Buddhist Perspectives on Emotion

Buddhist and Psychological

Perspectives on Emotions and

Well-Being

Paul Ekman,1 Richard J. Davidson,2 Matthieu Ricard,3 and B. Alan Wallace4

1University of California, San Francisco; 2University of Wisconsin, Madison; 3Shechen Monastery, Katmandu, Nepal; and

Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies, Santa Barbara, California

ABSTRACT—Stimulated by a recent meeting between

Western psychologists and the Dalai Lama on the topic

of destructive emotions, we report on two issues: the

achievement of enduring happiness, what Tibetan Buddhists

call sukha, and the nature of afflictive and nonafflictive

emotional states and traits. A Buddhist perspective

on these issues is presented, along with discussion of the

challenges the Buddhist view raises for empirical research

and theory.

KEYWORDS—Buddhism; consciousness

Buddhist thought, which arose more than 2,000 years ago in

Asian cultures, holds assumptions that differ in important ways

from modern psychology. The particular branch of Buddhist

thinking we consider here is Indo-Tibetan, a tradition having

roots in Indian thought and further developed by Tibetan theorists.

It is a line of thinking that is more than 1,000 years old.

Although different aspects of Buddhist thought have already

influenced a number of psychologists, its challenges for research

on emotion are not widely known. Some suggestive

convergences between Buddhist thinking and, for example,

findings in neurobiology, suggest the fruitfulness of integrating

a Buddhist view into emotion research.

The traditional languages of Buddhism, such as Pali, Sanskrit,

and Tibetan, have no word for ��emotion’’ as such. Although

discrepant from the modern psychological research

tradition that has isolated emotion as a distinct mental process

that can be studied apart from other processes, the fact that

there is no term in Buddhism for emotion is quite consistent

with what scientists have come to learn about the anatomy of

the brain. Every region in the brain that has been identified with

some aspect of emotion has also been identified with aspects

of cognition (e.g., Davidson & Irwin, 1999). The circuitry that

supports affect and the circuitry that supports cognition are

completely intertwined—an anatomical arrangement consistent

with the Buddhist view that these processes cannot be separated.

We have chosen two issues, the achievement of enduring

happiness and the nature of afflictive emotions, to illustrate the

usefulness of considering the Buddhist perspective in work

on emotion. Given the space allowed, we present illustrative

examples of possible areas for research, rather than a more

complete discussion.

This report is a collaborative effort of Buddhists (Matthieu

Ricard and B. Alan Wallace) and psychologists (Paul Ekman

and Richard J. Davidson). Our report grew out of an extraordinary

meeting with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, in Dharamsala,

India, in March 2000, that focused on destructive

emotions.1 The Buddhist authors wrote the sections titled