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 ago, cherry blossoms in bloom, petals heavy from the light spring rain as they fell in to the creek below. Yugen.  

We all get lost in our heads, and to take a moment to be present, to awaken to what is, beyond concepts and conditioning is the true purpose of life. And that is the purpose of this blog which I am introducing with this very first post. I'll be posting short stories, photos, and articles to hopefully awaken, for just a moment, our awareness. In the Zen tradition, a koan is a riddle that takes us to our deepest nature. They may not have understood it, but the sound of the bowl itself was the koan. The students and residents were allowed to ring the bowl if they answered the case questions correctly, not the one above but a smaller "training bowl." And now its part of their memories, their experience. One day, they'll hear a similar sound, and maybe they'll remember that bowl, like those temple bells in Kyoto, and remind themselves to come back to the present moment, 

* I visited a traditional healing clinic in Kathmandu where I watched them fill larger singling bowls with water, strike it, and then lay it on a patients back or wherever they needed healing, transferring the vibrating energy, not unlike ultrasound or massage therapy.

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