Borrowed Mindfulness: The White-Washing of Eastern Wisdom

Opinion

By Samad Ramoly

The modern West was built on the cult of pure reason. Since the Enlightenment, the Western elite has valued logic, measurement, and the technical mastery of the world, relegating intuitive, bodily, or sacred forms of knowledge to the background. This choice produced undeniable material progress—but it also left a void: that of meaning, death, and existential anxiety, questions to which instrumental reason does not respond. From this vacuum, an inverse movement was born: the Western quest toward Buddhism, Sufism, and Hinduism, perceived as reservoirs of wisdom that rationalism had dried up at home.

This aspiration is sincere. However, it often remains a prisoner of the very mindset it seeks to escape. We find the same rationalist gesture within it: extracting the useful technique—meditation, breathing, posture—and abandoning everything that surrounds it: cosmology, community, life discipline, and transmission. This is what is known as spiritual appropriation, which is less the opposite of rationalism than its continuation, applied this time to an exotic material. Consumer capitalism is its most visible vehicle, transforming these wisdoms into detachable products; the individualism inherited from the Enlightenment and Protestantism is its underlying condition.

Yet, this mechanism was not born with 20th-century spiritual tourism. It is much older, and the classical West itself offers a striking example: the Fables of Jean de La Fontaine. The fabulist openly drew inspiration from Aesop, but a portion of his work also tapped into the Panchatantra, a collection of Sanskrit fables that reached Europe through Arabic and Persian translations. Texts like The Tortoise and the Two Ducks or The Rat and the Elephant come directly from this Indian source.

However, this debt has long been downplayed: the French academic imagination remembered La Fontaine as the heir to Aesop, leaving the Indian lineage in the shadows. Furthermore, the Eastern content—often linked to concepts of karma or the cunning typical of Indian folk wisdom—was reframed into a typical classical rationalist and social morality: the fable became a tool to instruct the court and criticise social mores, not to transmit a cosmology.

The example is telling: keeping the useful narrative form and erasing the spiritual background is not a reflex unique to contemporary globalisation. It is a structural gesture, deeply rooted in the way the classical West has always digested what it borrowed from abroad. Today’s spiritual appropriation, therefore, invents nothing new: it perpetuates, with different tools, a much older habit.

Mauritius Times ePaper Friday 2 October 2026