religions Article Varieties of Buddhist Healing in Multiethnic Philadelphia † C. Pierce Salguero Division of Humanities, The Abington College of Penn State University, 1600 Woodland Rd., Abington, PA 19001, USA;
[email protected] † Portions of this article have appeared in nascent form on the Jivaka Project website, http://www.jivaka.net (all links up to date as of 4 January 2019). I wish to thank my research students and assistants, as well as the project’s advisory board, all of whom are listed on the website’s credits page. I also wish to thank Scott Mitchell, Michael Stanley-Baker, and all the colleagues who have commented on previous oral and written versions of this paper (most memorably at the 2016 AAR annual meeting and the 2018 gathering of the Philadelphia Area Buddhist Studies Working Group). Received: 28 November 2018; Accepted: 10 January 2019; Published: 13 January 2019 Abstract: While an increasing amount of attention has been paid in the last decade to mindfulness meditation, the broader impact of Buddhism on healthcare in the United States, or any industrialized Western countries, is still much in need of scholarly investigation. The current article presents preliminary results from an ethnographic study exploring the impact of a wide range of Buddhist institutions, practices, and cultural orientations on the healthcare landscape of the Philadelphia metropolitan area. By particularly focusing on segments of the population that are non-white and that have limited English language skills, one of the main goals of this project is to bring more diverse voices into the contemporary conversation about Buddhism and wellbeing in America.