Measuring Mindfulness Grounded in the Original Buddha’s Discourses on Meditation Practice

Abstract

The concept of mindfulness has been widely applied in the fields of health and mental health. Mindfulness has been defined as “being in the present moment,” “paying attention on purpose,” and “being non-judgmental” by John Kabat-Zinn, the pioneer of mindfulness-based intervention for stress reduction. Despite the popularity of mindfulness among Western health researchers, however, there is no consensus on how to define and measure it. Existing mindfulness scales have uncertain content validity. To address this research gap, we developed a new Buddhist Trait Mindfulness Scale (BTMS) with two subscales: Body-Mind-Senses Awareness Subscale (BMSAS) and Greed-Distress Non-clinging Subscale (GDNCS) based on the Buddha’s original instructions for meditation practice. This endeavor was a response to a long-standing call for an understanding of mindfulness from its Buddhist roots. The study sample included Chinese adults with varied experiences in meditative practices. In validating these scales, we adopted multimodal assessment methods using self-report questionnaires, a semi-structured interview (assessing “rater-rated mindfulness”) and experience sampling (assessing “momentary mindfulness”). Our findings revealed satisfactory psychometric properties of both the BMSAS and GDNCS. BMSAS was significantly correlated with momentary mindfulness but was unrelated to rater-rated mindfulness, while the opposite held true of the GDNCS. Non-clinging, but not awareness, distinguished meditators from nonmeditators. In conclusion, the BTMS offer simple, concise, self-report tools to measure the trait mindfulness among Chinese participants. Further cross-cultural studies are needed to validate the scales cross-culturally.