Buddhist Stories Informing Buddhist Spiritual Care Theory and Practice

Stories of lay Buddhists embedded in canonical and commentarial literatures not only help us understand how scripture entered the worlds and lives of diverse persons in Asian pasts, but also contribute to how lay Buddhists understand their lives and practice today, in the United States. The emergent field of Buddhist Chaplaincy remains in need of locating those narratives that can be theoretically framed and pedagogically utilized to further articulate uniquely Buddhist theory and praxis of spiritual care (Michon, 2023; Sanford, 2020; Giles and Miller, 2015). Towards such a future anthology of source texts, this paper identifies which stories are most used today by individual faculty and chaplains, and unpacks stories of the Buddha’s compassionate and skillful responses to the sickness and grief that beset laypeople in his time, and what they have to offer us as Buddhist caregivers, chaplains, and ministers today.

Chaplains have the teachers of old age, sickness, and death ever present, but lay Buddhist chaplains are often working not only outside the monastery, but also outside of Buddhist community spaces and cultures, longing for ways to connect their dharma practice lives to their professional livelihood, for education, inspiration, theological reflection, and meaning making. Stories of how Buddhists have coped with suffering, and even transformed it for spiritual growth, can provide companionship, be instructive, and support chaplains’ sustainability as they meet individuals in their suffering, be it in hospitals, hospices, prisons, and other diverse settings.

Given the enormous breadth and diversity of Buddhist literature worldwide and through millennia, which are the stories most relevant and salient for Buddhist practitioners of spiritual care (for other lay Buddhists and for non-Buddhists)? This author is conducting surveys and interviews (2023-2024) with the faculty of graduate school programs that train future chaplains and ministers, and spiritual care providers themselves, towards elucidating answers. The research informing this paper helps us to understand which stories in and across multiple lineages guide and theologically ground right livelihood in samsara.

For instance, in comparing stories of the deaths of a lay woman, the non-Buddhist Kisa Gotami’s infant son, the death of King Pasenadi’s beloved grandmother, Venerable Ananda’s reaction to the news of death of Venerable Shariputra, and the householder Cunda on his own deathbed, we see the Buddha responds to each one’s grief and spiritual circumstances differently, but always with care and to their benefit. Buddha does not lecture Kisa Gotami, who is inconsolable and desperate to bring her son back to life by any means, about impermanence or the inevitability of death. No, he gives her a single task to focus her mind and move her body, and along the way, slowly, she comes to the realization for herself that she has joined a human community of the bereaved, in which to love is also to eventually mourn. It is a brilliant spiritual care “therapeutic intervention”. (After this episode, she ordains as a nun and becomes a prominent Elder and teacher, known for her profound realizations.) In contrast, King Pasenadi comes to the Buddha, ashen and disheveled, straight from the pyre on which he has cremated his grandmother. He comes seeking solace, and also confesses that while he had previously heard Buddha preach impermanence, it had never before struck home so clearly as it has now, and yet he still wishes there was a way to bring her back as he can’t imagine life without her presence. Buddha empathizes with the King’s sadness and grief first, then confirms and adroitly builds on the spiritual teaching moment: he agrees with the King’s insight by way of enumerating the many beings, great and small, who cannot escape death, thereby normalizing the death of the grandmother.  He then proceeds to explain the results in the next life for those who lived virtuously, to remind and uplift the King, who is bound to think that his grandmother, a fine woman, will also experience the positive results of her karma, and just as he, the surviving grandson, will eventually experience if he continues living by her example. Again, the story lays out a practice of spiritual caregiving that is remarkably consonant with spiritual assessment and responses chaplains would be trained to use today (Cadge and Rambo, 2023; Kestenbaum, 2019). However, the centrality in these narratives of the Buddha’s teachings on impermanence, karma, and the eightfold path provide specifically Buddhist stories to ground a theory of care based in empathy and compassionate motivation, cultivation of insight (perspective taking and meaning making), and reorientation to one’s precious human rebirth in which to practice the dharma (akin to Worden’s (2009) tasks of mourning related to finding enduring connection to the deceased while embarking on a meaningful life adjusted to their absence). In other words, while Buddhist practitioners and graduate schools can and do learn from non-Buddhist theories, our own traditions are a treasury waiting to be mined for Buddhist stories as a source for constructing our own theories of care and mitigation of suffering. Stories were, and are still, used to convey tenets of worldview, with remarkable pathos and resilience those who hear them can relate to their own lived experiences, to be recalled in moments of need for solace and inspiration or ethical guidance.

This paper will utilize Buddhist stories and applications to spiritual care practice that have been developed in graduate seminars with chaplains-in-training, and will also put traditional Buddhist stories into dialogue with the stories of Buddhist professional chaplains to explore how they are informed by Buddhist images and stories of caregiving. The paper may include stories of the author’s own hospital and hospice chaplaincy work, for instance how Kisa Gotami’s story enabled me to hold spacious compassionate presence and provide simple, necessary directives while accompanying a frantically distraught mother in the Emergency Department as she laid down her precious 2 year-old for the last time, parting from his body which could not revived.

In some cases, such stories may provoke challenge: the Buddha’s extraordinary powers explain how, in one brief encounter, he could turn someone’s suffering into their dramatic, unfaltering attainments of incomprehensible leaps in degrees of liberation. By comparison, can our mundane actions hope to make any real difference? How is the chaplain or Buddhist minister of today to assess whether they are able to affect any difference at all in alleviating someone’s suffering on an ultimate level? On the other hand, stories from the Buddhist past bring about a recognition of the universality of human struggles and hopeful perseverance, nonetheless in our own times.