Buddhist Approaches to Relief from Anxiety

The Buddha was a historical person who lived around 500 BC, and he spent over fifty years teaching people how to wake up from the suffering that pervades human existence. The term “Buddha” actually means “to be awake” or “to be enlightened.” This talk explores some of the basic principles the Buddha taught about how one might wake up from habitual behaviors that keep us caught in suffering, stress, and anxiety. The Buddha located the sources of suffering and anxiety in our own misperceptions and in our own misguided habits rather than in our external environment or in other people. He proposed four main principles: that life, from an unenlightened perspective, is full of suffering; that suffering is caused by excess cravings and other internal negativities; that one can be liberated from suffering; and that there is an eightfold path one can walk to end suffering. He thus placed the possibility of freedom from anxiety squarely within our own hands. This freedom is sometimes known as “nirvana” in the West. Westerners have sometimes romanticized this idea of nirvana but have tended to overlook the more mundane pathways in everyday life that facilitate freedom from suffering and anxiety. These pathways are sometimes known as the “Eightfold Path” of good speech, good actions, good livelihood, good effort, good mindfulness, good concentration, good understanding, and good thoughts. This talk explores aspects of these four main principles of Buddhism and discusses how they are relevant to understanding anxiety.

Deborah Sommer, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Gettysburg College

Deborah Sommer is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Gettysburg College, where she has taught for nearly twenty years. Her main area of research is Chinese Confucian thought. Her current project is a new, topically arranged translation of the Sayings, or Analects, of Confucius. She teaches courses in Chinese religions, Chinese intellectual history, and Buddhism. She earned an MA, MPhil, and Ph.D. in Religion from Columbia University, where she graduated in 1993. She has published extensively on Chinese ritual, classical Chinese notions of the body, the figure of Confucius, and Confucian spirituality. She has lectured on these topics at universities throughout Asia and Europe, in both English and Chinese. In her personal practice, she follows the Dharma Drum Lineage of Chan Buddhism of the Chinese Chan Master Sheng-yen, and she also follows the mindfulness practices of the Vietnamese Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh.