From Buddhist meditation to psychological well-being: an ethical-cultural training ecology model

Buddhist meditation is widely studied in relation to mindfulness, emotion regulation, compassion, and well-being, yet it is often operationalized as an attentional or stress-reduction technique detached from the ethical and cultural conditions of practice. This article develops the ethical-cultural training ecology model, a Hypothesis and Theory framework that treats Buddhist meditation as a coordinated practice ecology rather than a single psychological technique. The model distinguishes four nested analytic levels. Ethical-cultural ecology provides the process-shaping context; a probabilistic functional hierarchy links attention, emotion regulation, self-decentering, nonattachment, and compassionate reorientation; authority reorganization provides a higher-order explanatory principle; and multidimensional well-being defines the distal outcome domain. Its distinctive claim is relational rather than additive: familiar mechanisms are hypothesized to acquire different functions through asymmetric dependencies and ecological configuration. Attention may increase observability, emotion regulation may increase affective tolerability, self-decentering may demote self-related narratives from self-truth, nonattachment may weaken their action-guiding grip, and compassion may provide ethical-relational direction while recursively supporting emotional safety. Authority reorganization is not proposed as an independent latent mechanism. Self-transcendence is treated as a possible experiential and relational outcome. Three theory-driven hypothetical illustrations specify predicted and disconfirming patterns, and five propositions translate the framework into prospective, incremental, mediation, and configuration-level hypotheses for future empirical testing.