Zen Koans, Singing Bowls & the Art of (Teaching) Medicine.
Lunch teaching conferences began with the resonant sounds of this Buddhist singing bowl I bought some years back in Kathmandu.* On the whiteboard across the room, on any given day you might find a zen koan, a kikuyu proverb, or something in Japanese (the Japanese and Germans have a word for everything but my favorite was tsundoku - Japanese for all the books you've bought and haven't read, and I have several). For anyone conditioned by their training in modern medicine, it was so very different. The purpose of all of this was to draw the audience in to the present moment, away from a busy day in clinic or operating room, where reality is just the sound of the bowl ringing, and not the abstraction of life, and medicine, in the symbols and thoughts resonating in our heads, past and future. And yet, it couldn't but remind me of the temple bells from Nanzen-ji temple I would hear while strolling along the Philosopher's Path in Kyoto years ag...