May I be the Nurse, the Doctor and Great Medicine – Working the Dharma in Nursing
Those of you familiar with Buddhist scripture, might recognize that the topic of this writing is derived from a text The Way of the Bodhisattva. A part of it is also recited during sesshins in the Finnish Tavallinen Mieli Zendo association that I practice with. This essay that is before your eyes aims not to be a scholarly analysis of the text. Rather, it is based on my experience of waking up to the ongoing embodiment of the view presented in it, of which my Zen teacher Karen asked me to write about, probably not so much to produce a publishable text, but to use it as a tool to structure these experiences within myself. This became a process of several months. The result is before you. If the Way of the Bodhisattva is new to you, you can find an English translation of it online, just google it. To give the text some background in a nutshell I’ll just state that the text is a part of a wider whole which was written in the 8th century by an Indian monk called Shantideva. Shantideva live...