As a scholar of “Buddhist medicine,” I have studied the connections between Buddhism and well-being since the late 1990s. During the course of that research, I would periodically run into sources claiming that meditation could sometimes have unexpected or adverse health effects. When I discovered in 2020 that psychologists were beginning to document the same thing, I began to examine more systematically how Buddhist texts address this issue.
I started coordinating a team of colleagues who translate Pali, Sanskrit, Chinese, Tibetan, Japanese and other languages to gather sources from around the Buddhist world, which we published in a 2026 book, “Meditation Sickness: A Sourcebook on the Dangers of Buddhist Practice.” We included scriptures and historical documents but also autobiographies of sufferers and advice from contemporary teachers from across Asia.
