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Week 6 Response Paper (Buddhism)

By Brian Fernando (3144207)

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Rooted in the teachings of the Buddha, Buddhism is considered both a religion and a

philosophy. It has a unique way of addressing health and healing that is deeply imbedded in the

Buddhist worldview and core values. In this essay, I will discuss how principles of Buddhism,

like mindfulness, interconnectedness, karma, compassion, and meditation, are applied to health

and healing. To help illustrate these concepts in practice, I will provide a hypothetical example.

In Buddhism, health is considered holistically, which means it includes your physical,

emotional, and spiritual well being. That perspective comes from the fact everything is

connected to everything else in Buddhism. The Buddha called that dependent origination. It

means nothing happens, not even a single thought, except through a multitude of causes and

conditions. So even your health is not just a personal matter. It’s not just how you take care of

yourself or what you, do; your health is the product of your relationships, your environment,

your thoughts and your actions. Its the product of everything you experience that gets stored as

memory and affects your brain and your body. So what we think of as “our” health is really the

product of the social, economic and cultural circumstances we live in. Our health is actually the

product of the entire system we live, since the entire system we live in lives in us.

Essential to Buddhism as a whole, and particularly to the Buddhist approach to health, are

mindfulness and meditation. Mindfulness allows one to cultivate an intimate awareness of the

body, mind, and emotions, to see the roots of suffering, and to begin to eliminate suffering.

Mindfulness is a way to approach life, rather than a technique. It is both preventive and

therapeutic. It is a method for working with illness and adversity.

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In relation to health, Buddhism’s understanding of karma, or the law of cause and effect,

asserts that our health in the present is the result of our past actions, and that our present actions

can affect our future well-being. This understanding encourages people to live ethically and with

kindness toward themselves and others to bring about good health and positive outcomes in life.

Beyond physical health, compassion – a core Buddhist value – extends to the welfare of

others. One should want to relieve the suffering of others, Buddhists argue. Such altruism also

has the benefit of positively affecting one’s own longevity and happiness. It is a reciprocal

process ensuring that people will have the help of their community when they need it, to

maintain their physical emotional and mental well-being.

To exemplify these principles in action, consider the synthetic example of a Buddhist

named Senge who is confronting a serious health challenge, such as a chronic illness. Instead of

entirely depending on traditional medicine, Senge could incorporate Buddhist principles into her

healing process. Through practicing meditation and cultivating mindfulness, meditation can help

her to deal with pain and anxiety but also foster a sense of peace in the face of hostility. By

understanding her illness through the lens of karma, she would no longer see her illness as her

being punished, but as her being blessed by the Buddhas so she can grow in this challenging

circumstance. Compassionate actions and thoughts that are directed towards both herself and

others will provide emotional support and building up her mental resilience. The way that

medical treatment being combined with Buddhist principles within Senge’s healing process is an

exampleley way of showing how Buddhist’s perspective of health and healing is comprehensive

but also rooted in spiritual values.

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To summarize, Buddhism provides a complex system for systematic knowledge of heath

and healing. Interdependence of life, the imperative of mental and spiritual practices, and the

significance of empathy are at the center focus of each. By following the hypothetical case

above, we can see that these thoughts can be put to real use in agencies of health care, and the

deep consequences that Buddhist ethics have for the overall strategy of health and well-being..