ABSTRACT
Chapter 6 focuses on religion's roles in the recovery process after a disaster. Survivors turned to the Buddhist temples for explanations of the catastrophe. This chapter provides Buddhist monks’ and nuns’ explanations of how they helped the survivors deal with suffering and find solace in grief. Encouragement was important, as were religious answers to existential questions and the Buddhist way of understanding the world. The tsunami became an example of Buddhist teaching about the conditions of life: Karma is considered central and life is understood as inevitably unpredictable, involving suffering of various kinds.
