A Good Dose of Medicine
Thanissaro Bhikkhu
November 13, 1996
The Buddha often compared himself to a doctor, healing the diseases of the hearts and minds of his listeners. Now, we normally think about heart disease as meaning hardening of the arteries, and mental disease as insanity, but he said the real diseases of the heart, the real diseases of the mind, are three: passion, aversion, and delusion. They burn like a fever in the heart, a fever in the body. And the reason he taught about these diseases is because there is a way to gain release from them. If they were impossible to cure, he wouldn”t have bothered to teach. So we have to learn to take his teaching as treatment for our own hearts, our own minds. That”s when we”re using them properly.
Treating these kinds of diseases is in some way similar to treating ordinary mental diseases, ordinary bodily diseases. And in some ways it”s different. With ordinary diseases, the doctor can give you medicine, you take the medicine, and that”s it. With the Buddha”s treatment, though, you are the one who administers the cure. You simply learn about the cure from the Buddha. As he says, he simply points out the way, but you”re the one who actually has to carry through and administer the treatment to yourself. So you”re both the doctor and the patient—you”re a student doctor. You”re learning the treatment. Sometimes the symptoms of the disease don”t quite match what”s printed in the texts, don”t quite sound like the things you”ve heard people say: That”s why you need an experienced doctor to help you along. But also you need your own ingenuity because there are times, as in a hospital, when the experienced doctor isn”t on call. Sometimes a really drastic case comes in and there”s nobody but interns around. The interns have to figure out what to do on their own. So it”s not simply a matter of following what”s in the books. You also have to learn how to apply the teachings to all kinds of unexpected situations, to learn which teachings are the basic principles and which are secondary details.
The similarity between the two types of diseases—outer diseases and inner diseases—is that in both cases there are two kinds of sources for the disease: inner and outer. Some bodily diseases you can blame on germs. They come in from the outside and they wreak a lot of havoc in the body. But on a more basic level the question is, “Why do the germs take over
”— because sometimes you have enough resistance to fight them off and sometimes you don”t. In this sense the basic cause comes from inside, from your inner lack of resistance. The same holds true with the mind. Many times we blame problems within the mind on things from outside—what other people do, what other people say, the general atmosphere around us, the values we grew up with, the things we learned as children. And these do play a role, but the most important problem is what comes from the mind. Why is it susceptible to those influences
After all, you find some people staying in a certain environment and they”re perfectly okay, they pick up no negative influences, while other people get into the same environment and come out all warped. Two kids growing up in the same family hear the same lessons from their parents but take away totally different messages. This is because of what you bring to life when you come, what weak points and what strong points are already there in the mind. So you have to focus in on the mind as the main problem. You can”t go blaming things outside. If the mind had really good powers of resistance, a really good immune system, nothing could stir it to passion, nothing could stir it to anger, nothing could stir it to delusion. Fortunately, you can train the mind develop that immunity. That”s the kind of mind you wa…
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