The Kalyāṇamitra Formation Model for Healthcare Chaplaincy: Cultivating Liminal Competence through the Pedagogy of Spiritual Friendship

Recognition-oriented chaplaincy reframes grief in contexts of ongoing loss not as a problem to be resolved but as a threshold to be inhabited, and it identifies liminal competence—the capacity for sustainable threshold-dwelling—as the clinical capability this work requires. Yet naming a capacity does not explain how practitioners acquire it. Standard Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) remains structured around an expert-intervention logic poorly matched to the formation of presence without mastery. This paper proposes the Kalyā？amitra Formation Model, a longitudinal pedagogy for healthcare chaplaincy adapted from Sanford’s recovery of kalyā？amitra (“spiritual friend”) as a model for Buddhist spiritual care. The model integrates two structures from Sanford’s account: a four-stage developmental arc moving from Self to Student to Chaplain to Spiritual Friend, mappable onto the four units of a CPE residency, and the three praj？ās—listening (？rutamayī), contemplating (cintāmayī), and practicing (bhāvanāmayī)—as a recursive learning cycle rather than a linear progression toward expertise. The paper argues that each developmental stage and each praj？ā cultivates one or more of the four constituent capacities of liminal competence, and that the kalyā？amitra posture—accompaniment from within shared vulnerability rather than intervention from without—supplies the formational ground that the G.R.A.C.E. protocol (Gathering attention, Recalling intention, Attuning to self and other, Considering what will serve, Engaging and ending) presupposes but cannot itself install. Attention is given to the ethics of adapting a Buddhist construct for interfaith and secular formation, including concrete safeguards on authority and consent and the teacher–student power asymmetry that the kalyā？amitra ideal was historically marshalled to correct. The model is offered as a theoretically grounded formation framework requiring empirical validation, not as a settled curriculum.