Contemplative Engagement:
The Development of Buddhist Chaplaincy
in the United States & Its Meaning for Japan
Rev. Hitoshi Jin
Jonathan S. Watts
Introduction
The Rinbutsuken Institute for Engaged Buddhism (臨床仏教研究所) was established inTokyo, Japan on March 7th, 2008. Affiliated with the Zenseikyo Foundation & Buddhist
Council for Youth and Child Edification ( 全 国 青 少 年 協 議 会 ), it engages incomprehensive research on social issues and Buddhism. The English meaning of theinstitute’s name, Rinbutsuken, refers to the practical or “clinical” (臨床 rinshō) approachto researching problems in society from a Buddhist standpoint. Therefore, our research
may be sophisticated, but never academic, while maintaining a Buddhist emphasis on thepractical transformation of the suffering of sentient life. Zenseikyo’s long time
experience in working with traumatized children and then its activities supporting thevictims of the 3/11 disaster has led us to commit full time in 2012 to the work ofcultivating Buddhist chaplains, or what we prefer to call rinshō-bukkyō-shi (臨床仏教師),
which can be translated as “Buddhist clinicians” or even “engaged Buddhists”. 1
Engaged Buddhism is a modern term first coined by the Vietnamese monkThich Nhat Hanh during the war there in the 1960s. He sought to describe a type of
Buddhism needed at that time where monks do not remain cloistered in their temples,chanting and meditating, but rather come out of the temples to engage in positive action
for peace and for the aid of the suffering. While Engaged Buddhism has been translated
into Japanese as “participating in society” Buddhism (社会参加仏教 shakai sanka
bukkyō), the social participation aspect is only half of the equation. The other half is thesimultaneous, deep investigation of the inner self. In this way, we might have in addition
to Socially Engaged Buddhism, also Spiritually Engaged Buddhism. Dr. A.T. Ariyaratne,
the founder of the Buddhist inspired Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement in Sri Lanka, has
explained this point as the difference between purna paurusodaya (personality
awakening) and vishvodaya (world community awakening).

1

http://www.zenseikyo.or.jp/rinbutsuken/english/index.html
Hitoshi, Jin. “Rinshō Bukkyō no Kanousei「臨床仏教の可能性」 : The Possibility of Rinshō Bukkyō.”
Rinshō Bukkyō Nyumon. edeted by The Rinbutsuken Institute for Engaged Buddhism. Kyoto: Hakuba
Publishers, 2013. P.10-25. 臨床仏教研究所編『臨床仏教入門』（白馬社 2013）1

In this way, rinshō has the meaning of engaging in the personal domain as wellas the social aspects of the four core causes of suffering (dukkha): birth, aging, sickness,and death. Thus, the Rinsho Buddhism Chaplaincy Training program seeks to develop
those who will not only offer bedside support for the ill and dying but to go forth into avariety of social situations to engage with suffering and its causes.
As Zenseikyo is an ecumenical organization, we have wide networks ofreligious professionals, not just Buddhists, from within Japan and overseas whom we arerecruiting to support us in developing this work. In this way, we are developing asystematic Buddhist chaplain training program based on the best practices of innovative
foreign programs, while seeking to develop a particular model that fits indigenous
Japanese Buddhist culture and society. This paper documents the specific research wehave conducted at the following sites over the past year on two visits to the United States
to learn more about Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) and Buddhist chaplaincy training:

one of the leading research and training centers in the U.S. for chaplaincy and CPE(the Department of Spiritual Care & Chaplaincy at Johns Hopkins Hospital in
Baltimore, Maryland)

two Buddhist educational institutions offering divinity degrees in chaplaincy (theInstitute of Buddhist Studies in Berkeley, California and Naropa University in
Boulder, Colorado)a center offering the only specifically Buddhist CPE internship and training programin the U.S. (the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care)

one of the first Buddhist hospice care organizations also involved volunteer training(the Zen Hospice Project in San Francisco)

one of the few Buddhist CPE Supervisors in the U.S. certified to train chaplains fromall denominations (Rev. Julie Hanada, Director of In-hospital Integrative Medicine
Services for the Institute for Health and Healing at the California Pacific Medical
Center in San Francisco)

an interfaith chaplain developing programs in mindfulness and social justice forstudents at one of the United States’ most prestigious universities (Matthew Weiner,
Associate Dean of Religious Life at Princeton University in New Jersey)a New York City police officer using Buddhist teachings and practice for conflict
resolution and officer training (Detective Jeff Thompson, Hostage Negotiation Team& Public Information, New York City Police Department)an organization teaching yoga and mindfulness meditation to at risk elementary
school children in a critically poor and violent urban area (Holistic Life Foundation2

in Baltimore, Maryland)
One of the central foci of this research was to understand how Buddhists in the UnitedStates have developed their own particular Buddhist approach to not only serving those inneed but in developing themselves within the context of American Clinical Pastoral
Education (CPE). CPE is a system of national certification for religious professionals
working in private and public institutions developed over the past 90 years with roots inthe formative Christian cultural heritage of the U.S.
Since the 1960s, CPE has been very slowly introduced and developed in Japan,
mostly by Christian pastors at private Christian hospitals that represent a small minorityof health care institutions in Japan. Outside of these private institutions and a handful of
Buddhist oriented ones, chaplaincy is an almost totally unknown field in Japan. This isdue to the bureaucratic interpretation of the Japanese constitution separating church andstate that bars religious professionals from working in public health care and other public
institutions. In turn, the concept of “team care” prevalent in the United States—in which
medical professionals work as equals on a team with social workers, psychiatrists, andchaplains—is totally unrecognized. In response to the inadequacies of this system, there
has been a growing interest in the past decade in “spiritual care” in various public
non-profit sectors, including Buddhist organizations like the Rinbutsuken Institute.
However, Rinbutsuken’s founding director, Rev. Hitoshi Jin, feels that Japanese do nothave a clear understanding of “spiritual care”. The terms “spiritual” and “spirituality” aredifficult to define in the pantheistic and Buddhist culture of Japan, and the concept of“spiritual care” is one that has developed largely from the Judeo-Christian standpoint ofAmerican CPE.
In visiting the U.S., we sought to learn about the ongoing negotiations between
Christian and Buddhist approaches to “spiritual care” and the development of newconcepts, like “contemplative care”, to express unique Buddhist approaches to this work.
We feel that these experiences can provide important lessons for us as we seek to develop
a uniquely Buddhist understanding of chaplaincy that fits the sentiments and culture of
the Japanese. This endeavor also involves reviving and adapting traditional Japanese
Buddhist practices, such as the practices for dying developed by the Twenty-five
Samadhi Society (二十五三昧会 nijūgo-zanmai-e) in the Heian era (794-1195)2, to thehighly modernized and secular social contexts of present day Japan.
As such this report will investigate a cluster of themes concerning:
2

Stone, Jacqueline. I. “With the Help of ‘Good Friends’: Deathbed Ritual Practices in Early Medieval
Japan.” In Jacqueline I. Stone & Mariko Namba Walker Eds. Death and the Afterlife in Japanese Buddhism.
Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2008. 61-101.
3

the differences between more Christian influenced “spiritual care” and more
Buddhist influenced “contemplative care”

the challenges of educating and training medical professionals in the basics ofspiritual and contemplative care as well as religious professionals in advanced formsof care

the challenges in translating and further developing Buddhist strengths in“contemplative” interpersonal skills to the wider systemic demands of CPE forinstitutional and social transformation

Understanding “Spiritual Care”
The concept of “spiritual care” has its roots in the concept of “pastoral care”, which refers
to the traditional role of Christian priests, or pastors, in counseling and supporting
members of their church or community. Rev. Dr. Seward Hiltner, a Presbyterian minister
who was a leader in the field of pastoral care and a former professor at the Princeton
Theological Seminary, further explains the concept as:
The ministry of the cure of souls, or pastoral care, consists of helping acts, doneby representative Christian persons, directed towards the healing, sustaining,
guiding, and reconciling of troubled persons whose troubles arise in the context
of ultimate meanings and concerns.3
With this kind of foundation, CPE developed in the mid 20th century under the strong
influence of Protestant theologians Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Karl Barth andtheir understandings of pastoral care and counseling. “These theologians helped frame
the existential suffering and spiritual longing of the persons chaplains encounter on adaily basis.”4 However, increasing cultural diversity in the U.S. in the 1970s and 1980s
forced an expansion of these understandings in CPE to incorporate modern psychology,
educational theory, and group dynamics as well as grapple with a growing diversity ofdifferent religious standpoints. In this way, the concept of pastoral care had to be
developed into something more encompassing, which is what many refer to now as“spiritual care”.
While spiritual care still carries undertones of Christian theology in the sense of a
spirit or soul in relation to a creator God, the concept of “spirituality” has greatly evolvedin the U.S. as seen in this definition by palliative care specialists:
3

Hiltner, Seward. Preface to Pastoral Theology. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1958. pp. 89-172.
Cobb, Mark & Puchlaski, Christina M. “Theoretical Foundations (of CPE)” in The Oxford Textbook of
Spirituality in Healthcare. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2012. p. 431.
44

Spirituality is the aspect of humanity that refers to the way individuals seek andexpress meaning and purpose and the way they experience their connectedness
to the moment, to self, to others, to nature, and to the significant or sacred.5
In this definition, we see no reference to a spirit or soul, nor any reference to God. Indeed,“spirituality” is now often used by agnostics as an alternative word to “religion” to referto their own personal belief systems.
This expanding notion of “spirituality” and “spiritual care” was echoed by the CPE
summer interns with whom we spoke at Johns Hopkins Hospital, all of whom are being
trained as Christian ministers. Here is a sampling of their responses to our question,“What is spirituality to you?”:From a Catholic priest in training: “Spirituality to me is a concrete lived relationshipwith God through Jesus Christ, which takes all kinds of different expressions. The
CPE program offers a deepening of who I am as a man, as a Christian, and as aminister.”

From a male Episcopalian minister in training: “I see spirituality in a broad way as aconnection to the divine or transcendent, whether that be our personal connection,
our connection within each other, or the world around us. The unknown componentof CPE has been how much I have come to see my own pastoral identity unveiled. It
was there, but I didn’t know it existed until this process.”A female minister in training from the Reformed tradition for whom chaplaincy is asecond career after being a social worker. “For me spirituality and faith is anacceptance and recognition of the existence and meaningfulness of God, ofsomething external to ourselves that we cannot necessarily see physically but ispresent in all of creation and humanity.”A female Episcopalian minister in training who was raised Roman Catholic, used to
be a scientist, and has practiced Buddhist meditation: “For me, spirituality is about
connecting with that piece of myself that is beyond, the divine. Making thisconnection is probably the most meaningful thing that I do and finding it in otherpeople.”

A Lutheran minister in training taking CPE to become a military chaplain:“Spirituality is about the human connection to the divine, but it has both individual

5“Improving the Quality of Spiritual Care as a Dimension of Palliative Care: The Report of the Consensus
Conference” Journal of Palliative Care, Vol. 12, No. 10, 2009.
5and communal components.”
Rev. Chris Brown, the Manager of Clinical Pastoral Education and director of theseinterns’ summer program, who is southern Baptist: “For me, spirituality is the sparkof being connected to other human beings. So the central core of my spirituality is
being in relationship not just with God but with others and myself.”

Despite the notion of connection with a single creator God, which is alien to Japanese, thecore sensibilities of connection to an external source of divinity and to other humanbeings are very similar to key Japanese notions of religion—such as the Buddhist concept
of interconnection with all sentient life (en) and with a source of divinity such ascompassionate and protective gods in the Shinto pantheon or buddhas (Amida) andbodhisattvas (Kannon). From this basis, we will examine how American Buddhists
further expanded the concept of “spiritual care”.
Introducing “Contemplative Care”
One of the first impressions in talking with Buddhists in the U.S. about chaplaincy is theuse of the term “contemplative care”. This term—along with others such as“contemplative intervention” and “contemplative practice”—is now commonly being
used among Buddhist groups, as seen in the names of two of the most establishedprograms: the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care founded by Revs. Chodo
Campbell and Koshin Ellison and the Being with Dying Professional Training Program inContemplative End-of-Life Care founded by Rev. Joan Halifax in New Mexico. The
term’s usage, however, tends to be for engaging not with fellow Buddhists but with two
disparate groups in the field: 1) the still predominantly theistic culture of the UnitedStates, principally Christianity; 2) medical professionals, whose scientific backgrounds
tend to make them averse to religious teachings and culture.
The roots of Buddhist oriented “contemplative care” begin with the pioneeringresearch done on the scientifically verifiable effects of meditation by Jon Kabat-Zinn inthe 1980s at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Using a Buddhist
framework, Kabat-Zinn created a structured eight-week course called Mindfulness-BasedStress Reduction (MBSR). The aspect of Buddhist meditation that he isolated as the key
component for scientifically verifiable, therapeutic interventions was “mindfulness”,
which he defined as “paying attention in a particular way; on purpose, in the present
moment, and non judgmentally.”6 Mindfulness is a core component of classical Buddhist
6

Kabat-Zinn, J. Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life. New York:
Hyperion, 1994. p. 4.
6

meditation, found specifically in the shamatha-vipassana (止観 shikan) tradition of
Theravada Buddhism and principally in the Tendai and Zen schools of Mahayana
Buddhism. With such empirical data, Kabat-Zinn’s work began gaining wide spread
notoriety in the 1990s. Over the last decade, “mindfulness” has become a buzzword andits practice a growing trend in many sectors of American public life.
However, in clinical contexts, both the term “meditation” and its Buddhist roots havebeen downplayed for their religious connotations. Thus, new terms like “contemplativeintervention” (i.e. the teaching of mindfulness meditation) and “contemplative care”
started being developed in the 1990s. As the therapeutic benefits of meditation forpatients are becoming more widely accepted, there has been a greater demand for such
meditation teachers in a variety of clinical environments. The term “contemplative” isalso used as a more inclusive term that recognizes the meditative-like benefits of forms ofpractice prominent in other traditions—such as “contemplative prayer” in the Abrahamic
traditions as well as mantra-like recitation in Hinduism and even in Buddhism itself like
Pure Land Buddhism. In the important new survey of Buddhist chaplaincy developmentin the United States called The Arts of Contemplative Care, the editors provide a helpful
explanation of this popular new term:
The term “contemplative care” has its roots in the movement of Buddhist
chaplains, care providers, and ministers that are beginning to turn their passion
for Buddhist practice and view into a meaningful living. It is a close cousin to
the term “spiritual care” … and yet we would like to distinguish (them) … We
understand spiritual care to refer to a wide swath of practitioners who provide
emotional and spiritual support in a variety of contexts, both professional andinformal. Contemplative care, on the other hand, refers to a kind of care that is
informed by rigorous training in a meditative or contemplative tradition …
Contemplative care is the art of providing spiritual, emotional, and pastoral
support, in a way that is informed by a personal, consistent contemplative or
meditation practice.7
In this way, we can see how “contemplative” is being used to express the importance of
meditation practice for not only the patient (as is widely assumed or expected) but also forthe caregiver—both medical and spiritual. In fact, in Jonathan Watts’ continuing research,

7

Giles, Cheryl A. and Miller, Willa B, eds. The Arts of Contemplative Care: Pioneering Voices in Buddhist
Chaplaincy and Pastoral Work. Boston: Wisdom Publication, 2012. p. xvii.
7

which includes Buddhist priests in Japan doing suicide prevention8, he has found that
greater emphasis is placed on meditation practice by the caregiver rather than by thepatient.9
As such, the development of “contemplative care” is not simply Buddhists trying to
be different or creating their own “brand” of spiritual care. Three certified CPE chaplainstrained by the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care explained to us this point
and the meaning of “contemplative care” and “contemplative practice” for them:A male chaplain who is beginning his third year with the palliative care team at Mt.
Sinai Hospital on the upper East Side of Manhattan: “I am going to relate thedifference between spiritual care and contemplative care to practice, of meditation
practice and overall Buddhist practice. This means being embodied in a way thatperhaps other chaplains may not be trained. Because of our practice, we can engage
in contemplative care with an inner awareness of how to be with our bodies andourselves. I find this most meaningful with patients in terms of them opening up andconnecting in ways they never imagined. I find that many in the pastoral care andpalliative care staff have never had that happen to them before with patients.”

a female chaplain who did CPE training in psychiatry and substance abuse as well as
palliative care for five years at Beth Israel Hospital in lower Manhattan:“Contemplation to me equals curiosity, which means to be very aware of what iscoming up for me and then opening to this elegant listening, just listening. So I try to
imagine, ‘What is the message that I am receiving from this other person?’ This does
not mean to let go of the foundation that is supporting me, but throughcontemplation to open up to what the person is telling me so that I can be aware of
how we are influencing one another. From that place, I can begin to wonder, ‘Whereis this person suffering? What is this person’s strength that they might not be
seeing?’ The posture of the Buddha acts as a model for my own posture and attitude
in dealing with others so that I can serve them.”

a female chaplain who worked in palliative care for seven years at Beth Israel
Hospital and now does home hospice care outside of New York City for the Hospiceof Orange and Sullivan County: “Offering contemplative care means to be reallygrounded in our bodies. This allows for sensitivity. It also helps to open up a field of

8

Watts, Jonathan S. “Journey through Dukkha: The Suicide Prevention Priests of Japan Enter into
Structural Violence and Connect to Social Change.” Yokohama: International Buddhist Exchange Center(IBEC). April 15, 2014. http://jneb.jp/english/activities/dyingcar/journey-through-dukkha1.
9
Watts, Jonathan S. and Tomatsu, Yoshiharu, eds. Buddhist Care for the Dying and Bereaved. Boston:Wisdom Publications & Tokyo: Jodo Shu Research Institute, 2012. p. 7.
8feeling to know what is happening in myself and to become very attuned to theperson I am with. I think this is what really allows for spontaneity, to be able to movehere or there, for whatever seems to be needed.”
Means vs. Ends or Presence vs. Salvation
The ability to develop embodied presence in the face of suffering is something that
distinguishes “contemplative care” from “spiritual care”. What is perhaps surprising is
not that there is a difference in what the caregiver is focusing on in the patient (a spirit vs.
a consciousness or mind) but rather the comportment of the chaplain themselves. ClinicalPastoral Education (CPE) was developed in the 1920s by Rev. Anton Boisen, aCongregationalist minister, and Dr. William A. Bryan in part as a response to the narrowminded way Christian priests often acted as chaplains in clinical environments. Too often
they were seeking to inculcate patients with proper faith rather than experience them first
as who they were and what their real suffering was. In this way, CPE at its core attempts
to train ministers of all religious backgrounds to cultivate more fully in themselves theirrespective traditions in order to better attend to the suffering of patients, rather than as
way to bring patients to a minster’s sense of their own respective tradition.
What this new generation of Buddhist chaplains appears to be contributing to CPE is
the power of a non-theistic “contemplative care” that manifests in the ability of Buddhist
chaplains to translate the practice of sitting with their own suffering in meditation to thepractice of sitting non-judgmentally with patients in their suffering—a practice known as“presence”. Roy Remer, who trains volunteer hospice staff for the Zen Hospice Project at
Laguna Honda Hospital, spoke to us of the tendency in theistic spiritual care, especiallycommon among Christian chaplains, to be more focused on active altruism, doing good,and getting tangible results—ideally in the patient coming to an awakening or
confirmation of faith and salvation. Buddhists, on the other hand, focus on the act ofsimply being present with the patient, seeing what arises, and remaining unattached tooutcomes. As the late Rev. Issan Dorsey, founder of Maitri Hospice also in San Francisco,emphasized, “You have to meet people where there are and not where you want them tobe.” 10 Remer concludes that, “This seems to result in greater longevity among ourvolunteers as opposed to others who burn out when they don’t see tangible results. We
emphasize giving up any notions of fixing things, to just serve with an open heart and bewith suffering.”
Revs. Chodo Campbell and Koshin Ellison, founders of the New York Zen Centerfor Contemplative Care, both did their CPE training in Judeo-Christian contexts and10

Buddhist Care for the Dying and Bereaved. p. 233.
9

found there was no such practice as “bearing witness” or “being with”. While there might
have been a sense of deep listening, it usually was goal oriented. For them, sometimes
there is a goal, but it involves something less tangible without an agenda—
such as getting someone to a place where they feel comfortable enough to open up and telltheir story.
Kirsten Deleo, a trainer in the Rigpa Spiritual Care Program founded by Sogyal
Rinpoche and Christine Longaker, explains in greater detail how meditation practicetranslates into a style of caring for others: “The premise of the contemplative approach isthat, if you want to be useful to others, the place to start is with yourself, beginning withyour own mind. Meditation practice gives us a window into observing and understanding
the mind and its nature … Meditative practice can help us preserve our sanity and connect
to our basic goodness … Contemplative practices are an effective and profound way tocultivate the ability to be non-judgmentally open with all that arises; to becompassionately present.”11
Rev. Jennifer Block, former Bereavement Manager at Zen Hospice Project andCo-founder of the Buddhist Chaplaincy Training Program at the Sati Center for Buddhist
Studies, defines what “spiritual care” looks like from a Buddhist standpoint: “Spiritualsupport from a Buddhist perspective can be defined as: willingness to bear witness, tohelp others discover their own truth, and to sit and listen to stories that have meaning andvalue; (as well as) helping another to face life directly; welcoming paradox and ambiguity
into care (and trusting that these will emerge into some degree of awakening); andcreating opportunities to awaken to their True Nature.”12
In conclusion, the development by American Buddhists of the new term of“contemplative care” to expand the understanding and practice of “spiritual care” toincorporate the physical embodiment of meditation and mindfulness practice appears tohave brought a revolutionary shift in the practice of chaplaincy in the United States. The
Rinbutsuken Institute seeks to create a similar revolution in care in Japan. However, we
feel we cannot repeat the same mistake in the initial development of “spiritual care” inJapan by simply incorporating the American concept of “contemplative care” and using it
as a borrowed term that has no meaning to the average person. In the ongoing attempt tolearn from other countries while developing an indigenous Japanese model, Rev. Jin has
begun to use the term “life care” (いのちのケア inochi-no-kea), instead of “spiritualcare” (スピリチュアルケア supirichuaru-kea). The Japanese term for “life”, inochi, canbe spelled using the Chinese character 命, but this is more physical life, one’s actual life
11
12

The Arts of Contemplative Care, p. 244.
The Arts of Contemplative Care, p. 7.
10

span. Using the Japanese hiragana script いのち offers a broader meaning, encompassing
existential aspects, like the Buddhist term dharma. As an indigenous terms, it is evocativeand leads to deeper reflection on its meaning, rather than the empty sound of atransliterated foreign word.
Role of Medical Professionals in Spiritual and Contemplative Care:
In our research, we feel that there are two critical insights gained from the wider CPE
program in the United States:
1) the religious professional must undergo an inner transformation in becoming achaplain so as to be able to listen deeply and be totally present for a patient,2) the chaplain’s role extends beyond caring for the patient and their family to thesurrounding medical professionals, who also struggle emotionally, mentally, andspiritually in their work.
In the former, embodied Buddhist meditation can be an important tool in developing theseessential abilities of chaplaincy. Indeed, numerous Buddhist chaplains have remarked thatchaplains from other faith traditions have asked them for instruction in meditation. The
aforementioned chaplain from the New York Zen Center for Contemplative working at
Mt. Sinai Hospital explains that:
Within the pastoral care departments at hospitals, we are experienced, seen, andrecognized differently, sometimes affectionately being called ‘Zen-terns’(Zen+intern). When we arrive at these departments, it is obvious that we are
embodied in a certain way and bringing our contemplative practice with us.
Many members of theses pastoral care departments are also hungry for this
aspect of meditation, both as part of their own practice as chaplains in thehospital and also as part of something they could possibly offer to patients. I
receive requests all the time to teach meditation to the members of thesedepartments and to have it incorporated it into their program of pastoral care.
In keeping with the CPE injunctions to never seek to convert and with Buddhism’s
non-theistic orientation, when a chaplain from another faith studies meditation, the goal is
not for them to become Buddhist. On the contrary, they become an embodied Christian,an embodied Jew, etc., which helps them to get their religious training from their head
down into their heart, and even into their gut, so they can then see ways to communicate
11their faith without relying just on the terms and concepts of their tradition.
In terms of the latter, there is the task of caring for medical professionals, like apatient, when they suffer from secondary trauma, burnout, and moral distress.13 However,
medical professionals themselves need to embody some of the basic skills of the chaplain,especially deep listening and presence. A number of CPE program founders and directors
whom we met had important insights into this issue:●

Rev. Chris Brown, the Manager of Clinical Pastoral Education at the Department of
Spiritual Care & Chaplaincy at Johns Hopkins Hospital, explained: “If I were apatient, I would want a physician to pause and understand that my spirituality isimportant. This is where “active listening” comes in, because when a patient istalking, a doctor or caregiver needs to look them in the eye and free their thoughtsfrom trying to complete the patient’s sentence. They may recognize that the situation
is out of their domain and refer it a chaplain. Even so, I would be looking for aphysician to be engaged with my suffering and to realize that at that moment myspirituality is important. Holistic care is knowing you are a physician but that you
are also a human being and making a human connection is spiritual care. In thisspiritual care department, we are trying to provide a complete model for the doctors
in “active listening”. I would hope that anyone on our interdisciplinary team would
be able to recognize that there is more to the patient than just the physical. This isvery important, because there are other hospitals with no spiritual care department or
CPE programs, whose patients need this kind of care.”●

Rev. Ty Crowe, Director of the Department of Spiritual Care & Chaplaincy at Johns
Hopkins Hospital and a teacher in the Shadhiliyya Sufi Order, explained further that:“Everyone needs to participate in spiritual care, so we do education for the nurses
and some physicians, and for other professionals in the hospital. They areencouraged to be compassionate and to listen for places where someone’s
spirituality may come up. Yet we also want them to know the limits of their abilities.
Most of them are afraid of talking about spirituality, because they think: 1) ‘This willtake too much time.’ 2) “What if the patient’s faith is different from my own? 3)‘What if the patient starts talking about things I have no understanding that may
endanger our doctor-patient relationship?’ It is in the last situation that they shouldmake a referral to a chaplain. Part of our role is actually having an influence on the
educational institutions, like the schools of medicine. There are a number of good

13

Halifax, Joan Jiko. “Being with Dying: The Upaya Contemplative End-of-Life Training Program” in
Buddhist Care for the Dying and Bereaved. pp. 209-28.
12

medical schools that are developing presentations, workshops, and simulation cases
to expose their residents to spirituality, but we have discovered that there are no suchjoint clinical programs with chaplains. We think this kind of program has potential todevelop.”

Rev. Koshin Ellison, co-founder of the New York Zen Center for Contemplative
Care, spoke about this from the Buddhist perspective: “We were just approached by
the medical school of a major medical center that wants specifically Zen training, as
they already have experience with mindfulness meditation. They want to train theirattending physicians, who are the ones who have to train the new medical interns
and other professionals in the unit. They want something more than justmindfulness. Thanks to MBSR, everyone now knows that meditation andmindfulness is a best practice. That is now standard knowledge, but these people arescientists and they want to know where this mindfulness comes from. They also
want to know about the ethics, which is a new and important jump. We are alsoteaching this at the University of Arizona Medical School and at the Houston
Medical Center. There is a desire now to learn Buddhist ethics, wanting to knowwhat meditation is rooted in.”

A comprehensive “contemplative care” training for medical professionals that goesbeyond just teaching meditation is the specialty of Rev. Joan Halifax and her pioneering
Being with Dying Professional Training Program in Contemplative End-of-Life Care
(BWD) course established in 1996 by her Upaya Zen Center. She explains that:[After examining the clinician’s worldview], the second area we work with in
exploring how we can transform the clinician is related to contemplativeinterventions—in other words, we teach them meditation. We call them“contemplative interventions” as a skillful means, because when you say“meditation,” it produces resistance in most medical settings. Our focus in thesereflective practices or contemplative interventions is on the cultivation of insight,
mental stability, and compassion … We endeavor to help clinicians understandthat there are beneficial outcomes to these contemplative strategies, including
attentional and emotional balance, cognitive control, and resilience … Throughthese contemplative interventions, one can develop mental flexibility, insight, andmetacognition, which means you are able to reframe experiences in ways that areprosocial.14
14

Halifax. Buddhist Care for the Dying and Bereaved. pp. 216-18.
13

The third area they work in is the confronting of moral distress and the development ofcharacter, as also seen in the growing work of the New York Zen Center forContemplative Care.
In this way, we can see the growing swath of the chaplain’s role: from caring for thepatient and their family, to caring for the other professionals and clinicians with whomthey work as a team, and finally to the widest level of caring for the institution in which
all this takes place. Rev. Halifax’s programs offer a significant emphasis on systems careand “transformation of the institution”, including Upaya’s own Buddhist Chaplaincy
Program that trains individuals to work in a wide area of social fields beyond just medical
environments. She explains that:
Our vision of chaplaincy operates on many different levels. Because you cannot
separate the patient from the clinician, the clinician from the community, or
beings from the institutions themselves, we have used a systems-theory
approach for both our Buddhist Chaplaincy and Being with Dying training
programs … We feel that a systems perspective is the only viable one. Individual
clinicians can go through a deep change in how they approach their work, but theinstitutional demands create a moral conflict within them and within how they
can approach their work. Therefore, you cannot look at things in isolation.
Everything is interconnected—as Buddhism teaches. We also have a very strongemphasis on neuroscience, direct and structural violence, and ethics,
relationship, and communication. In this way, our training, especially thechaplaincy program, is basically in socially engaged Buddhism.15
Shifting from the Individual to the System
In the wider field of engaged Buddhism, one of the core impetuses for Buddhists tobecome involved in social issues has been the perception that Buddhism is inward
looking and unconcerned with social justice, especially in comparison with the
Abrahamic faiths. This is a long discussion that involves looking at karma as theimpersonal force of justice for Buddhists rather than an anthropomorphic God thatintervenes to decide on matters.16 However, even convert Buddhists in the West whocome from Abrahamic religious traditions are accused of being more interested in the
personal transformation that occurs on their meditation cushion than the social
15

Halifax. Buddhist Care for the Dying and Bereaved. p. 227.
Watts, Jonathan S., ed. Rethinking Karma: The Dharma of Social Justice. 2nd Edition. Bangkok:
International Network of Engaged Buddhists, 2014.
16

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transformation that occurs from activism and engagement in society. One criticism of therecent mindfulness boom in the U.S. is that it has been delinked from Buddhist ethics andused by corporations and other profit oriented groups to enhance their own productivity.17
In the contemplative care movement, we have seen how the dedication to innertransformation has made Buddhists particularly adept at the core competency ofchaplaincy—being present with others in suffering. However, our research has shown
Buddhist training curriculums may be comparatively weaker in the wider work ofsystems care and engagement with the system around the patients and their loved
ones—usually being a medical or public funded care institution. This was the experience
we found at Naropa University. As their program had grown out of the Contemplative
Psychology and Comparative Religious Programs, they found the program was lacking in
the areas of ethics, social analysis, and diversity issues. These areas usually involve
advocacy work by the chaplain in dealing with institutional and structural systems. In thisway, they brought in five chaplaincy experts to assess the program, including Rev.
Daijaku Kinst, Director of the Buddhist Chaplaincy Program at the Institute of Buddhist
Studies (IBS), and representatives from the Harvard Divinity School and Union
Theological Seminary. The result was a major revision of their Master of Divinity
program to better address nine key points of the ACPE curriculum.
This type of research and focus on the role of the chaplain in the system is one of thespecialties of the John Hopkins Department of Spiritual Care & Chaplaincy. They design
specific studies to measure the positive impact of chaplains on the health institution, suchas: 1) the ways chaplains save a hospital costs by facilitating patients to move out ofintensive care and into hospice or palliative care, 2) increased customer (patient andfamily) satisfaction, and 3) less burnout among medical staff, especially nurses. The
department has created a Medical Religious Partners program, reaching out to religious
leaders in the community who are not CPE chaplains yet exert a stronger influence thandoctors on patient’s medical choices concerning intensive care and end of life care. At
Johns Hopkins Hospital, chaplains also are working more and more in ethics and on
ethical committees for difficult cases. They have a highly developed system of a consult
team and a committee that meets once a month. The consult team, with the chaplain at thecenter, is always working inside the units with the medical team and the patients andfamilies, often times around communications problems.
As Buddhist contemplative care continues to grow, it begins to connect with anotherimportant stream in American Buddhism, engaged Buddhism. The two would appear to17

Purser, Ron & Loy, David R. “Beyond McMindfulness”. Huffington Post. July 1, 2013.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ron-purser/beyond-mcmindfulness_b_3519289.html
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offer ideal complements to each other: engaged Buddhism pushing “contemplative care”
beyond the realm of meditation and personal counseling into the realm of structural
violence and social transformation; contemplative care providing a more disciplined andcompassionate grounding to the hyper-vigilant social activist. Matthew Weiner,
Associate Dean of Religious Life at Princeton University who develops programs forstudents combining meditation and social justice, explains this latter issue:
At Princeton, there are very few social activists, and the ones you meet often
have a big attitude. They tend to be very angry and hard to talk to. I talked to oneof my engaged Buddhist students who agreed with me about this problem. We
proposed a question to ask such activist students, “What if your identity was‘friend’, instead of ‘activist’?” The purpose was to see if it could help change
their perspective and understand where listening and self-reflection fits into
activism. I discovered a term at the very beginning of the Buddha’s Discourse on
Loving Kindness (Metta Sutta) called suvaco, which means “someone who iseasy to talk to”. It is a quality the Buddha recommends as one of the things to be
cultivated. I think this means that part of opening the heart means not justdeclaring, “I am a loving person,” but actually being easy to talk to. This relates
to the practice of deep listening that one develops in meditation practice. The artof shamatha-vipassana is deep listening, to yourself, watching and listening to
your own mind. You are basically doing chaplaincy on yourself. So I see doing
engaged Buddhism as a form of doing chaplaincy.
In this way, Dean Weiner not only acts like a traditional chaplain offering counsel tostudents in crisis, but also has expanded his role through the programs he co-creates withinterested students. One of these roles is to act more like a mentor or an “elder friend”
than as a chaplain. This is not a horizontal relationship as it would be with a friend of thesame age, yet it is different from other relationships with elders, like parents or
professors. This kind of relationship, which mirrors the Buddhist archetype of “spiritual
friend” (kalyanamitra), can be extremely important when students have complicatedpersonal problems, such as homosexuality, they feel uncomfortable addressing with achaplain from their own tradition.
Another role is supporting students to value and build human relationships. Dean
Weiner explains that most Princeton students have been valued all their lives for theirindividual success and their competitive fire, yet these skills retard their interpersonal
ones. Thus, he emphasizes to his students when making a program together that making
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friends during the process is as or more important than the successful result of the
program. A final role of Dean Weiner’s is vocational development in connecting students
to alternative career paths in NGO work and even engaged Buddhism. As an Executive
Committee member of the International Network of Engaged Buddhists (INEB) based in
Bangkok, Dean Weiner introduces students to a very different world of social
entrepreneurs and spiritual activists. He is presently developing summer internships forstudents to work in engaged Buddhists groups in various parts of Asia.
One of these alternative career paths that Dean Weiner exposed to students at aweeklong meditation and social justice retreat held in March 2015 was the work ofDetective Jeff Thompson of the New York City Police Department. Detective Thompson
is a New York native from Queens. He was raised Catholic but became intrigued by the
Tibetan non-violent resistance to the Chinese occupation and the teachings of the Dalai
Lama. He also discovered and began practicing the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh, one ofthe principal figures in both the mindfulness boom in the West and the growing interest in
engaged Buddhism around the world. Detective Thompson considers himself “basically apracticing Buddhist but I try to be non-denominational. As the Dalai Lama said, ‘My
religion is kindness.’” After serving as a policeman in fields ranging from one-on-one
interpersonal dialogue over disputes to high scale protest, he decided to go outside thepolice department to get formal training as a mediator at the New York Peace Institute.
Detective Thompson now designs and runs programs on conflict crisis
communication training. He explains that:
Our job is to de-escalate the conflict. Communication can be as or more effective
than the weapons I am carrying. We developed skills for talking with suicidal
people about to jump off a building, but then we thought why can’t police use
these same skills with people on the street who resist arrest but are not being
violent. We took this model used for hostage crises and trained all our police
officers in it to use on their regular patrols. I also taught every single recruit in
the academy twice. These were one-day trainings. I teach all over the country atpolice academies. We have a three-step model for this work:
1) Communication: involves the 80-20 principle of 80% listening and 20% speaking.
Such “active listening” not only creates a connection but helps to gather information,
which is critical in police work. From this basis, one can then 2) Negotiate: While understanding the other person is important, police also haveshorter term goals, which are to resolve the conflict at hand and ensure public safety.
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Therefore, police must negotiate and work towards the goal of 3) Voluntary Compliance: This is the ultimate goal and involves the act ofself-determination by the person in the street. This is what good police accomplish
every day.
In summation, the concept of “active listening” is to build rapport and develop trust withanother person, while at the same time gathering information for the purpose of helping
this person. This means to jointly explore their options about what they can do so that
ultimately they make their own choice. It is the opposite of telling people what to do.
Detective Thompson explains that: “With each step, you are slowing the process
down, which helps to de-escalate the conflict. Two important points in this work are: to
ask open-ended questions and to label emotions, which is something Thich Nhat Hanhteaches to do with anger. As police, we want to act with mindfulness and compassion, orin non-Buddhist terms, with awareness.” Detective Thompson uses role-play work
frequently in his training programs, since it is essential that the officers learn how to do itthemselves. He emphasizes to them that it is very important how calm and at peace they
are inside themselves.
From this work, Detective Thompson has developed further interest in researching
about the ways nonverbal communication and emotional contagion have an effect in
conflict resolution. For his present Ph.D. research, he has developed an acronym in called
METTA, which is the term for “loving kindness” in Buddhism. He explains that it isbasically a mnemonic device to help people and officers remember their nonverbal
communication habits:
M – movement: gestures, facial expressions, body language
E – environment: when, where, time, who speaks?
T – touch: 1) greeting, shaking hands, appropriateness, first impressions, 2)“leakage”, which means how one expresses anxiety and stress through fidgeting,tapping, playing with jewelry, etc. This shows a person’s deeper inner feeling overwhat they are saying.
T – tone: shows intention, like the way we even use gestures while on the phone
because it helps to influence tone and guide others. That is our role: to simply guideothers.
A – appearance: our dress, being mindful of other people’s perceptions of you
For the last three years, Detective Thompson has also worked in the press unit of the18police department trying to educate the public that police are actually interested andfocused on community building and not just using violent force. His work comes at an
intensely critical time in the U.S. with the numerous police related deaths of Afro
American men and a severe backlash against patrol officers and police departments.
Detective Thompson’s use of the inner realms of mindfulness practice in conflict
resolution and the outer realms of social engagement bringing this practice to New York
City’s police force is an especially powerful example of the Buddhist chaplain andengaged Buddhist as one.
We witnessed an equally powerful example of such work on the very opposite side of
Detective Thompson’s world at our visit with the Holistic Life Foundation in Baltimore,
Maryland. The Holistic Life Foundation (HLF) was founded in 2001 by two brothers Ali
and Atman Smith, together with Andres Gonzalez, whom they met at the University of
Maryland as students. The Smith brothers were raised by parents of the hippie generationand grew up being taught yoga and meditation. After moving back to their oldneighborhood in urban Baltimore, they noticed the marked deterioration of community.
Thus, together with Gonzalez, they founded HLF based on the goal of “nurturing thewellness of children and adults in underserved communities. Through a comprehensive
approach which helps children develop their inner lives through yoga, mindfulness, andself-care, HLF demonstrates deep commitment to learning, community, and stewardshipof the environment.”18
Their work began in 2002 as an after school program, called Holistic Me, at theWindsor Hills Elementary School, and then hosted at the Druid Hill YMCA for sevenyears. Now the HLF after school program is facilitated at Robert W. Coleman Elementary
School. The school is in the heart of the region of Baltimore that experienced “rioting”
and violent responses to Baltimore police in May 2015 in the wake of the death of ayoung African-American named Freddie Gray through police abuse and negligence in aroutine arrest. In an area of Baltimore that has been rife with poverty, drugs, and gangwarfare for decades, HLF works with some of the most at risk young children in the
United States. Their program at Robert Coleman serves 58 male and female students frompre-kindergarten through the end of primary school. They explain that it includes tutoringand homework assistance, fitness and sports fundamentals training, yoga andmindfulness programs, environmental advocacy and education, and other activities suchas creative writing, art, music, and civic engagement. This summer vacation they began
their first day camps for children at the school.
Among their expanding number of programs, they have developed a Mindful
18

Holistic Life Foundation: http://hlfinc.org/about-us/
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Moment Program, which includes the 346 students at Robert W. Coleman Elementary
School and approximately 1,300 students at Patterson Park High School. The Smith
brothers and Gonzalez have created their own definition of mindfulness in doing thiswork:
Mindfulness is the combination of awareness, centering, and being present. It is
the awareness of your thoughts, emotions, actions, and energy. It is the ability to
get centered and stay centered in all situations. And it is the ability to be present,
not letting internal and external distractions take you from the current moment.
This leads to the development of empathy, compassion, love, balance, andharmony.19
In the Mindful Moment program, they explain that students begin and close the schoolday with fifteen minutes of mindfulness practice. Students also have the opportunity to
self-refer to a Mindful Moment Room, or teachers may send distressed or disruptive
students there for individual assistance with emotional self-regulation. The room isstaffed by HLF Workforce Development participants, some of whom are graduates of theHolistic Me afterschool program. Some of the documented effects of the program havebeen: suspensions at Patterson Park for fighting dropped from 49 in the 2012-2013 school
year to 23 in the 2013-2014 school year; the number of 9th graders being promoted to the10th grade increased from 45% in the 2012-2013 school year to 64% in the 2013-2014
school year.20
The Holistic Life Foundation offers us perhaps the most clear and compellingexample of combining “contemplative care”, chaplaincy, and engaged Buddhism into
one comprehensive program. It also marks yet another extremely important stage in thedevelopment of Buddhism in the United States. As we have noted, the mindfulness
movement has been criticized for lacking a sense of social ethics and justice. The
mindfulness movement along with the entire Buddhist movement in the U.S. has also
been criticized for catering to upper middle class Caucasians, who have the time andmoney to attend meditation retreats often held at idyllic, rural retreat centers. The
Buddhist message of the renunciation of desire and leading a simpler material life has
understandably not resonated with the under class, who have very little to renounce norfind materialistic simplicity in poverty ridden areas very appealing. HLF, however, hasused the fundamental Buddhist approach of confronting suffering to identify the needs of
19
20

Holistic Life Foundation: http://hlfinc.org/about-us/
Holistic Life Foundation: http://hlfinc.org/services/mindful-moment-program/20

their community and adapt practices to that environment. Watching children in a hot
sweaty summer gym at Robert Coleman engage in a lively conversation with their
mentors on how their mindfulness practice helps them deal with the people in theirenvironment, we saw “contemplative care” being practiced in ways we had not imagined.
Conclusion
Earlier, we spoke of the two critical insights gained from the wider CPE program in the
United States. These can be further extended from the contributions of the growing
influence of Buddhism:
1) the religious professional must undergo an inner transformation in becoming achaplain so as to be able to listen deeply and be totally present for a patient. Buddhist
based mindfulness meditation practice offers a decisive method for this innertransformation through developing embodied presence in the practitioner.
2) the chaplain’s role extends beyond caring for the patient and their family to thesurrounding medical professionals, who also struggle emotionally, mentally, andspiritually in their work. Engaged Buddhism provides a means for Buddhists to extend
outward their meditation practice and develop their understanding of ethics, structuralissues, and social justice to meet the holistic demands of CPE and the wider suffering in
American society.
By extended these insights to include Buddhist facets of them, we can more clearly
understand the potential ramifications for developing Buddhist chaplaincy in Japan:
1) the inner transformation of the Japanese Buddhist priest
The situation of the Buddhist priesthood in Japan is very much like the situation of
Christian pastors in the days of Rev. Anton Boisen. While Christian pastors have been
criticized for too often focusing on right faith and conversion, Buddhist priests in Japan
have been roundly criticized for their focus on rituals and the mechanistic performance of
funeral rites. This situation has led experts to dub Japanese Buddhism as “funeral
Buddhism” (葬 式 仏 教 sōshiki-bukkyo) 21 , and the respect and reverence common
Japanese have for Buddhist priests is nowadays quite low. In both the Christian and

21

The term was originally coined by Taijo Tamamuro, a professor at Tokyo Imperial University, in 1963 ina book by the same name. Tamamuro, Taijo, Sōshiki Bukkyō. Tokyo: Daihorin Publishers, 1963. 圭室 諦成「葬式仏教」（大法輪閣 1963）21

Buddhists contexts, the problem has been that the religious education at seminaries andmonasteries has become based on the rote memorization of texts, the maintenance oforthodoxy, and the preservation of the institution. In the Japanese Buddhist context inparticular, this issue reflects the need to change the fundamentally outdated temple
system structure, called the danka-seido (檀家制度), created at the beginning of the Edo
period (1603-1868).
Though it may be shocking to westerners with a glorified vision of Japan as the landof Zen, most Japanese Buddhist priests do not have a regular meditation practice. In thisway, the very notion of them being able to offer “contemplative care” is brought into
doubt. In the same way that CPE has been a way to retrain American chaplains andprovide them a way to truly go through an inner transformation in the challenge ofproviding care to others, the Rinbutsuken Buddhist chaplaincy program and other suchprograms in Japan face the challenge of retraining Buddhist priests to confront thesuffering in their communities or places of engagement. The Rinbutsuken program inparticular also focuses on engaging with and changing the social structure since not all
suffering takes place at the “bedside”. On a certain level, it might not be difficult to
re-introduce mindfulness meditation into our programs. One barrier, however, is that not
all Japanese Buddhist denominations value meditation, principally the Pure Landdenominations that account for about one-third of the Japanese Buddhist world. Amongthe other denominations, there are also a variety of approaches to meditation.
In this way, the somewhat secularized form of mindfulness meditation might be anon-denominational way for retraining priests in “contemplative practice”. Further,mindfulness meditation is also attracting the interest of common Japanese, throughtranslations of Jon Kabat-Zinn’s and Thich Nhat Hanh’s works as well asshamatha-vipassana retreats. The way mindfulness has been presented in the U.S. as anon-sectarian and even non-religious practice for well being would fit the present secularsentiment of the Japanese people, most of whom declare they have no formal religious
belief or practice. As we have seen in the power of mindfulness meditation to help
religious professionals of all backgrounds embody their own teachings and faith in the
U.S., a similar approach to mindfulness training has potential for supporting the innertransformation of the Japanese Buddhist priest and in turn providing the ability to provide
non-judgmental presence to their followers and communities.
2) the chaplain’s role extends beyond caring for the patient and their family
This insight has two aspects: 1) caring for other caregivers and 2) “caring” for the
institution and system.
221) In the former, many of the above points about the priest first needing to undergo aprocess of inner transformation in order to be able to serve others also apply to
medical professionals. The more difficult barrier on this level, however, isengagement with medical professionals, especially secular and scientifically mindeddoctors. At this point, it is still very difficult to impossible for Buddhist priests to gain
access to medical institutions, much less work on a team and support medical
professionals. A first step, which has been seen in other countries, is enlisting the
support of “spiritually minded” doctors and medical professionals.22 The interest andsupport showed by Dr. Gen Oi, a renowned end-of-life care specialist from Tokyo
University, in the Rinbutsuken chaplaincy training program is the kind of important
initial step that is needed. Dr. Oi has not only become a special advisor to the
Ributsuken program but has also collaborated with Rev. Joan Halifax in her firsttraining for nurses in Japan in April 2015. Indeed, nurses are often more sympathetic
to spiritual approaches to care and can offer an important entry point into the Japanese
medical world.
2) In the latter, Rinbutsuken, as noted in its very name “Institute for Socially Engaged
Buddhism”, has incorporated a strong sense of “systems care” and engagement insocial issues. Rinbutsuken’s Buddhist chaplaincy program offers an introductory
seminar series drawing on a wide range of Buddhist priests and other religious andsecular professionals working in critical fields connected to structural violence—suchas suicide prevention, homelessness, community decline, juvenile delinquency, anddisaster trauma. In Rinbutsuken’s workshop training series, there is an entire session
devoted to Buddhist based social analysis. While Japanese Buddhism has been
dubbed as “funeral Buddhism” in the past few decades, a trend towards “publicbenefit Buddhism” (公益仏教 kōeki-bukkyō) and engaged Buddhism is attracting
interest at the centers of even the large denominations. At the grassroots, we haveseen in the last decade a marked increase in individual priests taking on social issues
in their own communities.23 Many of these priests, acting out of a natural sense ofchaplaincy, have been working compassionately and sensitively, listening deeply, andbeing present for those in suffering. Of course, there is still much work to do in raising
the awareness of Buddhist priests to ethics, structural violence, and social justice aswell as empowering them to respond appropriately as a true Buddhist chaplain. The
examples of Buddhist chaplaincy found in the U.S. and other countries where
22

Buddhist Care for the Dying and Bereaved. p. 13.
Watts, Jonathan S. and Okano, Masazumi. “Reconstructing Priestly Identity and Roles and theDevelopment of Socially Engaged Buddhism in Contemporary Japan.” In Handbook for Contemporary
Japanese Religions, edited by John Nelson. Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill, 2012.
23

23

Buddhists are active in medical environments, such as Taiwan, provide inspirationand important examples for Buddhist priests in Japan, as do the wide variety ofexamples of engaged Buddhism through Asia and the world. In this way, Rinbutsuken
is seeking to develop connections with Buddhist chaplains and engaged Buddhists
outside of Japan with a long-term goal of creating an international network of
Buddhist chaplaincy.

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