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Chapter 2: The Way of Healing Yudo 癒道
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Chapter 2 The Way of Healing Yudō 癒道 I know I am healed when I am kind. Umemura, Japanese Buddhist woman The healing way of my Japanese Buddhist consociates involves discipline, ritualized practices, and expanding perspectives. Expanding perspectives facilitates a different experience of life for these women and transforms their relationships with events, circumstances, and people, including themselves. As I searched for the source of their practices and understanding of healing it became clear that their healing path is grounded in a Buddhist worldview. With this development, the medical analogy of the root Buddhist teachings on the Four Noble Truths took on new significance . This medical analogy appears in early texts (fifth century BCE), with no precedents identified in other literature, suggesting a distinctly Buddhist creative development in framing its religious orientation.1 Although others have written about healing in a Buddhist context, it was viewing Buddhism through the lens of women’s ritual lives and practices that enabled me to see the medical analogy and to understand Buddhist teachings and practices as a path of healing.2 Indeed, from this perspective it becomes apparent that healing is at the center of Buddhist teachings. The medical analogy of the Four Noble Truths likens the first Noble Truth (suffering) to a diagnosis. It is an observation of a condition, not a fated state. The second Noble Truth (ignorance) is the cause of this condition. Ignorance of the impermanent and interrelated nature of ultimate reality is the lens through which deluded beings view things, 30 Bringing Zen Home propelling them to greed and hatred. From the Buddhist perspective, humans are prone to ignorance because they experience life largely through the six senses of hearing, seeing, touching, smelling, tasting, and thinking. The input through these sources reinforces a distinct but false sense of being an independent self. For example, when I stub my toe, your toe does not hurt. Mine does. So it seems like I am separate from you. A sense-based perspective of things leads to suffering because it frames perception to focus on experience as a matter of interacting with independent objects that, in turn, can be desired or rejected. Although, conventionally, distinctions can be made between this and that, ultimately everything is not separate. But when we make decisions based on the view that there are separate things, we suffer because our actions are not synchronized with the way things ultimately are: impermanent and interconnected. The Buddhist assumption is that people are born with a longing for good things to be permanent, and that they seek fulfillment of their desires and elimination of their aversions. According to Buddhist teachings, this longing is the primary condition from which people must be healed. Therefore, healing involves the transformation of habitually deluded ways of looking at the world through the lenses of attachment and aversion. The prognosis, though, could not be better. Suffering is neither a terminal nor a permanent condition. The third Noble Truth heralds that the cessation of suffering is possible. My consociates attest to the tenaciousness of ignorance , however. This leads to the fourth Noble Truth that outlines guidelines for treatment, which is to live according to the Eightfold Path of awakened views, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, and concentration.3 Dissolving the ego through the Eightfold Path requires surgical precision to extricate the delusions that insidiously shape perception and fuel suffering. These women approach life as a healing activity that transforms their lives. It is a way of life that emerges from a Buddhist worldview and its values and practices. Their concept of healing, in keeping with the larger frame of the tradition, is oriented to diminishing and ultimately overcoming suffering. The particulars of these women’s healing activities and experiences emerged during lengthy in-depth sessions during which they recounted stories of how they responded to the challenges and losses in their lives. To move from learning a myriad of details about specific people and complex events to understanding their significance required that I view my original ethnographic data in its greater historical, cultural, religious, and linguistic contexts. It is only from this larger vantage point that many of [34.201.122.150] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 23:48 GMT) The Way of Healing 31 the dynamics of their healing activities reveal a shared orientation and consistent qualities, values, and aims. I created the phrase “way of healing” (yudō) to name the theory of healing that I have developed from this ethnographic data, because it invokes...