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Buddhism and Psychology

The historical and contemporary dialogue between Buddhism and Western psychology — from C.G. Jung to the modern research on mindfulness, compassion, and the science of meditation.

by The editorial team · reviewed 2026-06-13

The dialogue between Buddhism and Western psychology is one of the most productive cross-cultural conversations of the last century. It began as a conversation between philosophers in the 1920s, became a serious therapeutic and research programme in the 1970s, and now shapes major strands of contemporary psychology, neuroscience, and contemplative studies. It is also, in its popular forms, often an oversimplification of both traditions. The reality is richer and more contested than the headlines suggest.

The early conversation #

The first serious Western engagement with Buddhist psychology was through the work of the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961). Jung read the I Ching, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and the Visuddhimagga in the years around 1927, when he was formulating his own concept of the collective unconscious. His 1944 Psychology and Religion and his commentary on Richard Wilhelm’s translation of the I Ching (1950) include extensive discussion of Buddhist concepts. Jung corresponded with several Buddhist scholars, including the Tibetan scholar D.T. Suzuki (whose work on Zen was appearing in English in the late 1920s and 1930s) and the German indologist Heinrich Zimmer.

The conversation deepened after the Second World War. Erich Fromm, the German-American psychoanalyst, published The Art of Loving in 1956 with explicit engagement with Zen practice; Karen Horney discussed Buddhism in her later work; the American philosopher William James had already, in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), drawn on Buddhist examples. None of these thinkers were converts to Buddhism. They were interested in the psychological content of Buddhist practice — what the tradition knew about the mind, what it had discovered about the conditions of human suffering, what its meditative techniques could teach the West.

The 1960s and 1970s brought the first major popular encounters: the Beat poets (Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums, 1958; Allen Ginsberg’s engagement with Tibetan Buddhism), the counterculture (the use of the Tibetan Book of the Dead in psychedelic experiences), the anti-war movement (the engagement of American Buddhists with the civil rights and Vietnam protests). The Tibetan diaspora, beginning in 1959, brought the first major wave of Tibetan teachers to the West. Chögyam Trungpa established the Naropa Institute in Boulder in 1974; the 16th Karmapa visited the United States in 1974 and 1976; the Dalai Lama made his first US visit in 1979. The encounter was mutual: Westerners interested in Buddhism, and Buddhist teachers interested in the West, were working out the terms of the conversation.

The MBSR moment #

The 1979 founding of the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) programme at the University of Massachusetts Medical School by Jon Kabat-Zinn is usually treated as the founding moment of the modern integration of Buddhism and psychology. Kabat-Zinn was trained in molecular biology at MIT and in Zen Buddhism under the Korean teacher Seung Sahn and others; the MBSR programme was, in his account, an attempt to bring the insights of Buddhist meditation practice to a clinical population, stripped of the religious and cultural scaffolding.

The MBSR programme was the first major research-grade clinical application of Buddhist meditation. The early studies, published in the 1980s and 1990s, documented the programme’s effects on chronic pain, anxiety, and stress. The success of the programme led to its expansion: Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), developed by Zindel Segal, Mark Williams, and John Teasdale in the 1990s, applied the same principles to the prevention of depression relapse; Mindfulness-Based Relapse Prevention (MBRP) was developed for substance abuse; Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction for Children (MBSR-C) for schools; and so on through what is now a substantial subfield of clinical psychology.

The clinical success of MBSR is real. The standard evidence reviews — including a major 2014 meta-analysis by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and the 2017 JAMA Internal Medicine meta-analysis by Goyal et al. — document modest but consistent effects of mindfulness-based programmes on anxiety, depression, and pain. The 2017 Lancet meta-analysis by Kuyken et al. found MBCT comparable to maintenance antidepressant medication for depression relapse prevention. The research is not the only evidence, but it is the most cited, and it has shaped the modern reception of the practice.

The neuroscience of meditation #

In parallel with the clinical work, the 1990s and 2000s saw a rapid expansion of research on the neural correlates of meditation. The earliest major study was the work of Herbert Benson at Harvard, whose 1975 The Relaxation Response documented the physiological effects of meditation. The work was taken up by Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin, who began studying Tibetan monks in the early 2000s and has produced some of the most-cited findings in the field — including the documentation of gamma-wave activity in long-term meditators that exceeds the level seen in any other studied population.

The neuroscience of meditation is now a substantial field, with centres at Harvard, Stanford, Emory, the Max Planck Institute, and elsewhere. The findings are real: long-term meditators show measurable changes in brain structure and function, including in the prefrontal cortex (associated with attention and emotional regulation), the insula (associated with interoceptive awareness), the amygdala (associated with stress response), and the default mode network (associated with self-referential thought). The 2015 study by Brewer et al. at Yale, in which experienced meditators showed reduced activity in the default mode network during meditation, is one of the most cited. The studies are not without controversy — sample sizes are often small, the meditation practices are heterogeneous, the effect sizes are sometimes modest — but the field is serious and is producing real findings.

The “two truths” of the dialogue #

The dialogue between Buddhism and Western psychology is often presented as a simple convergence: Buddhism knew things about the mind that Western psychology is now discovering. This is partly true, and partly a misleading framing. The more accurate picture is that there are two conversations happening, with different participants, different methods, and different goals.

The first conversation is the clinical and scientific one: can Buddhist-derived practices, when stripped of their religious context, help people with stress, anxiety, depression, chronic pain, addiction, and other conditions? The answer, on the evidence, is yes — modestly, but yes. The 2017 JAMA Internal Medicine meta-analysis found moderate evidence for improvements in anxiety, depression, and pain; the effect sizes for healthy adults are smaller and less consistent. The research is continuing, and the picture is being refined.

The second conversation is the philosophical one: what is the relationship between Buddhist accounts of mind and Western accounts? The classical Buddhist analysis of mind — the Abhidhamma analysis of consciousness, the Yogacara analysis of the eight forms of consciousness, the Madhyamaka analysis of the absence of inherent self — is rich and sophisticated. So is the contemporary neuroscience of consciousness (the work of Francis Crick, Gerald Edelman, Antonio Damasio, Stanislas Dehaene, and others). The two are not in a simple mapping relation: the Buddhist technical terms (manas, vijnana, citta) are not the same as the neuroscientific terms (default mode network, working memory, predictive processing). The mapping is work that scholars are still doing, and the results so far are interesting but not definitive.

A useful framing, from the philosopher and contemplative scholar Evan Thompson (whose 2007 Mind in Life is a landmark in the field), is that Buddhism and cognitive science are best seen as complementary — each has resources the other lacks, and the productive work is at the intersection. Thompson’s own work, with Francisco Varela and Eleanor Rosch, on neurophenomenology — the integration of first-person reports of conscious experience with third-person neuroscience — is one of the most interesting developments in the contemporary dialogue.

The “Buddhist modernism” critique #

The most important critical work on the dialogue is Donald McMahan’s The Making of Buddhist Modernism (2008). McMahan’s argument, in summary: the form of Buddhism that has been most readily available in the modern West is not classical Buddhism but a modernist construction, shaped by the encounter with Western colonialism, Western psychology, and the conditions of modern industrial society. The modernist construction has been productive — it has produced MBSR, MBCT, the modern Vipassana movement, the engaged Buddhist movement — but it has also obscured some of the more difficult and more traditional features of the practice.

The specific features that modernist construction has tended to obscure, on McMahan’s reading:

  • The centrality of ritual, especially in Tibetan and East Asian Buddhism
  • The centrality of the teacher-student relationship, especially in Vajrayana
  • The reality of rebirth and karma as central doctrinal commitments, not as metaphors
  • The authority of the monastic institution in classical Buddhism
  • The tradition’s own sense of the body and the senses as obstacles and as instruments, not as the neutral substrate of experience that Western mindfulness tends to assume

McMahan is not arguing that the modernist construction is wrong. He is arguing that it is a construction — a historically specific version of the tradition that emerged from particular conditions — and that the dialogue between Buddhism and psychology has been more honest in some places (the clinical research) and less honest in others (the marketing of mindfulness in the corporate sector) about what is being taken from the tradition and what is being left behind.

A second important critique, from the philosopher of religion S. Mark Heim (in his 2001 article “Buddhism and the Therapeutic Process”), is that the psychologisation of Buddhism risks losing what the tradition actually offers. Buddhism, on Heim’s reading, is not primarily a therapy — it is a set of claims about the nature of reality, a path to the end of suffering understood in a particular way, and a community practice. To extract the “therapeutic” content and present it as the whole of the tradition is to mistake the medicine for the cure.

The clinical landscape today #

The clinical landscape of Buddhism-derived practice, as of the mid-2020s, includes:

  • MBSR — the original Kabat-Zinn programme, with hundreds of certified instructors worldwide
  • MBCT — the Segal-Williams-Teasdale programme for depression, with strong research support
  • Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) — Steven Hayes’s cognitive-behavioural approach, which integrates mindfulness principles with a different theoretical framework
  • Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) — Marsha Linehan’s therapy for borderline personality disorder, which integrates Buddhist-derived mindfulness with cognitive-behavioural techniques
  • Internal Family Systems (IFS) — Richard Schwartz’s therapy, which has been explicitly developed in dialogue with Buddhist teachers
  • Compassion-Focused Therapy (CFT) — Paul Gilbert’s therapy, which integrates the Tibetan lojong (mind training) tradition with evolutionary psychology
  • Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC) — the Germer-Neff programme, based on the work of Kristin Neff and Christopher Germer
  • The Search Inside Yourself programme, developed at Google by Chade-Meng Tan, integrating mindfulness with emotional intelligence in the corporate sector
  • Buddhist chaplaincy programmes at major universities, including Harvard, Stanford, and Emory
  • The Veterans’ programs — the VA’s own mindfulness programmes, and the “Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction for Veterans” programmes in the private sector

The research base for these programmes varies. MBSR and MBCT have the strongest evidence; the corporate applications have the weakest. The general finding of the field is that the clinical effect sizes are real but modest, that they vary by population, and that the long-term outcomes depend heavily on the quality of the teacher and the engagement of the practitioner.

The ethics of the dialogue #

The dialogue is not ethically neutral. Three ethical questions recur:

  1. Who is the practitioner for? The MBSR programme was developed for chronic-pain patients. It is now taught in Fortune 500 companies, elite universities, and the U.S. military. The diffusion has been productive in some ways (it has made the practice available to many) and problematic in others (it has produced what Ronald Purser has called “McMindfulness” — the corporate co-option of the practice).
  2. What is being taken from the tradition? The Buddhist tradition is rich and old, and the modernist construction has tended to extract what is useful to the West and leave the rest. McMahan’s critique is the most sustained examination of this extraction.
  3. What is the practitioner’s relationship to the tradition? The clinical programmes are usually taught by people with substantial training, but the training is rarely the full monastic training of the classical tradition. The relationship between the clinical and the traditional is one of the open questions of the field.

These are not reasons to abandon the dialogue. They are reasons to do it well. The field is doing better on this in the 2020s than it was in the 1990s; the critical literature is more developed; the relationships with traditional teachers are more genuine; the questions are being asked more carefully.

Sources & further reading #

  • Jon Kabat-Zinn, Full Catastrophe Living (Delta, 1990) — the foundational text of MBSR.
  • Donald S. Lopez Jr., The Making of Buddhist Modernism (Oxford, 2008) — the essential critical work.
  • Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Buddhism, Biology, and the Cognitive Sciences (Oxford, 2007) — the philosophical engagement.
  • Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind (MIT Press, 1991, rev. 1993) — the classic of the neurophenomenology tradition.
  • Mark Williams, John Teasdale, Zindel Segal, and Jon Kabat-Zinn, The Mindful Way through Depression (Guilford, 2007) — the standard MBCT self-help book.
  • His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Richard Davidson, The Science of Meditation (Penguin, 2017) — the dialogue from the Buddhist side.
  • Ronald Purser, McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality (Repeater, 2019) — the critical take from the inside.
  • Sharon Salzberg, Real Happiness (Workman, 2010) and Lovingkindness (Shambhala, 1995, rev. 2014) — the loving-kindness tradition in Western form.
  • Rick Hanson, Buddha’s Brain (New Harbinger, 2009) — the neuroscience-meets-Buddhism popularization.
  • Geshe Tashi Tsering, The Four Noble Truths (Wisdom, 2005) — the Tibetan philosophical analysis of the foundational teaching.
  • Bhikkhu Bodhi, The Noble Eightfold Path (Buddhist Publication Society, 1984, rev. 2010) — the standard Theravada treatment of the path.