..续本文上一页you on a platter where would your discernment get engaged

　　 How would it develop

　　 You”d be a restaurant critic, picky and choosy about what”s served to you, but totally ignorant about how to fix the food yourself. So sometimes the Buddha gives the teachings as riddles, and your willingness to try to figure them out, make mistakes, come back and try again, is what will make you grow. This is the healthy attitude toward right effort, realizing that sometimes it”s going to take a lot of persistence, a lot of endurance, a lot of tenacity. But not always. There are times when it gets very easy and enjoyable, and everything seems to flow. So you learn to adjust your effort so that it”s just right for whatever the situation. That”s when right effort is really right, when you start getting your own sense of how things vary and how things need to be adjusted. That”s when the practice becomes more and more your own practice, the practice you”ve made your own, not just something that somebody outside is telling you to do. And this is where you turn from a student doctor into an experienced doctor.

　　Luckily with the diseases of the mind, it”s not the case that your patients are all going to die. This particular patient, the mind, keeps coming back. So there”s room for mistakes—but you can”t be too complacent. After all, you”re the patient. You”re the one who suffers from the mistakes. Some of those mistakes can lead you down a path that ends up far away, and it”ll be a long time before you find your way back. So again you need an attitude of balance: You don”t berate yourself for not attaining the goal, but at the same time you don”t get complacent. Much of the practice is this one issue: figuring out where that balance is. Other people can help give you pointers, but you yourself really have to listen to your own practice, look carefully at the results as they come—because this ability to see cause and effect in the mind is what lies at the essence of discernment, and discernment is what makes all the difference. It”s the ultimate medicine in the Buddha”s medicine box—and yet he can”t just hand it to you. It”s like an herbal medicine that you have to grow yourself. He describes it and tells you how to find it, how to grow it, and then how to take it.

　　So get used to this image that you”re both the doctor and the patient, and learn to have a very strong sense of the doctor looking after the patient. Don”t identify totally with the patient because if you do it”s hard to see a cure, hard to see even the possibility of a cure. But if you have the attitude of the doctor, there has to be a notion of what health is and how to recognize illness whenever it shows its face. At the same time, you have to develop the ability to step back and look at the whole situation to figure out the cure.

　　Here”s another image: Ann Landers. People who write letters to Ann Landers are so thoroughly immersed in their problems that they can”t step back. They have trouble even formulating a letter. But all Ann Landers has to do is read the letter once it”s formulated and usually she can give an answer right off the bat because she”s not immersed in the situation. From her perspective, the issue is already formulated. Her job is not all that hard. You”ll find your own practice gets a lot easier too when you can step back to recognize the problem and articulate it to yourself. Once the problem is clearly delineated, you”ve got your answer. As in the case of the doctor, the real difficulty lies in learning to diagnose the illness. Once you”ve got the diagnosis right, the choice of medicine is easy. So the first step is learning how to be the doctor. Identify at least part of your mind as the doctor. This is the part you want to train. And the funny thing is that in training the doctor, the patient gets cured.

《A Good Dose of Medicine》全文阅读结束。