Healing through Spiritual Care: Arts and Ethics of Chaplaincy as Gleaned from Some Buddhist Narratives

Upali Sraman

Many of the lay Buddhist practitioners in the USA have recently been becoming actively involved in “chaplaincy” - providing ministerial services and spiritual care in settings like hospitals, universities, prisons and so on. This trend might have been influenced by existing ministerial models, such as for example the curricu-lums in Christian-centric Divinity Schools. This trend has also attracted renewed academic and institutional interests dedicated to analyzing and understanding the distinctness of “Buddhist Chaplaincy”. “Buddhist Ministry Initiative” at the Harvard Divinity School and similar programs at the Universities of West and Naropa are some experiments to create professional Buddhist chaplains and ministers who can perform some of the ministerial services that were traditionally done by monastics. The Buddhist chaplains, practitioners and scholars have turned to classical texts from this new perspective. This paper is intended to be a contribution in this grow-ing scholarship on Buddhist chaplaincy.

In this paper I closely examine some Buddhist narratives, with particular attention to the Mulasarvastivada Avadanas, that illustrate instances/models of providing spiritual care to the sick, the psychologically stressed, the poor and even those who were subject to social injustices. These narratives illuminate us on some of the ex-cellent qualities, such as non-discriminative compassion, to be inculcated by chap-lains. They also teach some important arts of spiritual care such as skillfully elevat-ing the human dignity of the patients affected by fatal diseases.

This paper will also engage critically with the selected narratives addressing the is-sues of defining “Buddhist chaplaincy” in a broader context of multi-faith environ-ments in an increasingly globalized world.