Therapeutic Effects of Buddhism's Sasimsagwan Meditation on Reducing Depression of Nursing Students

Abstract

According to a discipline of Buddhist philosophy, cognitive understanding is believed to be based above all on the name (general concept) under the assumption that understanding is controlled by language. Hence, the discipline proposes Sasimsagwan (a thorough and deep insight on 4 things, i.e. name, thing, one's real nature and difference) as a means to free the subjects from the fixed language and lead them to pursue after satisfying their true nature, awakened from a delusion of language by penetrating into the essence of language. This would be the process of liberating the existence confined by ego and transforming it to the universal ’I'.This study tries to investigate the therapeutic effects of Sasimsagwan meditation upon reducing depression in such manner as suggested by Choi Yeon Ja(2001) as an oriental way of practicing mental health promotion by reducing depression down to the fundamental level. In a test, designed as a quasi-experimental research before and after the time lag of non-synchronized experimental group, Sasimsagwan meditation was conducted only by the experimental group 3 times a week, 6 times in total for 2 weeks during the period from Mar. to July 1999. The subjects of the experiment were 67 students enrolled in the nursing department at W university in I city. Among them. 33 students were grouped for the experimental group, while 34 for the comparison group.In order to examine the variation of depression level in the experimental and control groups, data were collected for finding the differences of reduced depression before and after the experiment by each group and these differences were analyzed by t-test.BDKBeck Depression Inventory), developed by Beck(1978) and arranged by Kim Myung Gwon(1984), was used as a tool to measure the level of depression. The collected data were processed statistically using Minitab.The findings of the research：1. The experimental group conducting Sasimsagwan meditation showed significant decrease of depression compared to the control group which didn't conduct it.