How Meditation Travelled West
Every step is dated: a Burmese lay-meditation revival from the 1890s, the Burmese-born S. N. Goenka's first course in India in 1969, and a programme founded at an American medical school in 1979 that set aside the Buddhist framework. What is marketed as a 2,500-year-old practice dates, in its Western clinical form, from 1979.
William Hart, The Art of Living (1987), on Goenka's Burmese birth and first course in India (1969); Jon Kabat-Zinn, Full Catastrophe Living (1990), on founding Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction at the University of Massachusetts Medical School (1979)
The documented, surprisingly recent path by which Buddhist meditation became a mainstream Western wellness practice.