Introduction. As a part of the “Interdisciplinary, International Joint Research Project on Systematization of Buddhist Social Work Based on History, Education, and Practice” research conducted in Mongolia, Sri Lanka, and Thailand, the current study aims to understand social work features in Mongolian Buddhist higher education. Using perspectives of Western-rooted and Buddhist social work, the authors conducted in-depth interviews with four lecturers from the Buddhist University and the Zuun Khuree College in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Findings. Buddhist lecturers perceive social work as any humanitarian work addressed to the needs of individuals and society. They also define books, manuscripts, interpersonal communication between lama teachers and monks, temples and monasteries, Buddhist universities, colleges, and families as the main ways of building and transferring Buddhist knowledge about helping. Since helping is the key concept of Buddhist philosophy and teaching, most of the Buddhist courses such as Buddhist Philosophy and Ethics, Lamrin Chenmo, and Bodhisattva practice cover content about helping. Therefore, Buddhist lecturers think that they prepare “social worker” monks, confirming that they do social work similar to the social work as defined by Model C of Buddhist social work. Implication. There is a need to conduct joint research by Buddhist lecturers and monks exploring their teaching and practice of the helping process in cooperation with social work lecturers and practitioners who were trained in Western-rooted social work. This is necessary because questions related to the monks’ learning process and the application of helping techniques in the field by those who graduated from the Buddhist University and the Zuun Khuree College remain unclear.
Batkhishig et al. (Sun,) studied this question.