Korea Journal of Buddhist Studies ISSN:1598-0642(Print) 불교학연구

The spirituality–erspective among modern social work practice theories resulted from the West’s rediscovery of Eastern culture and religion. It was a kind of reaction to the positivist’s technique–n oriented social work. As Spirituality has been increasingly considered essential to understanding the whole person, descriptions of it contained various themes. One theme is a person’ s extreme experience with a transcendent dimension of reality. The other refers to spirituality originating from the deepest potential of the person. Spirituality–erspective has an open– ended goal to the counseled person’s development subjectively. It seems Buddha and Nature are interrelated with one another, mostly in transcendental transformation. Although positivist social workers and scholars have criticized the spirituality– perspective as being vague for a theoretical base of social work practice, various intervention techniques have developed. Aside from social work, the spirituality has the tendency to be more therapeutic in areas such as psychiatry, psychology, and nursing. In the case of Buddhist social work, spirituality anticipates more in–epth applications than any other clinical theory. However, the progress is dull in reality. Even though the theoretical system of spirituality–erspective has been built in principal, there is a lack of application in social work fields and so in reality, feedback cannot be obtained from experiences. Here I emphasize that Buddhist social work practice based on spirituality–erspective needs to develop its own assessment and intervention skills and to explore a more preferable target population, which will make the perspective more applicable into the fields.