Buddhist Perspectives on COVID-19 Vaccination

The Venerable Tenzin Priyadarshi, a Buddhist monk and the president of the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at MIT, reflected on the many ways that Buddhist teachings encourage vaccination. He said, “The guidance is always to put the health of the community first. The first precept of Buddhism is the principle of nonviolence, and the extension of that is non-harming. Whenever you are making decisions or designing a policy, you always have to ask yourself, ‘if I don’t partake in the process, am I creating tendencies of harm?’ That’s something that drives our day-to-day decision-making. So any scientific advancement that promotes health and wellbeing is something that the Buddhists seriously encourage.”