Cannabis in Buddhism
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Cannabis in Buddhism covers what Buddhist scriptures, monastic codes and Buddhist institutions have said about cannabis, and the places where hemp enters Buddhist ritual. The early training rules forbid alcoholic drinks by name.[1] Later Buddhist authorities differ over whether the rule also covers cannabis.[2][3] One Vajrayāna Tantra may name the plant in a single disputed word,[4]: 373–374 and hemp seed and hemp stalk have places in devotional practice in Korea and Japan.[5][6]
In Burma and Ceylon, rules and campaigns against intoxicants that touched cannabis were grounded in Buddhism by those who upheld them.[7][8]: 74 In the 2020s Buddhist councils and monks in Thailand and Sri Lanka took positions on the changes to cannabis law in those countries.[3][9] The claim that the Buddha lived for six years on one hemp seed a day goes back to English renderings of Chinese lives of the Buddha.[10]: 25[11]: 143
The precept against intoxicants
In the Pāli formula of the training precepts, the fifth is a vow to refrain from surā, meraya and majja, which the translator Bhikkhu Sujato renders as "intoxicants of beer, wine, and liquor".[12] For monks the matching rule is Pācittiya 51 of the Vinaya, which makes drinking "this or that kind of alcoholic drink" an offence requiring confession. Its origin story tells of the monk Sāgata, who was served a liquor called kāpotikā in house after house at Kosambī and collapsed at the town gate; the Buddha then asked the monks whether one should drink "that which makes one senseless". In the commentary on the rule, surā is drink made from flour, cakes or rice and meraya is drink made from flowers, fruit, honey or sugar; even a drop on the tip of a blade of grass is an offence.[1]
Whether the rule reaches cannabis is a matter of interpretation. Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu, in his handbook of the monastic rules, notes "some controversy" over what other substances the rule covers. Because the canon condemns alcohol for destroying the sense of shame, weakening discernment and bringing on stupor, he judges it reasonable to extend the rule to "marijuana, hashish, heroin, cocaine, and LSD"; coffee, tea, tobacco and betel he leaves outside it. He also cites the Vinaya-mukha for the view that morphine and other narcotics may be taken as painkillers.[2] In Thailand in 2022 the spokesman of the National Office of Buddhism said that the Buddha's teachings did not directly forbid cannabis, but that its effects on the mind could lead monks to break their precepts.[3] In C. G. Uragoda's history of opium in 19th-century Ceylon, the precept is abstinence from intoxicating liquor; opium was not specifically forbidden to Buddhists, but they condemned its use.[8]: 72, 74
Indian and Tibetan texts
The Verses on the Heart of the Middle Way of Bhāviveka set the consumption of datura and other intoxicating herbs beside alcohol. Stuart Sarbacker reads the passage as a sign of their use in Bhāviveka's own milieu, perhaps by Śaiva yogis.[13]: 80
The Cakrasaṃvara Tantra, composed in India in the 8th century, is still practised by Newar Buddhists in Nepal and by three of the main schools of Tibetan Buddhism.[4]: 3, 21 Its fiftieth chapter sets out a rite for "abundant life" that names a list of edible plants. One of them is śaṇa, which the translator David Gray renders as hemp (Cannabis sativa). Both Tibetan translations read tsa na ka at that point, which Gray takes for caṇaka, chickpea, and Pandey's 2002 edition of the Sanskrit reads caṇakam.[4]: 373–374 Śaṇa can also mean sunn hemp (Crotalaria juncea).[14] Sarbacker cites the passage for cannabis as an aid to long life in Buddhist Tantra.[13]: 79 He also cites a story, told by Benoytosh Bhattacharyya, in which one of the Buddhist mahāsiddhas consumes large amounts of cannabis, datura and nux vomica.[13]: 80
In Tibetan materia medica hemp is sro ma nag po. Its synonyms include siddhi mu' la and bhanga. A related name, so ma ra dza, usually denotes mallows (Abelmoschus), though it has sometimes been confused with hemp.[15] Writing in 1981, Mia Touw stated that cannabis "was traditionally considered sacred in Tibet" and that in Tantric Buddhism it was "an important part of the meditative ritual". For the first claim she cited Michael Aldrich (1977), and her description of the ritual dose follows Agehananda Bharati (1965).[10]: 25–26 She found little information on medical use in Tibet. Her main witness was N. Kirilov, who in 1893 named hemp among only eight other herbs in his examples of Tibetan medicines.[10]: 31–32
Monastic codes and Buddhist rulers
Tibetan monasteries kept their own codes (bca' yig), studied by Berthe Jansen. A 13th-century code of Drigung calls monks who drink beer (chang) enemies of the teachings, to be punished.[16]: 128 An 1882 government decree for the large Gelug monasteries around Lhasa set heavy punishment for lay people who gave monks alcohol, and the code of Jampa ling forbade even lay people within its bounds to smoke or take snuff. Another Drigung code classes alcohol and tobacco together as intoxicants.[16]: 196–197, 202
In Burma the kings forbade liquor, opium and ganja alike.[17] Witnesses before the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission in 1894 traced the ban to Buddhism. The Kinwun Mingyi, Prime Minister to the last Burmese government, said the drug was forbidden because Buddhism forbids it.[7] U Pe Si, Town Magistrate of Mandalay for seventeen years, said the rule "originates in religion, but the king sanctioned it", and that it was read out each month at the fast days with the other moral laws.[17] Saw Maung, former ruler of Nyaungywe in the Shan States, said intoxicants were forbidden because the Shans are Buddhists, and that hemp could be grown only for medicine.[18] The British commissioner H. R. Spearman put Burman disapproval of the habit down to "Buddhism and the training of centuries".[19] The colonial evidence is set out in Cannabis in colonial Burma.
In Ceylon the opposition of the 1890s and 1900s to the British government's opium policy was led by the monk Hikkaduwe Sri Sumangala, a leading figure of the Buddhist revival, and S. C. Obeyesekere, a member of the Legislative Council.[8]: 73 Uragoda ties the agitation to that revival. The Buddhists, over seventy per cent of the population, resented the place given to their religion under foreign rule, and a temperance movement grew out of the revival.[8]: 74 In 1897 the governor, Sir West Ridgeway, doubled the duty on opium and banned the import of bhang and ganja.[8]: 73
Hemp in ritual and devotion
Korean Buddhist statues of the Goryeo period hold sealed deposits of objects (bokjang), and hemp seeds have been found in these deposits in large quantities. The deposit of the wooden seated Vairocana at Haeinsa held a hemp-cloth vest and a garment sleeve.[5]
In Japan the peeled stalk of hemp, ogara, is burnt in the welcoming and sending-off fires of the Bon festival and made into the chopsticks set with the offerings.[6] The sending-off fire, lit at the end of Bon to send back the spirits of ancestors and the dead, may also burn cedar or pine bark. The Yamakawa dictionary of Japanese history traces the fire to a communal rite for driving out evil spirits, like the New Year fire festivals, that changed under Buddhist teaching.[20]
The hemp-seed legend
Touw wrote of "a Mahayana Buddhist tradition" that during his six years of austerities the Buddha "subsisted on one hemp seed daily", and of images of the Buddha with serrated "soma leaves" in his begging bowl, citing Aldrich for both.[10]: 25 Ernest Abel repeated the story in 1980 as "one legend" and cited Samuel Beal's translation of the Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king, a Chinese version of Aśvaghoṣa's life of the Buddha.[21] Beal's 1883 text reads "Each day eating one hemp grain".[11]: 143 Several Chinese lives of the Buddha say that he ate 一麻一米 (yi ma yi mi), one ma and one grain of rice a day,[22][23] and the dictionary of Chinese Buddhist terms by William Soothill and Lewis Hodous glosses the phrase "hempseed and a grain of rice a day".[24] The Lalitavistara, in an English translation from the Tibetan, has the Bodhisattva live in turn on a single juniper berry, a single grain of rice and a single sesame seed.[25] In the Pāli Mahāsaccaka Sutta he takes a handful of bean broth at a time.[26]
Thailand and Sri Lanka in the 2020s
Thailand removed cannabis from the Ministry of Public Health's list of narcotics on 9 June 2022. On 1 July The Nation reported that the Sangha Supreme Council, the governing body of the Thai monastic order, had forbidden monks and novices to smoke or grow cannabis, hemp or kratom and barred their cultivation on temple grounds, while allowing monks to take them as treatment prescribed by a doctor.[3] In a qualitative study of unlicensed providers of medical cannabis in Thailand, three of the 36 providers were Buddhist monks. One patient described a monk who asked after the side effects of the cannabis oil the patient took during chemotherapy, and who taught some dharma.[27]
In Sri Lanka, senior monks spoke against legalisation in September 2020, together with the Sri Lanka Temperance Association. At a media conference at the All Ceylon Buddhist Congress, Ittapana Dhammalankara, Mahanayake of the Kotte Sri Kalyani Samagri Sangha Saba, asked the president not to legalise cannabis. Thirikunamale Ananda, Mahanayake of the Amarapura chapter, said that groups with vested interests were using the Ayurvedic platform to promote it.[9] In January 2021 the monk Bengamuwe Nalaka, president of the Sri Lanka Indigenous Medical Congress, urged the government to legalise cultivation for medicine, saying that the Buddha himself had spoken of the medicinal properties of kansa.[28] When a cultivation project for export was approved at Mirigama in 2025, Medagama Dhammananda, secretary to the Supreme Sangha Council of the Asgiri chapter, said the chapter's opposition was unchanged: "The drug menace has already become a disaster."[29]
In the United States, Yoga Journal and Tricycle: The Buddhist Review began in the late 2010s to publish essays on the role cannabis and psychedelics might play in yoga communities.[13]: 84 Sarbacker finds psychedelics framed among some American Buddhists as a "contemplative technology" that can support meditation.[13]: 84 In New Zealand in the mid-1970s, high-grade Thai cannabis tied on sticks was known as "buddha sticks".[30]: 289
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 "Bhikkhu Pācittiya 51: Drinking alcohol (Surāpānasikkhāpada)". SuttaCentral. Translated by Bhikkhu Brahmali. Retrieved 14 November 2026.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu (2025). "Pācittiya, Six: The Alcoholic Drink Chapter, rule 51". The Buddhist Monastic Code I: The Pāṭimokkha Rules (3rd, revised ed.) – via dhammatalks.org.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 "Buddhist monks banned from using cannabis, except as medicine". The Nation. Bangkok. 1 July 2022. Retrieved 14 November 2026.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Gray, David B. (2007). The Cakrasamvara Tantra (The Discourse of Śrī Heruka): A Study and Annotated Translation. Treasury of the Buddhist Sciences. New York: American Institute of Buddhist Studies at Columbia University. ISBN 978-0-9753734-6-0.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 Sim, Y. (2022). "삼베" [Sambe]. Encyclopedia of Korean Culture (in 한국어). Academy of Korean Studies. Retrieved 12 October 2026.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 タイマ (大麻) [Hemp]. Sekai daihyakka jiten (old edition) (in 日本語). Heibonsha. Retrieved 14 November 2026 – via Kotobank.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). "Evidence of Kinwun Mingyi, C.S.I., Prime Minister to the late Government of Burma". Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. VII: Evidence of Witnesses from Bombay, Sind, Berar, Ajmere, Coorg, Baluchistan, and Burma. Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India. Burma witness no. 52, pp. 407–408 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 Uragoda, C. G. (January 1983). "History of opium in Sri Lanka". Medical History. 27 (1): 69–76. doi:10.1017/s0025727300042277.
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 "Don't legalise cannabis: Religious leaders". Daily Mirror. Colombo. 22 September 2020. Retrieved 14 November 2026.
- ↑ 10.0 10.1 10.2 10.3 Touw, Mia (1981). "The Religious and Medicinal Uses of Cannabis in China, India and Tibet". Journal of Psychoactive Drugs. 13 (1): 23–34. doi:10.1080/02791072.1981.10471447. PMID 7024492.
- ↑ 11.0 11.1 Aśvaghoṣa (1883). The Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king: A Life of Buddha. The Sacred Books of the East. Vol. 19. Translated by Beal, Samuel. Oxford: Clarendon Press – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ "Basic Passages 2: The Ten Precepts (Dasasikkhāpada)". SuttaCentral. Translated by Bhikkhu Sujato. Retrieved 14 November 2026.
- ↑ 13.0 13.1 13.2 13.3 13.4 Sarbacker, Stuart (10 September 2026). "Psychoactives and psychedelics in yoga: historical contexts and contemporary culture". Journal of Contemplative Studies (1): 73–100. doi:10.57010/exia6450.
- ↑ Monier-Williams, M. (1899). A Sanskrit-English Dictionary (new, greatly enlarged and improved ed.). Oxford: Clarendon Press. s.v. śaṇa, p. 1048 – via Cologne Digital Sanskrit Dictionaries.
- ↑ "sro ma nag po". Rangjung Yeshe Wiki: Dharma Dictionary. Tsadra Foundation. Retrieved 13 November 2026.
- ↑ 16.0 16.1 Jansen, Berthe Katrien (2015). The Monastery Rules: Buddhist Monastic Organization in Pre-modern Tibet (PhD thesis). Leiden University. hdl:1887/32040.
- ↑ 17.0 17.1 Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). "Evidence of Myowun U Pe Si, C.I.E., late Town Magistrate of Mandalay". Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. VII: Evidence of Witnesses from Bombay, Sind, Berar, Ajmere, Coorg, Baluchistan, and Burma. Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India. Burma witness no. 53, p. 408 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). "Evidence of Saw Maung, ex-Sawbwa of Nyaungywe State". Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. VII: Evidence of Witnesses from Bombay, Sind, Berar, Ajmere, Coorg, Baluchistan, and Burma. Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India. Burma witness no. 50, pp. 406–407 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). "Evidence of Colonel H. R. Spearman, Commissioner, Tenasserim Division". Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. VII: Evidence of Witnesses from Bombay, Sind, Berar, Ajmere, Coorg, Baluchistan, and Burma. Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India. Burma witness no. 1, pp. 375–376 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ 送り火 [Okuribi]. Yamakawa Nihonshi shōjiten (in 日本語) (revised ed.). Yamakawa Shuppansha. Retrieved 14 November 2026 – via Kotobank.
- ↑ Abel, Ernest L. (1980). "Cannabis in the Ancient World". Marihuana: The First Twelve Thousand Years. Boston: Springer. pp. 3–35. doi:10.1007/978-1-4899-2189-5_1.
- ↑ 修行本起經 [Xiuxing benqi jing]. Taishō shinshū daizōkyō (in 中文). Vol. 3. Translated by Zhu Dali; Kang Mengxiang. no. 184, juan 2, p. 469c – via CBETA.
- ↑ 過去現在因果經 [Guoqu xianzai yinguo jing]. Taishō shinshū daizōkyō (in 中文). Vol. 3. Translated by Guṇabhadra. no. 189, juan 3, pp. 638b–639a – via CBETA.
- ↑ Soothill, William Edward; Hodous, Lewis (1937). A Dictionary of Chinese Buddhist Terms. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ Dharmachakra Translation Committee (2013). "17. Practicing Austerities". The Play in Full (Lalitavistara). 84000. paras. 17.15, 17.38–17.44.
- ↑ "Middle Discourses 36: The Longer Discourse With Saccaka (Mahāsaccakasutta)". SuttaCentral. Translated by Bhikkhu Sujato. Retrieved 14 November 2026.
- ↑ Assanangkornchai, Sawitri; Saingam, Darika; Thaikla, Kanittha; Talek, Muhammadfahmee (27 August 2024). "Views and practices on medical cannabis of unlicensed providers in Thailand: a qualitative study". F1000Research. 11. 365. doi:10.12688/f1000research.110367.4.
- ↑ Kariyakarawana, Kurulu Koojana (19 January 2021). "To revive the 'Hela' medicinal benefits Bengamuwe Nalaka Thera urges Govt. to legalise cannabis cultivation". Daily Mirror. Colombo. Retrieved 14 November 2026.
- ↑ Samaraweera, Buddhika (15 August 2025). "Cannabis: Buddhist clergy against commercialisation". The Morning. Colombo. Retrieved 14 November 2026.
- ↑ Newbold, Greg (30 September 1997). "Chapter 15: Organized crime in New Zealand". Kanagawa Hogaku (神奈川法学). 31 (3): 285–312.