Secular mindfulness derives from contemplative traditions but reproduces only part of what those traditions contained. Understanding which part was taken and which was left explains most of the arguments now made about it.
The technique travelled and the framework did not
What was extracted was a set of attentional instructions: attend to present experience, notice when attention departs, return without evaluation.
Those instructions were separable from their doctrinal setting, testable against ordinary outcome measures, and teachable to people of any belief or none.
The extraction was deliberate and was the condition for entering healthcare and education at all, since neither can deliver religious instruction.
The original systems supplied more than a technique
In their source traditions these instructions sat inside a structure that also included ethical commitments, a community of practitioners and a defined understanding of what practice was for.
Attention training was one component among several rather than the whole of the path, and its purpose was set by the framework surrounding it.
Removing that framework leaves the technique intact and leaves its purpose to be supplied by whoever is teaching or using it.
The critique concerns what fills the gap
The most substantial objection is that a practice whose aim is now set by context can be pointed at any aim at all, including tolerating conditions that ought to be changed.
Training people to accept present experience without judgement is coherent inside a tradition oriented towards a particular end and does different work inside an organisation with productivity targets.
This is an argument about the missing framework rather than about the technique, and it is not answered by evidence that the technique affects attention.
Non-judgement is a narrower instruction than it sounds
The instruction concerns the evaluative commentary that accompanies experience, not moral discernment about situations or actions.
Noticing anger without immediately condemning oneself for it is what is being asked; concluding that nothing warrants a response is a different proposition entirely.
The conflation appears more in popular presentations than in the clinical programmes themselves, whose manuals are considerably more specific.
How to read the debate without picking a team
The evidence base concerns structured programmes taught over weeks by trained instructors, which is not what most applications of the word deliver.
Judging a specific offering means asking what it consists of, who is teaching it and what it is oriented towards, since the word itself no longer answers those questions.
Both claims can hold at once: the technique does something measurable, and stripping its framework left a question about purpose that each application answers for itself.