Even the Buddha experienced challenges with meditation: Historical texts reveal its potential downsides

(The Conversation) — 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 We included scriptures and historical documents but also autobiographies of sufferers and advice from contemporary teachers from across Asia.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…