I am an acupuncturist. My work is to help people heal themselves by stimulating and adjusting their energy. While on vacation in India this winter, I decided that during part of my time, I wanted to work in local health clinics, volunteering my acupuncture skills in a country where acupuncture is not commonly employed.
If nothing else, my small contribution to global peace diplomacy would mitigate my carbon heavy conscience two tons of green house gasses pumped into the atmosphere by jet engines to transport my 160 pound sack of flesh and bones half way around the planet.
In Dharamsala, I volunteered in the clinic of Dr. Namgyal Qusar, a Tibetan physician. Out of all the patients that I saw, the one that I remember the most was a 90 year old nun who had recently had a stroke. She had lost considerable motor functioning, and it was difficult for me to tell during our brief encounter, how much of her cognitive faculties were intact. Clearly, she was in the last phase of her life. Perhaps she had ten years to live, perhaps a year, perhaps a few months, who could really say? I put the needles in, and she seemed to smile a bit, understanding that I was trying to help prolong her Dharma practice of this life.
A few days later, we were in Bodhgaya, the place of Buddha’s enlightenment. Buddha sat under the Bodhi tree, and with his meditative clairvoyance, perceived that his past lives were without beginning. He saw that at such and such time, he was born as so and so, lived for a period of time, and then died over and over again. Surely there must be a way to put an end to this pointless cycling without meaning, he asked. Circumambulating the stupa marking the spot where he conquered death by penetrating the riddle of the ego, defeating ignorance and all manner of delusion, I contemplated his inner victory, praying that I too would one day achieve enlightenment, in order to be of highest benefit to all other beings.
Realistically though, I can see it isn’t going to happen anytime soon, and as many a teacher had pointed out, one of my main problems is a deficiency in merit or karmic potential. Upon arriving at our guest house – actually a meditation center in Bodhgaya, I had again come down with a case of “Delhi belly” and was feeling under the weather. As soon as I felt up to it though, I inquired about doing acupuncture at the Shakyamuni Buddha Community Health Clinic. The initiative to volunteer did not come naturally. It would be easy to be like many a tourist, and lie around in the sun, hang out in internet cafes every morning for hours, and indulge myself in a 100 different ways. But I knew I was up against Mara – my inner demons so I just dug in and said, hey, remember your ideals little boy…time to work!
This time, I spent two days in the clinic, giving acupuncture to common laborers worn beyond their years by grueling tasks such that a 35 year old body exhibits the deterioration that a much older Westerner might have perhaps by a fifteen year margin. I treated mainly joint pains, and while everyone seemed to acknowledge the pain relief, when the next day of washing clothes on hands and knees dawned, or sweeping out the dirt hut, or laboring in the fields all day, it was not difficult for me to see that any help I might offer would be merely palliative. Aging would continue, and of course, as Buddha taught, death would come for all of us.
Our last patient was another stroke case. It was her second stroke, and this time, in addition to one side being partially paralyzed, there were spasms occurring on the opposite side, with considerable agitation and anxiety. She was in her 50s, and it gripped my heart to see her struggling to walk, held up by the other therapists. It did not seem appropriate to add the strangeness of acupuncture to her world at this moment, so I held back and let the therapists work with her. It was going to be my last day in the clinic as we were heading on to Rajghir the following day. These were the types of patients seen every day….the stuff of life and death.
Buddha’s teaching on death was driven home one morning in the meditation hall. An Israeli monk leading the session slowly led us through a contemplation, asking ourselves how long we thought we might live 40 more years maybe? 30? But what guarantee is there really, that we might be alive by the evening? Why do we always wake up thinking,”I shall not die today?” Or why do we go to bed at night and assume that we will wake in the morning? Absolutely no guarantees! This should be contemplated, or else we are asleep in the very jaws of death.
My wife, daughter and I enjoy the Buddhist holy sites in Rajghir and Nalanda, and then hop in our jeep, heading towards Patna. It was on this road 7 years ago that our bus came upon the gruesome remnants of truck-car accident. Being an American in India after the Mumbai attacks of a month ago certainly made me feel a little cautious, but in reality, my greatest danger I reasoned, would be riding in a taxi probably on a road like this one.
Soon after leaving Nalanda…deja vu. A freight carrier (i.e. giant truck) has smashed into the side of a taxi, obliterating the driver side. There is no smoke, no bodies, no aide cars. It is hard to tell if the scene has been left as a monument of caution for all drivers over the past several days. We drive on, more than once I am gripping the edge of my seat as our jeep pulls out to pass a line of trucks, rickshaws, ox-carts, bicycles, pedestrians. Bumping over bridges which are literally crumbling to the point where you can see foot wide cracks at the edges. As we approach Patna, for the final hour to our hotel, there is only the sound of near continuous honking of horns and such an incredible crush of humanity in their motorized and non-motorized vehicles going in all directions. To find a semi-private place to lie horizontal after all this is simply heaven.
Dec. 31. After a six hour train ride, we are in Varanasi, near Sarnath, where the Buddha walked after his enlightenment in order to give his first teaching on the four noble truths: There is the noble truth of suffering, notably birth, aging, sickness, and death, being parted from the pleasant, meeting with the unpleasant, not getting what one wants, having no security, and so forth. There is the noble truth of the causes of suffering: craving, bound up with passion and other delusions, and fundamentally, ignorance of reality. There is the noble truth of the cessation of suffering – Nirvana, the deathless state of awakening. There is the noble truth of the Path leading to the end of suffering – the Eightfold path of Right View, Intention, Speech, Action, Livelihood, Effort, Mindfulness, Concentration.
Our guest house is on the Ganges River, next to the ghats where corpses are burned in funeral pyres 24/7. Our hostel manager gives us directions to a restaurant, and as we pass along the waterfront, quite unexpectedly, we come to a section where the alley is piled high with firewood on both sides. I turn another corner and can smell smoke. An Indian woman is huddled on a bench, obviously in emotional anguish. Then, just below a railing, a number of fires are burning. In the closest one, a human sized bundle with still unburnt cloth sits atop the raging fire, splayed feet and toes stick out of one end.
In other fires, lie corpses in various stages of destruction. The shapes are vaguely human – an obvious torso and skull, but the features are well…burnt beyond recognition. In one, the flame blows up through her throat and chest – not sure how I knew it was a female.
I walk on, fingering my prayer beads, contemplating the preciousness of human life, the tremendous potential of a human mind for inner spiritual development, and the Himalayan task before me of overcoming my own delusions such as laziness – being preoccupied with mundane activities which will not matter at all when my moment of death arrives. What to do but continue to strive for perfection? To keep walking onwards, picking myself up after each fall.
May all beings quickly awaken to their full potential.