ABSTRACT

The purpose of this research is twofold 1) to study the Buddhist teaching concerning Kamma and afterlife in order to develop a hybrid-activities, integrating Buddhist teachings and practices with Buddhist-psychological group counseling techniques. 2) To study the effects of these activities on grief of the bereaved through quantitative data obtained from a quasi-experimental method using a pre-test and post-test design with one group of 19 bereaved people from 24 to 77 years old participated in Buddhist-psychological program which was designed based on the concept of Trisikkha to deliver Buddhist teachings concerning Kamma and the afterlife. The program lasted for four days or a total of 35 hours of designed activities. During the pre-test, post-test and two-weeks follow-up studies, participants completed the Grief Scale, adapted from David Fireman’s holistic grief scale. This scale has 33 items with rating scale of 10 composed of 5 subscales: emotional, cognitive, physical, social and spiritual. An arithmetic means, standard deviation and the Paired-Samples T-test were used for data analysis.

The major findings was that the scores on grief scale of 19 participants were reduced 48.6% in the post-test and 54.3% in the two-weeks follow-up test, compared with its pre-test scores, at 0.001 level of significance especially in the sub-scale of emotion, social and spiritual. The results supported that Buddhist-psychological counseling together with Buddhist teachings and practices work beneficially in coping with bereavement.