With the advances in technology and information that came with the arrival of the 21st Century, people have enhanced abilities to cope with their daily life. However, the changes in modern society are such that there are more adversities and various sorts of pressure. Among such adversities, drugs have the most devastating effects on people’'s body and mind. Past experience shows that the purposes of religion in relation to society and the human mind go beyond the spread of knowledge and faith, instead they also have the functions of upgrading the meaning of life, building social values, calming people's minds as well as social purifying. In this era of technology, Christians have successed in rehabilitation through gospels. However, meditation, with its root in Buddhist teachings and close to 2,600 years of continuous practice, has yet to obtain similar results achieved by the Christians in drug rehabilitation. In the areas where there were some results, only certain methods of Buddhist meditation were involved, the principle therein was seldom probed. Therefore, the present study attempts to focus on the practice of Buddhist meditation and compare its application to two cases and observable results in drug rehabilitation. It is hoped that through systematic analysis as well as observation of the application of the principle of Buddhist meditation to drug rehabilitation, such principle could be applied to other modern-day ailments such as depression, so as to enhance the educational effect of the principle with a view to open up new frontiers for the application of educational therapy. This study will be divided into five chapters. The first is an introduction; the second probes the reasons for drug abuse, examines the forming of addiction against the functions of the brain, observes both the physical and mental states of drug addicts; the third covers the principle and methods of meditation, searches the root cause of drug addiction using references in scriptures of original Buddhism aided by current scientific knowledge of the neural system of the brain, and so forth; the fourth looks at actual cases through field studies, attempts to understand the current state and difficulties of applying the principle of Buddhist meditation to drug rehabilitation, tries to obtain specific proof of the efficacy of the principles and their application, so as to achieve the basic goal of helping drug rehabilitation and prevention of addiction; the fifth is the conclusion.
