The Research On Buddhists’ Death Attitude And Its Relation With Self-esteem

Death is an important issue in everyone’s life. Only if we recognize death appropriately, can weunderstand the true meaning of life, learn to cherish our lives and work hard to gain a positive life. So theresearch of death attitude has certain theoretical and practical significance. Death attitude is one’s beliefsand feelings of death, which are multi-dimensional and can be measured indirectly. It includes threecomponents: cognition, emotion and action. At present most of the researches on death attitude in ourcountry are focus on the groups of college students, medical workers, cancer patients and the eldly. Thereare only a few researches on the death attitude of Buddhists based on the psychological view. So this articleaims to make a primary research on Buddhists’ death attitude and its relation with self-esteem, and applythe useful parts of Buddhists’ death attitude in the life education and hospice care work.The questionnaire of this study includes Taiwan Chinese version of the Death attitude profile-revised(DAP-R), self-esteem scale(SES) and information on individual and environment variables. The purpose ofthis research is to explore the characteristics of Buddhists’ death attitude and its relationship withself-esteem. Besides this, this study discussed the applied significance of Buddhists’ view on death in lifeeducation, bereavement trauma care and hospice care work. As the DAP-R had not be used in Buddhist inmainland, a pre-test of DAP-R be surveyed in150samples. Then according to the results, the DAP-R wasrevised to a23questions version which includes five dimensions: fear of death, death avoidance, natureacceptance of death, approach to acceptance of death and accept death for flee.The result suggests that:(1) The23questions version of death attitude scale has a well reliability andvalidity when it be used in the group of Buddhists.(2)Generally speaking, neutral acceptance of deathranks the highest among Buddhists’ death attitudes. This result means that most of Buddhists regard deathas a natural process of life.(3) Generally speaking, Buddhists’ death attitude has some significantdifferences on the background variables, such as gender, age, educational background, diseases history,physical health level and the atmosphere of discussing death. Besides this, Buddhists’ death attitude alsohas some significant differences on the religious faith variables, such as the reason of convert to Buddhism,how long have they been converted to Buddhism, the frequency of chanting.(4) Generally speaking,Buddhists’ self-esteem level has some significant differences on the background variables such as diseases history, physical health level, educational background and the support from their family. Besides this,Buddhists’ self-esteem level also has some significant differences on the religious faith variables such asthe frequency of chanting, how long have they been converted to Buddhism.(5) Different self-esteem levelhas significant differences in five dimensions of death attitude. The subjects who have high level ofself-esteem got higher scores in the nature acceptance dimension than the subjects who have low level ofself-esteem; The subjects who have high level of self-esteem got lower scores in the other four dimensionsof death attitude than the subjects who have low level of self-esteem.This study has verified and supplemented the theory about death attitude and self-esteem, and hasdiscussed the effect of Buddhist thanatology on the psychological field. At the same time, this research hasdiscussed the applied significance of Buddhists’ view on death in life education, bereavement trauma careand hospice care work. However, there are still some problems in this study, for example, how to selectsubjects more appropriately, how to revise the death attitude scale more rigorous, etc. These problemsshould be solved in the future research.