Almut-Barbara Renger

Emerging as a modern discursive category in the 19th century, mindfulness has traveled further than almost any other concept of religious origin, moving with apparent ease between Buddhist monasteries and Silicon Valley boardrooms. Yet this very familiarity conceals a multilayered history of semantic reorientations shaped by transregional circulations among South(east) Asia, Europe, and North America. Rather than reducing such complexity to a single line of development from Buddhist sati to contemporary mindfulness, this presentation proposes a 360° perspective spanning five dimensions—time, culture, institutions, epistemology, and contestation. It traces how mindfulness has repeatedly been turned, translated, relocated, and reinterpreted by monks, reformers, scholars, colonial agents, scientists, and therapeutic practitioners—most recently through debates over its neoliberal instrumentalization. Thus shifting attention away from singular origins and linear continuities toward historically situated configurations and changing contexts, this multi-angle approach treats mindfulness not as a stable or universal entity but as a dynamic constellation of meanings and practices in motion. In doing so, it turns the global reach of mindfulness into a case study for a larger claim—that the wider practice-oriented religious concepts travel across diverse settings, the less singular their meaning becomes.