The dharma attitude toward illness, especially in the Theravada tradition, is quite radical and very much in contrast to the attitude of our culture. It isn’t that the monks in Asia want to get sick; they appreciate good health and the energy that it gives for practice. But when the body does grow ill, that too is considered a wonderful occasion for practice.
Illness, for one thing, is an immediate reminder of the unpredictability of everything. It is a striking demonstration of impermanence, a reminder that the body is a changing phenomenon and does break down, sometimes quite rapidly. Illness is also a reminder – one that we often ignore – that the body will eventually give out altogether. Since that fact is considered a vital part of practice, we make good use of the reminder, the chance to see deeply into ourselves. We often see what we are by seeing what we are not. And we are not permanent physical entities.
So as dharma practitioners we do whatever we reasonably can to be healed but don’t bemoan the fact that we are ill and don’t constantly compare our condition to a time when we were healthy. Illness provides a unique opportunity for practice, especially if we are bedridden. Suddenly we can drop all the responsibilities and cares of daily life.
This attitude is much in contrast to that of our culture (and probably – to be fair – to that of most cultures). We are an energetic productive, can-do society, proud of our robust health, and we see disease as something that shouldn’t be happening, when it is really just a natural part of being human, of finding ourselves in a body that is changing and not entirely under our control.
The view of dharma is quite different. It sees the human body as an impermanent phenomenon like any other, one that not only will come to an end but also is constantly changing in unexpected ways. We have control over some conditions that affect the body but not others, and a part of wisdom is to know that. We need to take care of our bodies, but in a profound way we don’t really own them, except in a conventional and legal sense.
This is not to say that there is no such thing as illness. Illness and health are useful classifications in our encounters with doctors. The problem is that we attach to these classifications as self; we see them as who we are. They separate us from experience and keep us from being intimate with our lives.
So there is sickness and there is health. But more specifically, there is always just how we are right now. That is what we practice with.
I had a somewhat similar experience when I was traveling to Thailand to practice with the famous teacher Ajaan Maya Boowa, a student of Ajaan Man, who had largely revived the Thai forest tradition. This was rather different from the collective practice that I had done in Zen. We did get together in a hall to eat and do chanting, but we meditated mainly in cutis in the forest, little bamboo huts that were connected together by long paths. Meditators were alone in their cutis. We were near a small village, an overnight train ride in Bangkok, and a good distance from the nearest small city.
It is important to understand that the person undertaking this practice had been brought up in Brooklyn. They call it the Thai forest tradition, but I call it the Thai jungle tradition. A forest is where you go for a picnic, where the worst creatures you run into are ants and the worst catastrophe a rainstorm. This was a lush tropical jungle, with snakes and all kinds of creatures slithering around, including a substantial community of rats who join meditators during the rainy season. There were even stories of monks encountering tigers during their evenings of walking meditation. The tigers were apparently gone, but the rats, insects, snakes, and wild chickens were plenty of company for me.
I had certainly been aware of the possibilities of illness and had brought a water purifier and lots of medicines, but within a few days I was sick in a way that made my Korean experience (2 weeks of severe dysentery) look like a walk in the park. I had a fever and terrible diarrhea and was vomiting. To make matters worse, I had bitten into a hard object in my food and broken a tooth. In Thailand the monks went to the village to beg for food, and we took what we got. I am normally a vegetarian, but I was eating chicken and fish. The food was actually quite good. But something was making me sick.
I was terribly discouraged. Once again I’d been extremely excited about going there to practice and instead I was spending much of my time lying down, when I wasn’t running to the bathroom with diarrhea or running outside to vomit. I was also feeling a lot of fear. The conditions we were living in were quite primitive, and I seemed very ill.
Maha Boowa dealt with my anxiety first. He had a relaxed, jovial air and didn’t seem at all worried. “Listen,” he said. “You’ve taken all the medicines you have. You’ve taken all the medicines we have. It’s time to let nature take its course. We don’t think you’re going to die. If we thought things were that serious, we’d find you the best medical help we could. This just seems to be the problem many Westerners have when they first come to Thailand.”
Instead of letting this illness keep me from practicing, he said, I should practice with it. Forget about words like dysentery, fever, even illness. The sensations I was experiencing were as good for practice as any other. What I needed to do was focus on them and stay with them. It is when the mind wanders from its concentration that the difficulties arise. Suddenly it’s your illness, these are your feelings, and you’re full of self-pity. But when your concentration returns, they’re just sensations again. He told me just to work with it, to see the impermanent nature of it all. The unpleasant sensations and the min-states that accompanied them: All of them were empty. None was solid.
I told him that most of the time I couldn’t sit. He said the physical posture was less important than the quality of the attention. I should sit when I could and at other times just practice in bed. “Listen,” Ajaan Maha Boowa said, “you’re probably discouraged. Have you thought about going home?” I admitted I had. “You could do that,” he said. “You could stay a week, then go back to the United States and talk at parties about your heroic week at the Thai forest monastery. But what would you have accomplished? Either way, the illness will run its course. But if you practice with it, you’ll do something for your mind.” He meant not my thinking mind but the larger realm of mind that we open up to when we meditate.
I don’t think I could have done it without Maha Boowa’s help, his calm, light-hearted encouragement to practice with my illness moment by moment. But with him there I was able to, and I can honestly say it was an extraordinary experience. My body was falling apart; I was spending much of my time in bed, but my mind was often positively blissful. Even as I was running to the jungle to throw up there was sometimes joy.
Ajaan Maha Boa told me it had other implications as well. “We don’t know what is going to happen when it is time to die,” he said. “But the skills you are learning now will help you then.”
From Living in the Light of Death by Larry Rosenberg, forthcoming from Shambhala Publications in June, 2000.
