A Buddhist Mindfulness View of Paradox: Silence and Skepticism of Language to Dismantle Paradoxes

This study explores how Buddhist mindfulness as a self-reflective practice helps individuals respond to a paradox and ultimately dismantle it. To deeply immerse myself into this context, I conducted a nine-month ethnographic fieldwork in three Korean Buddhist temples that confront the paradox between the need for financial resources and spiritual values that disavow money. The findings show a series of cognitive mechanisms that reveal multiple roles of mindfulness, manifested as silence and skepticism of language. First, the monastic environment enables monks to become familiar with a life of silence that turns their attention to the inner mind from the external-empirical world. The silence serves as a mental buffer when monks switch between their sacred role and their business role. Over time, deep silence directs them to skepticism of language that triggers doubt on preexisting linguistic categories, boundaries, and separations. When the preexisting linguistic categories finally disappear in their mind, monks no longer rely on any differentiating or integrating tactic to navigate their paradox. In other words, they no longer perceive a paradox, which means the paradox has disappeared from their life. These cognitive mechanisms construct the monks’ worldview on contradictions, conflicts, and dualities, leading them from the experience of paradox to a unique mental state, the nonexperience of paradox. Integrating this mental state and the worldview of Buddhist monks with paradox research, this study theorizes a Buddhist mindfulness view of paradox.