The Buddhist Health Study: Meditation on Love and Compassion as Features of Religious Practice

Abstract

The Buddhist Health Study: Meditation on Love and Compassion as Features of Religious Practice Bruce M. Sullivan, Bill Wiist, and Heidi Wayment Love and compassion are most important, most precious, most powerful, and most sacred. Practicing them is useful not only in terms of true religion but also in worldly life for both mental and physical health. They are the basic elements supporting our life and happiness. With practice, they become effective and beneficial driving forces for life. (Dalai Lama 2005: 209) A striking feature of contemporary religion is the growth of Buddhist practices and institutions in the Western world, particularly in Europe and North America. Empirical data, however, are scarce, so considerable disagreement is found regarding the scope of that growth. Some countries include census questions on religious affiliation, and others (such as the United States) do not, so even the most basic data are sporadic and impressionistic.1 Buddhist organizations do not keep records of membership in a consistent way, nor do they use comparable criteria to determine who is a member. With regard to such limitations, Janet McLellan states, “Although thousands of Buddhist temples, meditation centers, and Buddhist associations can be identified in North America, … there is no adequate means to determine an accurate count of Buddhists.”2 In an effort to contribute to the understanding of contemporary Western Buddhism, an interdisciplinary team of researchers at Northern Arizona University wrote a set of questions to elicit data from Buddhist practitioners. In addition to demographic questions, we included questions on health and health‐related practices, and psychological characteristics, drawing from previously used measures (see Wiist et al. 2010). For the Buddhist practices segment of the survey, all the questions were written by the researchers. With the religious practices segment of the survey, we sought (among other things) to test four hypotheses concerning contemporary Western Buddhist practitioners: 1 Contemporary Western Buddhist practitioners are more likely to identify themselves as Buddhist than as members of other religious traditions and to have marked that identity in a formal way such as pronouncing the Three Refuges formula. 2 Contemporary Western Buddhist practitioners are more likely to engage in meditation than to attend Buddhist religious services supervised by clergy. 3 Contemporary Western Buddhist practitioners who engage in meditation are more likely to engage in a variety of meditative practices, practices that they regard as identifiably distinct, than to engage in a single meditative technique. 4 Buddhist practitioners today engage in conscious efforts to increase loving‐kindness and compassion through meditation practices. Method and Data The questionnaire totaled 265 questions. Once it was written and tested for validity and clarity by three professors of religious studies who have expertise in Buddhism, the questionnaire was placed on a website. We invited members of an assortment of Buddhist organizations to participate in this survey beginning August 2007 and ending January 2008 (six months altogether). In an effort to reach scholars and practitioners of Buddhism, we put the invitation onto three listservs: RISA‐L (the Religion in South Asia list), H‐Buddhism, and Buddha‐L. We e‐mailed some 270 Buddhist organizations that have websites and e‐mail addresses we could find; some of these are multinational, even global, organizations. We asked these organizations to circulate our invitation to the survey among their members, and some forwarded the e‐mail and/or placed the invitation on their own websites. We also paid for some advertisements (with grant funding from our university). We placed electronic banner ads in three online publications of Tricycle and print ads in the magazines Buddhadharma, Shambala Sun, and Tricycle. Partly because the electronic means of communication appeared earlier, and therefore some potential survey respondents who saw the print ads had already done the survey, we found the electronic means of communication much more effective in generating respondents. For every dollar spent on electronic ads and free e‐mail invitations, we got twenty‐nine respondents; once the paid advertisements appeared in print, we received only one respondent for each dollar spent (Wiist et al. 2010). Moreover, because the e‐mail invitations continued to circulate for the entire six‐month period of data collection, those may still have been generating respondents even after the appearance...