Category: death

Contemplating Disease – Part 5c – Comforting the Ill – September 3, 2018

Walking the fine line between remembering the emptiness of the body and dwelling upon final extinction is often the fine line many who deliver medical care and care-givers travel.  How do you be honest without being forlorn or slipping into causing hopelessness.  Vimalakirti saw this difficulty and cautioned the person seeking to provide comfort.  Not being dishonest about the disease or illness causes harm, being too brutally honest also causes harm.  There is no one…

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Contemplating Disease – Part 5b – Comforting the Ill – September 2, 2018

It’s not just family and friends who don’t know how to interact with the patient.  I’ve witnessed many doctors who, while good at the practice and delivery of medicine are woefully inadequate in finding the balance between honesty and compassion.  I’ll say this from my witnessing many doctor patient interactions, most doctors don’t know how to deliver bad news.  Part of this comes from the sense of failure on the part of a doctor if…

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Contemplating Disease Part 4 – Resting in Forbearance – August 27, 2018

Subscribe to my blog post newsletter Diseases to be contemplated as has already been said do not include those that are taken on as a means to educate or instruct someone in the Dharma.  What is left is the wide range of karmic diseases, or diseases that are ours because we have a physical body.  We are in this case speaking of karma in a general and broad sense and not to any specific karmic…

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Part II – Disease Two Meanings – August 22, 2018

Disease is a fact of existence.  Chih-I considered disease to be of two types.  One is real and the other is tentative.  We must not be misled by the use of tentative however as being something that only is of short duration or that will simply go a way.  Another way of considering tentative is they are diseases of instruction.  A disease of instruction or tentative would be like the illness of Vimalakirti the famous…

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