‘Buddhist therapeutics’: The overlapping logics of religion and health in Italian Buddhism

Abstract

Despite ‘new’ and ‘alternative’ religious and spiritual movements centred on health and wellbeing have gained international significance, cultural analysis of the overlapping logics of religion and health in contemporary forms of Buddhism is a substantially unexplored, although sociologically promising, object of study. Relying on empirical research conducted within the Project ‘Buddhism in Italy’ and on a close analysis of the literature on Buddhism and therapeutic cultures, we develop the concept of ‘Buddhist therapeutics’ to theorize the current social, practical and discursive construction of Italian Buddhism at the intersection – and in the interstices – among the religious, the therapeutic and the economic fields. Italian Buddhism emerges as both: a therapeutic technology of the self, aligned with a form of political rationality based on the cultivation of entrepreneurial values such as self-optimization, discipline and health; and as a valuable alternative to traditional Roman Catholicism, perceived by practitioners as unable to satisfy their existential quests and spiritual thirsts. The concept of ‘Buddhist therapeutics’ contributes to an innovative programme of research that inquiries into the boundaries and overlaps among religious, therapeutic and economic logics as well as the symbiotic relationships that occur between the cure and care of the soul and that of the body at the centre of today’s broader cultural field.