What is the difference between mindfulness and meditation?

The most common consensus is that mindfulness is one of the many practice methods of meditation. However, many traditional practitioners believe that the origins and core goals of the two are completely different and cannot be directly classified into an inclusive relationship. This disagreement actually mainly comes from the different definitions of the two concepts.

I couldn't tell the difference when I first came into contact with mind-body practice. It was my first time to experience an offline meditation studio. The whole class was 70 minutes long. In the first 30 minutes, the teacher taught me how to count my breaths. He said that you don't need to scold yourself if your mind wanders. You just need to gently bring your attention back to the touch on the tip of your nose. This part is a typical mindfulness practice.； In the next 40 minutes, we are guided to visualize a warm light in the chest, flowing along the blood vessels throughout the body. After the end, the whole person is as soft as sun-dried cotton. This kind of meditation with clear guidance goals belongs to other types of meditation besides mindfulness.

Put in the current popular context, meditation is a very broad basket. It can be as small as taking the initiative to relax for 5 minutes when fishing at work, as big as sitting quietly, visualizing, and looking inside in traditional practice. As long as it is an exercise that actively regulates attention and adjusts the state of consciousness, almost all can be counted as meditation in a broad sense. Mindfulness is the category with the clearest rules and the lowest threshold: the core requirement is to "be aware of the present moment without judgment." There is no KPI that requires you to achieve any special state. You can pull back when your mind wanders, and that's it.

But if you talk to friends who practice traditional Vipassana, they will most likely not agree with the statement that "mindfulness is a type of meditation." I know a teacher who has practiced Theravada Vipassana for ten years and said that mindfulness originally originated from the Four Foundations of Mindfulness practice in Buddhism. It has a complete path of practice, and the ultimate goal is to get rid of self-grasping and obtain liberation. Most of the "meditation" on the market today has been commercialized and transformed. It only takes the physical and mental techniques with superficial relaxation functions and incorporates mindfulness into meditation. On the contrary, it narrows and secularizes the original practice.

To put it bluntly, this difference is actually a bit like the relationship between tea and oolong tea: ordinary consumers think that oolong tea is of course tea, but in the eyes of experienced tea people who have been making rock tea for decades, those flavored teas with added essences and tea bags made from crushed tea are not serious tea at all, and they do not want to classify their own Zhengyan cinnamon into the broad sense of "tea" and confuse it with this type of product. Essentially, they have different definitions of reference systems.

If you just want to reduce stress and improve concentration on a daily basis, there is no need to worry about the difference between the two definitions. Just find a method that feels comfortable after practicing. If you really want to go deep into the traditional practice path, it is not too late to grapple with the boundaries of the concepts.