Category: healthcare

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 5a – Comforting the Ill – August 29, 2018

At this point I’d like to make a little detour away from Chih-I and look at Vimalakirti.  I mentioned earlier that the illness we are talking about do not cover those taken on by Buddhas or Bodhisattvas for the purpose of instruction, such as the illness of Vimalakirti.  Yet in the Vimalakirti Sutra we can learn important lesson, such as found in the exchange between Manjusuri and Vimalakirti on how to encourage a bodhisattva who…

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Contemplating Disease – Part 3b – Balance, Harmony, and Whack – August 24, 2018

Chih-I refers to the Four Elements as snakes, he wasn’t the first to do so, yet it is his work we are exploring.  An explanation for the metaphor of four snakes can be found in the Suvarnaprabhasa Sutra which offers a parable of a man who fleeing from the two bewildering forms of life and death spies a rope (life) and climbs down into the well of impermanence.  In this well are two mice who…

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Contemplating Disease – Part 3a – Balance, Harmony, and Whack – August 23, 2018

To have physical form is to have disease.  Why you might ask?  Beside an obvious answer that a physical body is subject to decay and change another response is because of the natural imbalance of physical life forms.  Our bodies are comprised of the four elements of earth, water, air, and fire.  That may sound a tad bit ancient or even suspiciously superstitious and certainly not the language of modern medicine.  Remember though we are…

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