Medicine Buddha

Ancient teachings tell us that merely seeing the Medicine Buddha, or even seeing an image of the Medicine Buddha, or hearing the name of the Medicine Buddha, can confer inconceivable benefits. - Spiritual Bliss

Bhaisajyaguru, commonly known as the Medicine Buddha, is the Buddha of healing and medicine in Mahayana Buddhism. He is a fully enlightened being capable of healing both, the outer and the inner, suffering or dukkha by applying his teachings as medicine. He has unbiased compassion for all sentient beings. He offers protection from physical harm and mental afflictions, as well as other dangers and obstacles. He helps the faithful to eradicate the three unwholesome roots (poisons) or kleshas of attachment, hatred and ignorance that are considered to be the source of all suffering.

In a Sanskrit manuscript called Medicine Buddha Sutra (Bhaisajya-guru-vaiḍūrya-prabhā-rāja Sūtra) he was described as a bodhisattva who upon enlightenment made twelve great vows:

1. To illuminate countless realms with his radiance and enable anyone to become a Buddha.
2. To awaken the minds of sentient beings through the light of lapis lazuli.
3. To provide all sentient beings with all necessary material needs.
4. To correct heretical views and inspire all sentient beings toward the enlightened path of the Bodhisattva.
5. To help all sentient beings follow the Moral Precepts of Buddhism even if they have failed before.
6. To heal sentient beings born with deformities, illness or other physical sufferings.
7. To help relieve the destitute and the sick from their suffering.
8. To help women who wish to be reborn as men achieve their desired form of rebirth.
9. To heal sentient beings from their mental afflictions and delusions.
10. To help the oppressed be free from their suffering.
11. To relieve those who suffer from terrible hunger and thirst.
12. To help clothe those who are destitute and suffering from cold weather or mosquitoes.

The idea of Buddha as a metaphorical healer is as old as Buddhism itself and goes back to the historical Buddha who found the cure for suffering and presented his formula as the Four Noble Truths.

Medicine Buddha is one of the emanations of the Gautama Buddha as understood in Mahayana Buddhism. He is venerated in China, Japan and Tibet. He is often depicted as a seated Buddha with a stem of the Aruna fruit (Terminalia chebula) wearing the three robes of a Buddhist monk, sometimes blue-faced or having a blue body and holding a lapis lazuli medicine bottle.

Bhaisajyaguru (Medicine Buddha) Mantra

namo bhagavate bhaiṣajyaguru
vaidūryaprabharājāya tathāgatāya arhate
samyaksambuddhāya tadyathā:
oṃ bhaiṣajye bhaiṣajye
bhaiṣajya-samudgate svāhā

The practice of Medicine Buddha is considered to be a very powerful tool for liberation from suffering. The faithful recite either the dharani or the mantra that helps them overcome the inner "sickness" of attachment, hatred and ignorance. It also helps ease the outer, physical suffering and purify the negative karma.

By Dominique Allmon

Dominique Allmon©2025

Images: Medicine Buddha by Dominique Allmon

 

Labyrinth of Dark Passages

Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilizations without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers, and without finding what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed. - Stanisław Lem, Solaris (1961)

Stanisław Lem on AI and Consciousness

We may not solve the riddle of consciousness in the coming millennium, but we may be able to imitate intelligence so perfectly that, surrounded by legions and swarms of imitations, we will come more and more closely under their protective tutelage. 

Nowadays we are offered veritable orchards of electronic apples of paradise, which will inevitably have both good and bad sides, because such is the ambivalent nature of things. 

Our greatest achievements, secondary or not secondary to biology, have served us to destroy the biosphere and to engage in vile war games, and finally, a great deal of what we have already managed to create on the way to the yet-to-be-achieved artificial intelligence often serves to foolishness, amusement, and eccentricities that are incomprehensible to me. 

I have read many works and books that absolutize the possibility of creating a non-human intelligence, as well as a no smaller collection of well-motivated justifications that are supposed to prove to the reader that this concept cannot and will never be realized. It is indeed difficult to rise above the crowd of such contradictory and expertly justified opinions. 

Without a multitude of dreams, attempts, disasters, there would be no aviation. Without constant assaults, artificial intelligence cannot appear. 

I am convinced that both the quantity and quality of these programs, directed especially at successive generations of computers working in parallel and at contaminating clusters of pseudo-neural networks, will achieve an expanding range of efficiency and thus will increasingly imitate the presence of an intelligent consciousness, and will even be taken by many people for a person or a personality embodied in a machine. In a sense, this will be a fraud practiced on people as interlocutors or collaborators of the machine, because imitators of this kind will not yet possess authentic, personally localized, conscious intelligence, called psychic life. 

The title of Carrel's old book "Man, the Unknown Creature" is still relevant. Not only do we not know ourselves, but we also do not know how we will behave in unforeseen situations. I do not know whether the insights that will eventually make it possible to create artificial intelligence will be good for our health. Let's hope so. 

From "The Blink of an Eye" by Stanisław Lem, (2000) 

AI image designed by Freepik. Website www.freepik.com

Christmas Bells

 

Christmas Tree Decorated with Lights 

by Rudolf Bernhard Willmann (1868-1919) 

 

Christmas Bells by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along
The unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Till ringing, singing on its way,
The world revolved from night to day,
A voice, a chime,
A chant sublime
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Then from each black, accursed mouth
The cannon thundered in the South,
And with the sound
The carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

It was as if an earthquake rent
The hearth-stones of a continent,
And made forlorn
The households born
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And in despair I bowed my head;
"There is no peace on earth," I said;
For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!"

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
"God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men."

Wishing Merry Christmas to all who celebrate! Happy Holidays to all - Dominique