SIGNATURE WORK
CONFERENCE & EXHIBITION 2022

Studies of religion and meaning-making, such as Park (2010), have found that religion functions as a meaning-making system in people’s coping with stress and adversity. Researching a Chinese Buddhist group, this study validated Park’s (2010)’s theory by presenting Buddhists’ meaning-making strategies for managing emotions and coping. 385 articles narrating group members’ stories of dealing with stressful events were selected from the group’s public website for content analysis. The study identified several meaning-making strategies based on Buddhist concepts. These strategies were categorized into three types: internal attribution, external attribution, and redefining events. My findings indicate the positive role of Buddhist meaning-making in coping with stress and enhancing positive well-being. This study also discovered that the major Buddhist meaning-making strategy–internal attribution–is distinct from Park’s findings on Christian populations’ attribution to God. Since previous literature on religious coping and meaning-making is largely restricted to Western Christian populations, this study’s focus on Chinese Buddhists demonstrates the model’s applicability across different cultural and religious contexts.