Carolyn Chen: “Buddhism has found a new institutional home in the West: the corporation.”

Once associated in the United States with the alternative spirituality of hippies and beat poets, Buddhism is now ubiquitous in Silicon Valley. In 2016, tech giant Salesforce set up “Mindfulness Zones” at its annual Dreamforce Conference, with pavilions where Buddhist monks from Thich Nhat Hanh’s Plum Village monastery taught meditation and mindfulness techniques. LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner calls his leadership style “compassionate management,” which he describes as “putting yourself in another person’s shoes and seeing the world through their lens or perspective,” and claims it is inspired by teachings of the Dalai Lama. Bill Gates took up meditation in private lessons from Andy Puddicombe, the former Buddhist monk who co-founded Headspace, an app which has turned online meditation into a multimillion-dollar business. Google even has its own in-house mindfulness guru, Chade-Meng Tan, a former software engineer who says his program “Search Inside Yourself” not only boosts profit but also contributes to world peace.

What we see in the tech world is an extension of American Buddhism’s adaptation into the US mainstream, a process that has been shaped by influential mindfulness entrepreneurs such as Jon Kabat-Zinn, who claimed to have extracted from the Buddha’s teachings the universal “essence” of Buddhism without the rituals and paraphernalia of religion. Kabat-Zinn popularized meditation — traditionally an advanced practice for gaining insight into the ultimate nature of reality — as a secular practice to boost mental health and productivity. Now, business meetings often open with a brief meditation session to make sure everyone is fully engaged: a mental hack in service of productivity.

In her new book, , Carolyn Chen — a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley — argues that a new kind of American Buddhism has evolved, one which serves the logic of work and