Is Meditation Just Repackaged Religion? An Honest Look at Where Mindfulness Came From

Is mindfulness cultural appropriation? An honest, well-researched look at how Buddhist meditation became a secular wellness product — and who got left out.

Table of Contents

1. The App Store Moment
2. What You’ll Walk Away With
3. So What Actually Happened Here?
4. What This Isn’t
5. The Man Who Built the Bridge
6. Who Got Written Out of the Story?
7. Is It Actually Cultural Appropriation, Though?
8. The Harder Truth
9. What to Actually Do With This
10. Closing: The Practice Was Never the Problem
11. Author’s Note

The App Store Moment

You’re lying in bed at 11 p.m., phone brightness dialed down to “stealth,” scrolling past a meditation app that promises to melt your anxiety in ten minutes for $69.99 a year. The narrator has a name like Ravi or Sage. The background music sounds like a spa crossed with a spaceship. Somewhere between the breathing exercise and the upsell for the “Deep Sleep Bundle,” a thought needles in: wait, isn’t this supposed to be a two-and-a-half-thousand-year-old spiritual practice?

You’re not wrong to notice that. And you’re not being paranoid, oversensitive, or “too online” for wondering whether something got lost — or stolen — on the way from a forest monastery to your lock screen.

This article is for the people who’ve felt that flicker of unease and kept scrolling anyway, because they didn’t have anywhere to put the question. It’s also for the people who roll their eyes at the question entirely. Both of you are going to find something here that complicates your position. Good. That’s the point.

What You’ll Walk Away With

By the end of this piece, you’ll understand exactly how meditation went from a component of Buddhist liberation practice to a stress-management tool sold in eight-week corporate packages — who did that translating, what they kept, what they cut, and why the cutting wasn’t neutral. You’ll also have a real answer to the “is this cultural appropriation” question, one that doesn’t collapse into either “everything is appropriation, cancel it all” or “it’s just techniques, nobody owns oxygen.” And you’ll come away with a way to practice — if you choose to keep practicing — that doesn’t require you to pretend the history doesn’t exist.

No dictionary definitions. No incense-scented platitudes. Let’s actually look at this.

So What Actually Happened Here?

Here’s the plain-language version, no jargon, one clean example.

In 1979, a molecular biologist named Jon Kabat-Zinn was sitting on a meditation retreat in Massachusetts when he had a specific, practical idea: what if you could take the attention-training core of Buddhist meditation — the part where you learn to notice your experience without immediately reacting to it — and offer it to people who would never set foot in a Buddhist center? Chronic pain patients. Cardiac units. People whose doctors had run out of options.

So he built a program. Eight weeks. A full-day retreat. Body scans, sitting meditation, gentle yoga. He called it Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, or MBSR, and he deliberately stripped out the vocabulary that would make it feel foreign or religious to a skeptical, secular, insurance-billing American medical system. No samadhi. No dharma. No robes, chanting, or rebirth. Just “pay attention to the present moment, on purpose, without judgment” — a definition you’ve probably heard a hundred times without knowing it was engineered.

That single design choice is the hinge this entire article turns on. Kabat-Zinn wasn’t hiding the Buddhist roots out of shame; by his own account, he was trying to make a form of wisdom he found genuinely liberating accessible to people who’d never accept it wrapped in a religion they didn’t practice. He has since said he was after a “universal dharma” — the idea that the insight underneath Buddhist practice belongs to human consciousness generally, not to one tradition’s copyright.

That’s a beautiful and generous idea. It’s also, depending on who you ask, exactly the problem.

What This Isn’t

Before going further, let’s clear out some oversimplified takes that dominate this conversation on both sides, because both sides get things wrong.

It’s not “ancient wisdom, unchanged for millennia.” The mindfulness you’re doing on an app bears about as much resemblance to classical Buddhist sati (the Pali word usually translated as “mindfulness”) as a gym’s “yoga for tight hips” class bears to the eight-limbed path of classical yoga. Meditation has been adapted, reformed, and reinterpreted continuously for 2,500 years, across Theravada, Zen, Tibetan, and dozens of other lineages, long before it reached the West. There was never a single pure original to “return” to.

It’s not “just neutral techniques with no history attached.” This is the opposite oversimplification, common among wellness brands that want the benefits without the baggage. Attention training was never separated from an ethical and philosophical framework in its source traditions — more on that shortly. Treating it as a value-free productivity hack isn’t neutral; it’s a specific choice with specific consequences.

It’s not the same thing as, say, a Western chef using miso. Cultural exchange and cultural appropriation aren’t identical, and treating every borrowed practice as automatically exploitative flattens a much more interesting conversation into a thought-terminating cliché. The scale, the money, and the erasure involved here matter — they’re not incidental details.

It’s not a “gotcha” that ends with you feeling guilty for meditating. Several of the loudest critics of the mindfulness industry are themselves Buddhist teachers who meditate daily and think the practice is genuinely valuable. Their argument isn’t “stop meditating.” It’s “know what you’re doing, and know what it cost to get here.”

The Man Who Built the Bridge

It’s worth sitting with Kabat-Zinn’s actual story for a second, because the popular version — “a hippie went to Asia, brought back meditation” — isn’t quite right either.

He was finishing a PhD in molecular biology at MIT when he attended a lecture by a Zen teacher and found something in it he couldn’t shake. He went on to study with several teachers across Zen and Theravada lineages for years before he ever designed MBSR. This wasn’t a weekend workshop’s worth of borrowing. By most accounts, including his critics’, he trained seriously and for a long time.

What he did next was a genuinely novel act of translation: he took the technique of anchoring attention to breath and body, kept the emphasis on non-judgmental awareness, and rebuilt the delivery system entirely — no temple, no teacher-student lineage, no cosmology, no ethical precepts as a formal prerequisite. He published Full Catastrophe Living in 1990, and MBSR spread into hospitals, universities, and eventually the mainstream stress-management vocabulary of an entire culture. Within a couple of decades, it had catalyzed a research field, a corporate wellness category, and — depending on who’s counting — a mindfulness app industry valued well over a billion dollars.

He wasn’t naive about the tension this created. Years later, he’d coin his own term for what he saw happening downstream of his work: “McMindfulness” — a watered-down, consumerist version of the practice that treats a moment of calm as the whole point, with nothing underneath it. He meant it as a warning. The industry mostly didn’t listen.

Who Got Written Out of the Story?

Here’s where the popular narrative — “Buddhism arrived in America via 1960s counterculture seekers who brought it back from India and Japan” — starts to crack.

Buddhism didn’t arrive in America in the 1960s. It arrived with Chinese immigrants in the 1850s and Japanese immigrants in the late 1800s, who built temples on the West Coast, practiced their religion under intense racism and legal discrimination — including internment during World War II — and quietly kept those traditions alive for generations before any white American had heard the word “dharma.” Some of those communities’ teachers later mentored the very same white counterculture seekers who get credited as mindfulness’s founding fathers in most popular histories.

The Asian-American scholar Funie Hsu has made exactly this point in her critique of mindfulness’s origin story: the version most people know erases the immigrant communities who preserved and transmitted the tradition, and centers the white teachers who later popularized a secularized version of it — without meaningfully crediting or compensating the lineage they drew from.

That’s not a semantic nitpick. It’s the actual mechanism of appropriation that critics point to: not that a technique moved between cultures — that happens constantly, everywhere, and always has — but that the credit, the visibility, the teaching positions, and the enormous financial upside all concentrated among people who weren’t from the tradition, while the communities who kept it alive for a century in the face of hostility remained largely invisible. Look at the leadership of major meditation apps, the faculty photos on most retreat center websites, or the author photos on best-selling mindfulness books, and the pattern is hard to unsee once you’ve seen it.

“Cultural appropriation happens when a majority group adopts elements of a minority group’s culture, profits from them, and separates them from their original meaning — often while the originating community remains excluded from the benefits.” (paraphrased from commonly cited definitions used in this debate)

Is It Actually Cultural Appropriation, Though?

Short answer: parts of this are cleanly, uncontroversially appropriation. Other parts are genuinely more complicated. Let’s not pretend otherwise in either direction.

Where the appropriation critique lands hardest: the near-total absence of Asian and Asian-American teachers, founders, and voices from the public face of an industry built on their tradition. The consistent stripping of Buddhist ethical content — precepts like non-harming, honesty, and community responsibility — while keeping only the parts that are commercially frictionless. The pattern of white teachers being credentialed as authorities after a fraction of the training that’s expected of teachers within Buddhist lineages. And the sheer scale of the money: a billion-dollar-plus industry built on practices whose countries and communities of origin see essentially none of that revenue.

Where it’s messier: Kabat-Zinn didn’t hide behind a fake origin story — he’s been publicly explicit for decades that MBSR draws on Buddhist meditation, and he has spoken respectfully about his teachers. Meditation itself isn’t sacred property in the way a specific ceremony or sacred object might be; contemplative traditions across cultures — Christian centering prayer, Jewish hitbodedut, Sufi dhikr, Vedic practices — have independently developed attention-training methods for centuries, which complicates any claim that focused-attention meditation belongs exclusively to one tradition. And plenty of Buddhist teachers, including monks actively teaching in the West, actively support and participate in secular mindfulness programs because they see real benefit reaching people who’d never otherwise encounter contemplative practice at all.

So: is mindfulness cultural appropriation? The honest answer is that the technique transfer is defensible and has real precedent across contemplative history — but the industry built on top of it, with its erasure of Asian teachers, its stripped ethics, and its concentration of profit, is where the legitimate critique actually lives. Conflating the two lets people dismiss real harm as “just semantics,” or dismiss real precedent as “just theft.” Neither move is honest.

The Harder Truth

Here’s the part most wellness content skips, because it doesn’t resolve into a shareable takeaway.

Buddhist meditation was never designed to make you calmer at your desk job. In its source traditions, meditation practice — samadhi — sits between two other pillars: sila (ethical conduct) and panna (wisdom or insight into the nature of self and suffering). You weren’t supposed to get one without the other two. The attention training was a tool for a much bigger, much harder project: seeing through the illusion of a fixed, separate self, and living differently — often less selfishly, more communally — because of what you saw.

Strip out the ethics and the wisdom framework, and you’re left with something real and useful — attention regulation, nervous system down-shifting, measurable reductions in anxiety and rumination that show up reliably in clinical research — but it’s a different tool doing a different job. It’s a bit like extracting caffeine from an entire coffee ceremony: the caffeine still works, but you’ve lost the part that was ever about anything other than the individual user’s internal state.

This is precisely Ronald Purser’s argument in his widely discussed critique of the mindfulness industry: when you remove the ethical and communal dimension, mindfulness doesn’t become neutral — it becomes available for whatever purpose the surrounding culture assigns it. That’s how you end up with mindfulness programs marketed to help employees tolerate exploitative working conditions with less complaint, or mindfulness training piloted inside military and intelligence programs to sharpen operational focus. The technique didn’t change. The absence of any ethical container around it did.

And here’s the genuinely uncomfortable part, the bit that doesn’t fit on an inspirational graphic: you can be practicing something real, something that measurably helps you, and still be participating in a system that has quietly extracted value from a community while giving that community almost nothing back. Those two things are not mutually exclusive. You don’t get to pick just one truth here. Sitting with that discomfort — rather than resolving it too quickly in either direction — is closer to what mindfulness was supposed to teach you to do in the first place.

What to Actually Do With This

You don’t need to quit meditating, and you don’t need to feel guilty every time you open a meditation app. But you can practice with your eyes open instead of closed to the history. A few concrete moves:

• Learn the actual name of the technique you’re using and where it comes from. If you do body-scan meditation, that’s rooted in Burmese Buddhist Vipassana lineages by way of teachers like Mahasi Sayadaw and later transmitted to the West through students like S.N. Goenka. Knowing this takes two minutes and changes your relationship to the practice.
• Follow and financially support Asian and Asian-American meditation teachers directly, not just the apps and books built on top of their tradition. Search out teachers like Larry Yang, Konda Mason, or the wider network of teachers of color at organizations built specifically to correct this imbalance — they are not hard to find once you’re looking.
• Notice when a program’s marketing strips history for a reason. “Ancient technique, no religious content!” is a sales pitch, not a neutral fact. Ask what got removed and why — usually it’s whatever might have complicated the sale.
• Reintroduce an ethical dimension yourself, even loosely. You don’t need to convert to Buddhism. But pairing your practice with an actual, if informal, commitment — to less reactivity toward the people in your life, to more honesty, to noticing your impact on others — restores some of what commercial mindfulness quietly discarded.
• Hold two facts at once without needing to resolve them into one tidy verdict. The practice can be valuable to you and the industry around it can be worth criticizing. That’s not hypocrisy. That’s just accuracy.

Closing: The Practice Was Never the Problem

Maybe the most honest thing to say is this: meditation didn’t get corrupted by capitalism so much as it got isolated by it — pulled out of the community, the ethics, and the teachers that used to hold it, and handed to you alone, in bed, at 11:47 p.m., with a subscription fee attached.

That isolation is worth grieving a little, even as you keep the ten minutes of quiet it gives you. You can appreciate what Jon Kabat-Zinn built and still ask why the app store isn’t full of Asian teachers’ faces. You can find real relief in your breath and still want the people who kept that practice alive through a century of being told their religion was foreign and inferior to get some real credit — and some real compensation — for it.

The question in the title isn’t really is meditation repackaged religion. It’s closer to: who gets to repackage it, who gets paid when they do, and what do we lose in the repackaging? Those are better questions. Sit with them a while. That, at least, is one part of the practice nobody managed to strip out.

If this is the first time you’ve looked closely at where your practice actually comes from, a natural next step is learning a bit about the specific lineage behind whatever technique you use most — body scan, breath awareness, loving-kindness — and finding a teacher connected to that living tradition rather than only an app.

Author’s Note

I wrote this piece the way I’d want to read it if I were the person lying awake, phone brightness dimmed, half-trusting an app to fix something an app was never built to fix. This topic resists tidy conclusions, and I’ve tried to resist them too, even where it would have made for a cleaner ending. If you finish this more unsettled than when you started, that’s not a failure of the piece — that’s usually where the more honest thinking begins.