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By Dr Upul Wijayawardhana Two recent articles in The Island extolled the virtues of thoughtfulness, the second supporting piece largely reproducing passages from the first ( “Thoughtfulness or Mindfulness” on 5th June and “In favour of Thoughtfulness” on 14 June). Whilst agreeing with the learned writers that the world is what it is today due to thoughtfulness, the creative aspect of the human mind, I was rather taken aback by some comments slighting mindfulness, the main reason for doing so being the commercialisation of mindfulness, as typified by the comment: “All human progress is indebted to people who observed, experimented, invented, created and above all used their imagination with hardly any guidance from mindfulness gurus”! Science has advanced to produce AI, and some have even started writing articles using AI tools, though only an honest few admit to doing so! In spite of all these advancements, mind and brain remain enigmatic there being no consensus on what the functions of the mind are or what the relationship of the mind to the brain is. It was the Buddha who analysed the mind long before modern scientists did so, or even the Greek philosophers, and it was unfortunate that Buddhism, the religion that evolved subsequently, has submerged the great intellectual achievements of the Buddha.

What psychologists now call metacognition is what Buddha described as Sathi : ‘awareness and understanding of one’s own thought process’. Mindfulness is being .

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