, Buddhism, geopolitics