The use of Buddhist teachings and practices in psychotherapy, once described as a new popular trend, should now be considered an established clinical practice. Religious studies scholars often offer interpretations of these activities that are based in binary understandings of the classifications "religion" and "secular." They frequently name these activities as either new religious forms, "new faces of Buddhism," or products of secularization, "the silent takeover of religion." Psychotherapists have, however, taken a wide variety of approaches to Buddhist traditions. Some clinicians intentionally secularize Buddhist practices, while others explicitly present a Buddhist path as a superior source of healing. I argue that psychotherapists' diverse approaches are molded by their own relative levels of investment in preserving psychotherapy's qualification as a secular biomedical discipline. I demonstrate that "religion" and "secular" are not only abstract categories for scholarly classification but concrete determinants of behavior for contemporary communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
Copyright of Journal of the American Academy of Religion is the property of Oxford University Press / USA and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)
