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
tr ...