David Pecotic flagged this New York Times piece about the “backlash against mindfulness,” which mainly is a backlash among Buddhists against the corporatization of mindfulness, rather than a backlash among corporations against Buddhism (though I’m sure that’ll come eventually.) As Anna North writes,

At the core of this debate is a question about what mindfulness should be. For some, it remains a fundamentally religious practice, one rooted in Buddhism’s ethics and understanding of social justice (Stone writes, “The first ethical principle that the Buddha taught in his description of living mindfully is ‘not Killing’”).

But in the mainstream, mindfulness is often seen simply as a tool, a way of calming and focusing oneself. As such it can be used to de-stress after a long day, to get more done at the office, or even to wage war.

Two points. First, while entrepreneurs of mindfulness have almost all come out of or try to appropriate Eastern religion (particularly Buddhism), mindfulness isn’t an exclusively Buddhist practice. While there are important differences between them, every religion has its own version of mindfulness practice. (Indeed, within Tibetan Buddhism versus Korean Son or Japanese Zen, there are nontrivial differences, just as there are between Catholic lectio divino and the practices you’d observe in a Quaker meeting-house.)

Second, it’s worth noting that there’s a long history of Buddhism being used for purposes that seem pretty non-Buddhist. Compared to the samurai practice of using Zen to become more efficient killers (or Imperial Way Zen in the 20th century), the efforts at Google or Facebook to use mindfulness to make programmers better skilled at designing things we’ll click on is pretty benign. (Brian Victoria’s Zen at War tells this story.)

And finally (no one expects the Spanish Inquisition), in the Bay Area there’s long been an intertwining of Buddhism and the tech world, in part because they began to grow into global centers at roughly the same time, and in part because plenty of people in the counterculture were interested in both. Steve Jobs spent time in Tassajara, and talked about the Zen of the product; lawyer Bill Fenwick believed that Zen provided a good mindset for doing legal battle. The current version is just better-publicized.