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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 We included scriptures and historical documents but also autobiographies of sufferers and advice from contemporary teachers from across Asia.
What emerges from these collections is the certainty that Buddhism had never understood meditation to be without its dangers. However, the sources also contain potentially valuable advice for what to do when meditation goes wrong.
Scientists are reevaluating meditation
Decades of scientific research have established the health benefits of mindfulness and other meditation practices, making them a ubiquitous part of today's global wellness industry. But some researchers have been questioning whether meditation is necessarily safe for everyone. Starting in 2017, psychologist Willoughby Britton, religion scholar Jared Lindahl and their team of researchers at Brown University have documented cases of meditation leading to harm rather than wellness.
Their study, titled The Varieties of Contemplative Experience, involved in-depth interviews with nearly 100 Western Buddhist practitioners and teachers who experienced difficulties – including fear, anxiety, panic, paranoia and other negative experiences – while engaging in different meditation practice traditions.
Other studies have reported similar findings, suggesting that between 5% and 65% of practitioners may experience adverse effects from mindfulness or other forms of contemplative practice.
Buddhist texts have long described meditation challenges
Meanwhile, Asian Buddhist traditions have been talking about the potential dangers of meditation for millennia. One common name for meditation-related challenges in East Asia has been “meditation sickness” – “chanbing” in Chinese, or “zenbyō” in Japanese. They are also commonly diagnosed as disorders of “wind” – “loong” in Tibetan, “lom” in Thai.
Some historical texts describe the Buddha's own challenges with meditation. In a Pali text commonly dated to the early centuries C.E. called the Great Discourse to Saccaka, for example, the Buddha recounts experiencing headaches and other symptoms as a result of overconcentration.
Many other sources describe similar experiences happening to other people. Secret Essentials for Curing Meditation Sickness, a fifth-century scripture from the Silk Roads kingdom of Khotan, narrates how adept meditators “went mad” when loud sounds startled them while deep in meditation.
Two major scriptures – the Sanskrit Perfection of Insight in 8,000 Lines from the first to second century C.E., and the Chinese Shurangama Sutra, from the eighth century C.E – relate how advanced spiritual practitioners can be vulnerable to attack by “demons.” Whether such demons are understood as external entities or as psychological manifestations is a matter of interpretation in Buddhist traditions.
One story from the Samyukta Agama, dating to the early centuries C.E. and available in multiple languages, even tells of monks who committed suicide en masse after practicing a meditation the Buddha had taught, prompting him to modify his instructions.
What to do when things go wrong
One clear takeaway from these Asian Buddhist perspectives on meditation is that side effects are no one's fault; they are the acknowledged risks of a powerful set of transformative practices. But they are also manageable. While Buddhist sources point out the potential dangers of meditation, many also describe what to do when things go wrong.
Meditation masters and physicians from across Asia have devoted substantial attention to diagnosing and treating practice-related illness with different types of counterbalancing meditations, visualization, chanting, acupuncture, herbs and other remedies. One common type of treatment involves “grounding,” or redirecting attention to the lower abdomen, the feet, or a point deep in the ground below the body.
Another type of grounding involves visualizing energy descending through the body from head to toe. A 17th-century Japanese monk named Hakuin Ekaku, for example, describes visualizing butter melting on the crown of the head and slowly oozing downward, relaxing everything it touches until it reaches the ground.
Whether this accumulated wisdom about how to deal with the side effects of Buddhist practice can be translated into forms useful for contemporary practitioners remains an open question for scholarly study. Addressing this question is a priority of the Contemplative Challenges Collective, a research initiative that I launched earlier this year.
Informed consent for meditation?
Asian Buddhist traditions also stress that it is crucial to distinguish between the normal healthy challenges of doing something transformative on the one hand and a true medical crisis on the other. In fact, Buddhist texts say that people can expect challenges to arise as part of the process of spiritual development.
Navigating difficult psychological territory – especially encountering one's traumas and core fears – can be quite difficult and also tremendously rewarding at the same time.
My research shows that Buddhist cultures differ on what crosses a line from expected challenges to debilitating mental and physical conditions. What constitutes a health crisis in ancient India or medieval China is different from 18th-century Japan or 21st-century Tibet. What is tolerable in a community of monastics dedicated to deep contemplative practice will be different from what is reasonable for everyday people interested in stress reduction.
How to navigate the benefits and dangers of mindfulness and other meditations is something that every culture and community must work out for itself. It's yet another aspect of how Buddhism needs to be continually translated into our own time and place and adapted to harmonize with our own needs and cultural expectations.
In the West, many meditation teachers and researchers alike are now calling for informed consent, better screening and training for teachers and clinicians to recognize when practice has the potential to become dangerous. Some experts feel that therapeutic meditation should carry a warning label, like any other medical intervention that is both a potential cure and a potential risk.
Western promoters, practitioners, app developers and scholars of meditation alike have long ignored, dismissed or been completely unaware of the potential downsides. But the inconvenient fact that meditation is not always beneficial has long been familiar to the Buddhist tradition, which has a lot to say on this topic that may prove helpful.
Pierce Salguero, Professor of Asian History & Health Humanities, Penn State
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.