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Abstract

This essay examines Buddhist forms of self-cultivation and development that enable a psychosocial capacity for emotional, cognitive, and behavioral adjustment by improving an individual's characteristic mode of interaction within the world. First, we will consider the religious form of self-cultivation seen in the context of Buddhism and its desire to remove delusional perspectives through developmental practices. In this, we will consider the cultivating function of clinical psychology through the therapeutic application of cognitive restructuring techniques as a form of cultivation. Next, considering psychological self-cultivation, training, development, and education concerning the treatment of schizophrenia and its characteristic criterion of delusions. Further, Buddhism’s delusional-mitigation strategies will be compared to clinically based treatments of psychotic delusions within the spectrum of schizophrenia. Within religious self-cultivation is the development through the progressive growth of one's mind or capacities through intentional action; the project of clinical psychology, in the therapeutic setting, speaks to much of the same goals of religious self-cultivation.

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