The paper, published on 24 September 2026, makes a technical but consequential argument. The standard paradigm typology descends from a specific tradition, the researcher-defined paradigm model articulated by Egon Guba and Yvonna Lincoln in 1994. Recent work by R. Chafe has shown that this is one paradigm conception among several, not a neutral framework. Kuhn’s discipline paradigms and Burrell and Morgan’s sociological positions perform different functions and rest on different assumptions. The Guba-Lincoln model holds that paradigms are worldviews possessed by individual researchers, declared at the start of every project, and grounded in basic beliefs accepted on faith. Crucially, all of its available positions are organised around a single axis: how the relation between subject and object is configured. Positivism says the subject can access an independent object. Constructivism says the subject builds the object. Poststructuralism, even in Foucault’s sophisticated historicisation of the knower and the known, keeps that relationship at centre stage. None of these options questions whether the two-pole structure itself is fundamental.

That question is precisely what nondualism raises. The position, as the authors define it, is that the subject-object distinction is not a basic feature of reality but a derived, pragmatic structuring within experience. This is easy to mishear. Nondualism is not monism, which answers the question of how many fundamental kinds of things exist with the number one; nondualism declines the question altogether. It is not idealism, which collapses matter into mind, nor eliminative materialism, which collapses mind into matter; both still operate within the two-pole framing. And it is not mysticism. The position requires no special states of consciousness, asserts no hidden unity behind ordinary experience, and does not treat the everyday world as illusory. Its claim is structural: the organisation of experience into a knower in here and a known out there is one way experience gets organised, not the way reality fundamentally is.

The authors are careful about genealogy. There is no generic nondualism, and no single Buddhist nondualism either. The lineage they draw on runs from Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka analysis, which argued that all phenomena, including subject and object, lack intrinsic self-standing existence, through Yogācāra and Chan/Zen, and into the modern Kyoto School founded by Nishida Kitarō. Nishida’s concept of pure experience, a pre-reflective awareness in which subject and object have not yet been distinguished, and his later logic of place and absolute nothingness, gave nondualism a rigorous philosophical articulation that requires no scriptural authority. The authors deliberately avoid Advaita Vedānta, whose nonduality rests on the positive theological claim that Brahman is real. Madhyamaka-derived analysis, by contrast, proceeds by negation and asserts nothing of its own, which is why the authors argue it fits with empirical science, a discipline that likewise asks for no article of faith.

To make this philosophy usable for working researchers, the paper builds on a recent framework called unitlessness, introduced by Krägeloh in 2025. The framework distinguishes three structural levels. The first is units: the level of language, categories, and description, where all standard research methods operate, from quantitative measurement to qualitative coding. The second is unity: pre-discursive experience, what Nishida called pure experience, which is not yet divided into subject and object. The third is unitlessness: the enveloping ground from which both units and unity arise, which cannot be described because description requires units. The levels are connected by bidirectional movement, and the framework is trans-discursive rather than non-discursive: it does not reject language but locates it at one level among others. Nothing in the framework rejects standard methods; it simply recognises the level at which they operate.

The methodological consequences are more modest than one might expect, and the authors are explicit about what does not change. Research methods are left entirely untouched. A researcher adopting a nondual paradigm position uses the same statistical tests, coding procedures, and interview techniques as anyone else. What changes is how findings are worded and what they are taken to show. First-person and third-person methods are located at the same structural level rather than ranked on a hierarchy of fundamentality. The framework does not elevate first-person inquiry, does not privilege practitioners, and does not require researchers to meditate or to have had any nondual experience. The argument is philosophical and structural, not experiential. Nondualism enters paradigm debate on the same terms as any other position, succeeding or failing by whether it generates productive research.

The paper illustrates the difference with a concrete case from neuroscience. A well-replicated finding is that experienced meditators show reduced activity and altered connectivity in the default mode network, a brain system associated with self-referential processing. Framed postpositivistically, such a study measures the neural correlates of a thing called the self, assumed to exist independently of the measurement. Framed nondually, the same data support a different conclusion: the study has correlated two descriptions, both at the units level, one being neural activity parsed into regions and intervals, the other being experience parsed into report categories. What the data show is that the sense of being a bounded self can fade while awareness continues, suggesting that the observer side of experience is something the mind builds and maintains rather than a fixed starting point. The statistics are identical; the interpretation and its scope are not.

The authors also apply a sharp caution to fashionable hybrid methods. Neurophenomenology and micro-phenomenology aim to integrate experiential reports with neural measurement, and the authors accept that reaching pure experience is not their stated aim. But from a unitlessness framing, such methods necessarily parse experience into units: verbal reports become experiential categories, neural activity becomes measurement intervals. The resulting correlations are between two units-level descriptions, not between measurement and experience itself. When this is forgotten, findings can drift into reifying experience as a countable, locatable phenomenon. Similarly, the authors deflate reflexivity: positionality statements are themselves units-level acts that add more units rather than bridging the researcher-researched gap, because that gap is itself a units-level structuring. Reflexive declarations remain useful where methodologically warranted, but they carry no special weight in a nondual framing.

The practical stakes reach beyond philosophy of method. Mindfulness-based programmes are now delivered at scale in health systems, schools, and workplaces, and the research base is vast but uneven, with documented problems of overclaiming when questionnaire scores or neural signatures are quietly taken to be the thing itself. The authors argue that a nondual paradigm supplies principled grounds for methodological honesty: wording results as claims about descriptions of experience rather than experience as such, and stating openly that no method reaches experience before it is put into words. Because first-person and third-person methods sit at the same structural level, qualitative accounts, including reports of adverse experiences that standard scales miss, could enter the evidence base with equal standing. For a field whose findings inform clinical guidelines and public spending, the authors contend, this is a practical contribution rather than an abstract one.

The paper closes with careful boundaries. This is not relativism: empirical adequacy, internal consistency, explanatory scope, and transparency remain in force at the level of scientific discourse. It is not idealism: denying subject-object dualism does not mean reality is all in the mind, and the recognition that phenomena lack inherent existence does not license ignoring their practical reality. Nor does the framework settle disputes between quantitative and qualitative researchers; it locates them. What it offers is a clarification of the paradigm landscape. Researchers whose underlying commitments are nondual, a group the authors suggest may be far larger in mindfulness and consciousness research than the explicit literature admits, can now state those commitments plainly and defend them in methodological terms. Researchers who do not share those commitments lose nothing. What everyone gains is the recognition that the standard typology never exhausted the options.

Subject of Research: Nondualism as a research paradigm for mindfulness and contemplative science methodology

Article Title: Nondualism as a Research Paradigm for Mindfulness Research and Beyond

Article References: Medvedev, O. N., & Krägeloh, C. U. (2026). Nondualism as a Research Paradigm for Mindfulness Research and Beyond. Mindfulness. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-026-02992-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12671-026-02992-7

Keywords: nondualism, mindfulness research, research paradigms, qualitative methods, unitlessness, Kyoto School, Nishida Kitarō, contemplative science, subject-object distinction, neurophenomenology, default mode network, methodological honesty

The research, conducted by Ben C. L. Yu of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University and colleagues at The Chinese University of Hong Kong and The University of Hong Kong, set out to compare two competing qualities of mindfulness that appear, on the surface, to be nearly contradictory. The first is nonjudgment, the familiar operationalization embedded in the widely used Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire, which asks whether people approach their thoughts and feelings in a non-evaluative way. The second is discernment, a construct rooted in classical Buddhist teachings that emphasizes actively assessing whether one’s mental states are wholesome or unwholesome, that is, whether they lead toward well-being or toward suffering. From a Buddhist psychological perspective, this evaluative function is not a corruption of mindfulness but one of its defining features. In the ancient text The Questions of King Milinda, the monk Nāgasena describes mindfulness precisely as the examination of the wholesomeness and unwholesomeness of mental states, and early discourses such as the Kālāma Sutta frame unwholesome states as those marked by greed, aversion, and delusion that lead to harm, while wholesome states are those conducive to welfare and happiness.

To translate these concepts into testable psychological terms, the research team drew on the Mindfulness-Discernment Scale, a recently validated instrument grounded in Buddhist teachings that reconceptualizes mindfulness as having two functions. The first function is maintaining steady, non-forgetting awareness of internal and external objects, including sensations, thoughts, feelings, and mental states. The second is discernment, a clear knowing of those objects, such as recognizing whether one’s breath is long or short, or whether one’s current mental state is characterized by greed. The scale’s developers found that discernment correlated moderately with well-being, lower stress, and lower psychological distress, and showed moderate-to-strong associations with secularized Buddhist constructs including nonattachment, acceptance of impermanence, wisdom, tranquility, and concentration. Nonjudgment, meanwhile, has accumulated its own impressive empirical record. Studies have linked the nonjudging facet of the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire to higher well-being, lower psychological disturbance, and, in a meta-analysis, strongly reduced post-traumatic stress symptoms.

The Hong Kong study followed 275 adults with no meditation experience over eight months, with assessments at baseline, four months, and eight months. Participants had a mean age of 24.5 years, just over half were women, and nearly all held at least an undergraduate degree, with the majority reporting no religious affiliation. The researchers used path analysis with full maximum likelihood estimation in Mplus, structuring their models with baseline discernment and nonjudgment as independent variables, nonattachment at the four-month follow-up as the mediator, and either life satisfaction or psychological distress at eight months as the outcome. Crucially, the longitudinal portion of the model controlled for baseline levels of the mediator and outcomes, allowing the team to test whether the mindfulness qualities genuinely predicted change over time rather than merely correlating with it. Indirect effects were estimated using bias-corrected bootstrapping with 5,000 resamples, and the models showed excellent fit to the data.

The answer to which quality matters more depended entirely on the timescale. When all variables were measured at the same time point, both discernment and nonjudgment performed respectably. Both were significantly associated with higher nonattachment, which in turn was associated with lower psychological distress and greater life satisfaction. But the concurrent results already hinted at an asymmetry: after controlling for each other, discernment showed a much stronger association with nonattachment than nonjudgment did, with standardized coefficients of 0.51 versus 0.18. The indirect effect of discernment on distress through nonattachment was roughly two and a half times larger than that of nonjudgment. In other words, even in the cross-sectional picture, the evaluative quality of mindfulness appeared to be doing considerably more work.

The longitudinal results were more decisive. When the researchers inserted a four-month time lag between the predictor and the mediator, nonjudgment simply stopped predicting anything. Baseline nonjudgment showed no significant association with nonattachment at four months, and no indirect pathway to either distress or life satisfaction at eight months. Discernment, by contrast, held its ground. Baseline discernment significantly predicted higher nonattachment at four months, and nonattachment at four months in turn significantly predicted greater life satisfaction at eight months, producing a significant indirect effect of discernment on life satisfaction through nonattachment. The parallel indirect pathway to reduced psychological distress, while directionally consistent, did not reach significance, likely because of the modest effect sizes involved and the attrition of participants reporting higher distress. Still, the pattern was unambiguous: only discernment carried psychological benefits forward across time.

Why might this be? The researchers draw on Buddhist psychological models in which suffering arises from habitual clinging to pleasant feeling tones and aversion to unpleasant ones, followed by mental proliferation of the initial events. Mindfulness, in this framework, is not an end in itself but a vehicle for recognizing these patterns of clinging and repulsion and fostering nonattachment, defined psychologically as a flexible, balanced way of relating to one’s experiences without clinging to or suppressing them. Discernment, the authors argue, is what makes this possible. According to the theory of embodied mindfulness, bodily states and cognitive-emotional processes interact bidirectionally: unwholesome states characterized by greed, aversion, or delusion may manifest as visceral tightness, constriction, or physiological agitation, while wholesome states present as bodily ease, spaciousness, and relaxation. A person with discerning awareness can use these somatic signals as a compass, deliberately letting go of unwholesome states and cultivating wholesome ones. Nonjudgment, by contrast, may offer only a temporary buffer, shielding people from the sting of negative experiences in the short term without fostering the deeper understanding needed to release them.

There is also a darker possibility that has concerned scholars for a decade. Some researchers have warned that an emphasis on nonjudging may foster passive acceptance, in which individuals tolerate adverse or even abusive situations rather than changing or leaving them, potentially exacerbating their difficulties and allowing harmful sensations to accumulate unexamined. Intriguingly, the new study found a hint of this: after controlling for nonattachment and discernment, nonjudgment showed a significant negative direct effect on life satisfaction at the eight-month follow-up. The authors are appropriately cautious, noting the small effect size and the absence of a zero-order correlation between nonjudgment and life satisfaction, and they stop short of declaring nonjudgment harmful. But they urge researchers to remain alert to its potential long-term costs.

The findings also connect to a growing body of temporal evidence suggesting that the benefits of mindfulness may be less durable than cross-sectional studies imply. Previous work by the same research group using ecological momentary assessment found that mindfulness predicted nonattachment and positive affect only when variables were measured concurrently, with the association vanishing when a lag of a few hours was introduced. A subsequent two-month study produced the same pattern. The authors of the new study suspected that part of the problem lay in measurement: those earlier studies used instruments capturing bare awareness or the mere absence of inattention, which may not capture the multidimensional richness of mindfulness. By pitting two distinct, well-measured qualities against each other, the present study suggests that the choice of which quality to cultivate, not merely whether to be mindful, may determine whether benefits persist.

The practical implications could be significant for the design of mindfulness-based interventions. If discernment is the active ingredient for enduring well-being, programs might benefit from teaching participants not just to observe thoughts, bodily states, and emotions without immediate reactivity, but to evaluate whether those states are wholesome, unwholesome, skillful, or unskillful, and to respond without clinging or avoidance. Such training would represent a meaningful departure from the strictly non-evaluative stance that has dominated secular mindfulness pedagogy. The study’s authors also caution that future research should not treat mindfulness qualities as interchangeable, recommending finer-grained measurement rather than reliance on broad global scales.

Limitations remain. The sample consisted of young, highly educated, predominantly non-religious university affiliates in Hong Kong with no meditation experience, and the authors note that meditators interpret mindfulness qualities differently. The longitudinal design, while stronger than cross-sectional work, cannot establish causation, all measures were self-reported within the same surveys, raising the possibility of common method bias, and attrition reached roughly 21 percent by the final follow-up, though full information maximum likelihood estimation was used to mitigate missing data. Even so, the study represents one of the most rigorous comparisons to date between two rival conceptions of what mindfulness actually is. Taken together with earlier null findings for bare awareness and inattentiveness, the evidence points toward a provocative conclusion: simply watching the mind without judgment may calm it for a moment, but learning to discern the nature of what arises, and to release what harms, may be what sustains well-being over the long run.