Buddhism as Academic Discipline: Medicine as Parallel
Nov 18th, 2008 by admin
This is an interesting monograph out of The Nalanda College of Buddhist Studies in Canada that compares the practice of medicine to the practice of Buddhism. (For the full pdf go to http://www.nalandacollege.ca/PDF/Dscpln.pdf).
“The Discipline that can be said to be the closest analogy to the Discipline of Buddhism is
Medicine. The primary intent, and the raison d’etre, of Medicine is the alleviation of suffering.
So, of course, is the Discipline of Buddhism. The Fourth Noble Truth is called ‘the Path’ precisely because it is the road to alleviating suffering. Before the doctor can treat your illness, she has to diagnose it. “Oh, you have a temperature”, says she, sticking a thermometer in your mouth. Likewise, the good Doctor Buddha begins by diagnosing the human malaise, identifying it as dukkha, a term with no exact parallels in English and so translated as ‘suffering’, ‘stress’, ‘unsatisfactoriness’, etc. This, of course, is the First Noble Truth. It covers the total range– physical, the one that the physician talks about, namely, illness, old age, death; the psychological as a psychiatrist might identify – stress and unhappiness resulting from the disjuncture between what you expect and what you get; and the general angst of the human condition resulting from change…”
Medicine. The primary intent, and the raison d’etre, of Medicine is the alleviation of suffering.
So, of course, is the Discipline of Buddhism. The Fourth Noble Truth is called ‘the Path’ precisely because it is the road to alleviating suffering. Before the doctor can treat your illness, she has to diagnose it. “Oh, you have a temperature”, says she, sticking a thermometer in your mouth. Likewise, the good Doctor Buddha begins by diagnosing the human malaise, identifying it as dukkha, a term with no exact parallels in English and so translated as ‘suffering’, ‘stress’, ‘unsatisfactoriness’, etc. This, of course, is the First Noble Truth. It covers the total range– physical, the one that the physician talks about, namely, illness, old age, death; the psychological as a psychiatrist might identify – stress and unhappiness resulting from the disjuncture between what you expect and what you get; and the general angst of the human condition resulting from change…”