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ORNAMENTALMIND
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"Health Through Balance, An Introduction to Tibetan Medicine"
Dr. Yeshi Donden, edited and translated by Jeffrey Hopkins
The fascinating Tibetan Medical system has never been so clearly explained as in this collection of outstanding lectures presented at the University of Virginia in 1980. Tibetan medicine restores and maintains balance among the three humors of the body through a variety of treatments-diet and behavior modification as well as the use of medicine and accessory therapy. The basic system has been enhanced by the practical findings of Tibetan physicians who have used the system for more than a thousand years. Dr Dondhen holistically considers factors of personality, season, age,climatic condition, diet, behavior, and physical surroundings in addressing the means for restoring health. The great strength of Tibetan medicine is that it is delicately responsive to patients, complete symptom pattern-no complaint being disregarded-and its wide variety of curative techniques are described in this book.
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Outline of Disease
In this world, all breathing creatures, all beings — whether human beings, animals, whatever — are exposed to different forms of suffering. In the Tibetan system we believe that whether we are physically healthy or not, basically all of us are sick. Even though disease might not be manifest, it is present in dormant form. This fact makes the scope of disease difficult to fathom.
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THE ORIGINS OF ILLNESS
With respect to the origins of illness, Shakyamuni Buddha propounded that there are 84,000 different types of afflictive emotions, such as desire and hatred, which have corresponding effects on beings, thus producing 84,000 different types of disorders. These can be condensed into 1,016 types of disorders which can further be condensed into 404.
The factors giving rise to disorders are causes and conditions, the latter enabling the causes to ripen or manifest. Causes are of two different types — distant and proximate. The proximate causes are wind, bile, and phlegm. With regard to the distant ones, the distinct causes for each disorder are difficult to enumerate because basically all disorders have their origin in the mental environment of the past — prior afflictive emotions — and it is these mental factors that are ultimately responsible for all types of disorders. These afflictive emotions impel actions (karma) that establish potencies in the mind, ripening later as specific diseases. Hence, it is impossible to determine all the specific distant causes involved in a particular disease; however, the basic entities of those causes are the afflictive emotions of desire, hatred, and obscuration. These three, in turn, depend upon ignorance.
Ignorance refers to a state of mind that not only is not aware of how things actually exist, but also misconceives the nature of phenomena. Ignorance gives rise to desire which, in turn, leads to hatred, pride, jealousy, harsh speech, more obscuration, and so forth. In rough terms, from the activity of these negative states of mind arise the three types of humoral disorders of wind, bile, and phlegm. Forty-two types of wind disorders arise in dependence upon desire; twenty-six types of bile disorders arise in dependence upon factors of hatred such as pride and jealousy, and thirty-three types of phlegm disorders arise in dependence upon obscuration — making a total of one hundred and one diseases.
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"Dearest to my heart, abandon your old concepts - realize your encompassing emptiness and dissolve all duality." Milarepa
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