There are several layers of meaning within Buddhist imagery. The image can be engaged devotionally for the Being or Beingness that it represents, such as any other religious icon. Or one might understand that the image represents a factor of Awareness, or a particular Path to Awareness and Enlightenment, thus one would engage the image for the teaching and teacher that it is. This Generation Stage meditation is along the latter orientation.
Medicine Buddha signifies the ailment, the cure, and doctor and the patient of being a human being on the Wheel of Rebirth.
- The ailment is the samsaric nature of life. It is happy when happy, frustrated, worrisome, prideful, envious, disappointing, painful, discontented and distracted when not happy. Contentment is fleeting and rarely deeply contented. The ailment is compounded by overall shared human forgetfulness about our fuller nature, our fuller Beingness.
- The cure is wakefulness – awareness of truth of moment, engaging one’s inner subjective processes in an objective way in order to reveal and transform the subjective reality which will change the outer reality. The truth is that we are not inner and outer, reality is not of two grades or strata, but human beings tend to cling to duality, so the cure is written in this way.
- The doctor is Wisdom presented in the image of a Buddha. The doctor is human Beingness.
- The patient is you and I, in other words, the practitioner.
The podcast is uploaded differently this time – due to technology of the day!
Medicine Buddha podcast. You can download it once it opens.