The INEB Institute for Buddhist Chaplaincy (IBCC) was founded in January 2025 and is a cooperative, network organization that supports Buddhist chaplaincy training programs specifically in Southeast and South Asia. Buddhist chaplaincy has been widely developed over the past 30 years in Europe and North America, first in end-of-life care and now in a wide range of fields. In East Asia, it has developed in Taiwan since the early 2000s, mostly in end-of-life care, and in Japan since the early 2010s in disaster trauma, end-of-life care, and suicide prevention.
The focus on Southeast and South Asia, then, is to support the systematic development of chaplaincy in these regions, which already have ancient traditions of monastic service and Buddhist psychology. In East Asia and the West, chaplaincy was developed to envigorate ossified systems of monastic training to transform monks/nuns from doctrinal preachers into compassionate listeners. This work also includes exposing lay Buddhists, many of whom are training as professionals in a variety of psycho-spiritual care disciplines, to the dynamically changing world of psycho-spiritual therapy. No longer dominated by Freudian models of cognitive therapy, contemporary therapies are increasingly integrating somatic and energetic practices from the yogic traditions of the East.
IBCC will use the INEB model of decentralized management and support by not establishing a complex, centralized institition but rather working with partners in these regions to facilitate the establishment of local and regional training systems, and eventually Buddhist chaplaincy training institutions. In this way, IBC’s main activities will be:
1) to network Buddhist counseling and chaplaincy trainers around the world with organizations and networks in Southeast and South Asia to create a variety of training programs that fit with local/regional needs and culture.
2) to provide financial support for these programs, which it is envisioned will cultivate the foundations for established programs and institutions in the future.
