Sickeness and Medicine Heal Each Other

Dharma Talk February 18, 2024 Brattleboro Zen Center

Blue Cliff Record Case 87

Master Yuanwu’s Pointer

A clear-eyed person has no nest: sometimes on the summit of a solitary peak weeds grow in profusion; sometimes they’re naked and free in the bustling marketplace. Suddenly they appear as an angry titan, with three heads and six arms; suddenly, as sun-face or moon-face buddha, they release the light of all-embracing mercy. In a single atom they manifest all the physical forms; to save people according to their type, they mix with mud and water. If suddenly they release an opening upwards, not even the Buddha’s eye can see them; even if a thousand sages appeared, they too would have to fall back three thousand miles. Is there anyone with the same attainment and the same realization? To test I cite this old case. Listen.

The Main Case

Yunmen, teaching his community, said, “Medicine and disease heal each other. The whole earth is medicine. Where do you find yourself?”

Master Xuetou’s Verse

The whole earth is medicine:why have ancients and moderns been so mistaken?

I don’t make the carriage behind closed doors —

The road, though, is naturally quiet and empty.

Wrong, wrong!

Though they be high as the sky, your nostrils have still been pierced.

Yunmen Wenyan lived about a thousand years ago. This story was preserved as a koan in the Blue Cliff Record collection about 75 years after Yunmen’s death. Brief as this story is, it’s on the wordy side for Yunmen. When asked by a monk, “What is the teaching that transcends Buddhas and Patriarchs?” Yunmen replied, “Sesame cake.” Yunmen was a prominent teacher of his era and founded one of the five schools of Zen in China; his lineage was eventually absorbed into the Linji (Rinzai) school.

When Yunmen addresses his assembly, he makes every word count. Pay attention! “Sickness and medicine heal each other.” Let the words roll around in your mind a bit. Notice the familiar patterns of mental and emotional functioning. “Sickness and medicine heal each other.” Then perhaps, deeper and less conventional perspectives might emerge. What’s Yumnen up to here? He presents a familiar pairing, a duality of sickness and medicine, and says they heal each other—that’s novel. Sure medicine heals sickness, but how does sickness heal medicine? Okay--that’s not too much of a stretch: medicine isn’t medicine unless applied to disease, disease empowers medicine. No disease, no medicine... No medicine, no disease? Ah! Watch the mind get to work on all the permutations! But Yunmen strikes: “The whole Earth is medicine!” The whole Earth, every speck, not only every speck, every non-speck, every phenomena or non-phenomena. It’s all medicine. All that we deem beautiful, all that we deem horrible—it’s all medicine. Then Yunmen drives it home: “Where do you find yourself.” 

Many of the Indigenous Peoples of this continent speak of medicine in terms of relatedness and reciprocity. What a plant or animal or stone offers to complete the whole circle of life—that’s their medicine. The special essence of a person, in relation with all beings, that’s their medicine. This accords well with an important aspect of Yunmen’s challenge. Zen practice opens the way to experience the self that is no-self,  realizing oneness, but that is only half—not even half.  

I don’t remember which of our ancestors pointed out that realizing oneness is the easy part. Realizing differentiation is hard! Why? Because our habitual perception of separateness is pretty convincing—it’s too easy to take that perception as something authentically “me,” and indispensable.  Buddhists from the earliest times identified the delusion of a separate self as sickness, and prescribed Buddhist practice as medicine. Dispel the delusion of separateness and then what are you left with? Say oneness and you only get the half of it, intellectually anyway. In reality, not even half. Tonight we chanted the Sandokai, The Harmony of Sameness and Difference. One key line says, “Grasping at things is surely delusion; according with sameness is still not enlightenment.” We can read the Sandokai as it relates to the phenomenal world; let’s also appreciate that it applies to ourselves.

Buddhism offers the teaching of Three Bodies of Buddha, three perspectives on self. The Dharmakaya is the “reality body” the body of emptiness, no independent self existence, boundless.  An important perspective to realize—but don’t get stuck there. The Sambogakaya is the body of mutual co-arising or the “bliss body.” Everything is perfect just the way it is—because that is the way it is, and it all hangs together in harmony. Beautiful, but don’t get stuck there. The Nirmanacaya is the body of uniqueness. You are just you, as never before existed and never again shall. Not to be neglected, not to be discarded! But also not to be grasped. Your uniqueness is medicine, not to be possessed, or hoarded—give it away!

Sickness and medicine heal each other. The whole Earth is medicine. How about now? In these troubled times we are confronted by human folly, so much that is not life-affirming—sick. We look for the right medicines to rectify the illnesses. We ask, “What can I do?, what should I do?” I dare say that an indigenous Elder might say in response, “What is your medicine?” Who are you, really? Yunmen asks, “Where do you find yourself”? How do we heal our sickness, our delusions of separateness? The whole Earth is medicine. The whole of it, as it is. Nothing excluded.

That which is need of healing calls to that which heals. The sickness is the medicine--your medicine, and mine. Don’t turn away.