Tullio Giraldi - Psychotherapy, Mindfulness and Buddhist Meditation

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This work should not have been possible without the personal and professional growth which I had thanks to the encounter with numerous outstanding personalities and institutions which I had the privilege to meet and to work with. I shall not attempt to name all of them to avoid omissions which would be inexcusable, and I shall necessarily make impersonal references.

My Alma mater is the University of Trieste, Italy, where I completed my studies and later spent large part of my academic career as a professor of pharmacology and related topics. There I had the occasion to develop a critical mind towards the understanding of the world in an objective (scientific) perspective, aware of the fallacies of the beliefs affecting human attempts to understand the inner and outer world.

My initial interests on pharmacology were on chemotherapy, and later moved towards the brain and the drugs modifying its functions. In this connection, I could participate to the dramatic changes in psychiatric care which happened in Trieste beginning in the 60s, thanks to the realization of the revolutionary approaches of Franco Basaglia in the local Department of Mental Health of the community care services of the National Health System. These initiatives led to marked changes of the legislation in Italy, and are still at the focus of the attention by the international psychiatric community and WHO. My psychiatric interests were also enriched by becoming a clinical psychologist with a training in psychotherapy as a transactional analyst which I received in Bologna, Italy.

A distinct enrichment was provided to me by outstanding British institutions. As a young visiting scientist I had a remarkable experience at the old Chester Beatty Research Institute, London, in mid-70s. This had to be followed much later by my current visiting professorship at the Global Health and Social Medicine Department of the Kings College, London. This is a place of excellence, where the founder and past director, together with a growing academic staff, provided original critical views of the continuously debated critical issues of mental health: it is while in this department that I had the occasion to develop some of the ideas which led to writing this book.

A crucial event in my life was the encounter with Buddhism, which led me to the practice of Rinzai Zen which I began in the late 70s at the Zenshin-ji monastery in Orvieto, Italy. I followed there the teachings of master Engaku Taino along the lineage of Yamada Mumon Roshi, and it is with this master at this temple that in 1971 I was ordained a lay Buddhist monk.

These are the experiences along which my experiences developed, and I mentioned them to let the reader of this book to understand the background of my efforts to provide a critical perspective for the recent explosive growth of mindfulness, with its isolation from Buddhist meditation which occurred with its transplantation into current Western culture.

These are also hints which will allow to understand why I cannot cite name by name all the numerous and beautiful persons and minds, teachers and students, researchers and discoverers, and companions along the Way of life, from which I learnt so much and to whom I have an incommensurable debt of gratitude that I recognize and acknowledge here with the greatest gratefulness.

I wish finally to thank Tristan Grove for his careful work of copy editing.

Since this work is intended also for a general readership, the terms of Pali and Sanskrit origins are transliterated without the diacritical marks that would have been appropriate in a work of a more scholarly nature.

Similarly, the Japanese words will be used retaining the system of Romanization used in the original documents cited.

Mindfulness is the word which had been used as a translation of the Pali term sati since the early English translations of Buddhist scriptures. With the diffusion of the mindfulness movement and applications in the West, and particularly with its diffusion into the world of medicine and psychology, the term of mindfulness began to be used also in an undifferentiated way as a synonym of meditation . The terms of mindfulness and meditation will be therefore retained without further specification as used in the original documents cited.