The traditionalists did not appreciate the irony of capitalists and marines embracing a practice with a history of disdaining violence and accumulation of wealth. They worried that mindfulness would simply create better baby killers and robber barons. They pointed derisively to the proliferation of books such as Mindfulness for Dummies, The Mindful Investor, and The Joy of Mindful Sex. Critics had a term for this phenomenon: “McMindfulness.” There was something important being overlooked, they argued, in the mainstreaming of meditation—a central plank in the Buddhist platform: compassion.
