Buddhist Approaches To Mental Health

To Buddhists, the supreme purpose of life is to become a Buddha; their ideal is to “deliver all beings.” They advocate dispelling all private desires and distracting thoughts, doing good deeds, and being altruistic. There is no specific theory on health building in the Buddhist classics. Working, sitting in meditation, eating vegetarian food, and rejecting sexual desire are Buddhism's philosophy on health building. Ideologically, Buddhism holds that if people sit still with a peaceful mind, concentrate, and perseveres; they can achieve a delightful, bright, clear, refreshed state of body and mind. Achieving this state is the purpose of sitting in meditation. From a medical point of view, constant anxiety and worry negatively affect the physiological functioning of the human body and cause pathological changes. The goal of meditation is to free the mind to achieve a natural state of peace. Buddhists combine chanting with sitting in meditation. Many Buddhists, including lay Buddhists who practice Buddhism at home, live a long life. One reason is because they concentrate on chanting Buddhist scriptures and so have few distracting thoughts running through their minds. They are totally indifferent to personal honor, disgrace, gain, or loss in the physical world