Learn to Be a Calm and Detached Patient
The day before yesterday, a liver cancer patient came to Beijing's 301 Hospital for treatment and, by the way, visited me, hoping I could give him some guidance. Honored by his regard, I ventured to speak plainly. I pointed out that his illness of the mind was more serious than his illness of the body; to cure the body one must first cure the mind, and to heal the body one must first heal the temperament.
In our conversation, he was resentful and indignant about far too many things. Being obsessive, irritable, and prone to agitation is a common ailment of many cancer patients. The first dose I prescribed for him was: learn to let go—let go of the five poisons in the heart: greed, anger, delusion, pride, and doubt. Buddhism teaches that because the mind is obscured by turbid desires, a person has the five poisons of greed, aversion, delusion, arrogance, and suspicion. These five poisons fill a person's heart with constant unease and anxiety as they move through the world, making their life restless and turbulent. And over sixty percent of diseases are directly related to a person's emotions; if these unhealthy emotions cannot be eradicated, the illness will be hard to cure. A cancer patient, with life hanging by a thread, who keeps doing these things that endanger their own life, is being utterly foolish. So I told him: next time he gets angry, remember to remind himself—how can I be so stupid as to deliver myself to the gates of hell? This conversation greatly affected the patient; after leaving, he changed his online nickname to "Fully Equipped with the Five Poisons." Evidently he had begun to reflect.
I do not advocate that cancer patients pray to gods and Buddhas for divine protection to cure themselves, but I often recommend Buddhist knowledge to patients so that they may treat their own minds. When a person falls ill, they ought to reflect on the causes of their illness; besides bad lifestyle habits, unhealthy emotions are also important pathogenic factors. And unhealthy emotions do not arise from the outside world—they are born within one's own character. Rivers and mountains are easy to change, but inborn nature is hard to shift; only the ordeal of life and death may cause a person to suddenly turn back to the shore and thoroughly reform.
People often think themselves very wise and full of confidence; this itself is first of all a self-centered illness. The world is vast, yet people often see it as small, while the self, though small, people often inflate into something huge. This contrast breeds vexation. A person who correctly sees the distance between their own cognition and the true origin of the world, and correctly assesses themselves, is better able to let go of the self before disputes and troubles, thereby not generating unhealthy emotions. The doctor is treating the illness while unhealthy emotions are causing it; with such a tug-of-war, expecting the illness to be cured is asking too much of medicine.
When ill, besides greed, anger, delusion, pride, and doubt, there is also fear and anxiety; this in itself is an extremely dangerous state of emotional imbalance. If one still becomes entangled in worldly disputes and manufactures trouble for oneself, it becomes even more dangerous. The Dharma teaches people to be calm and detached; this is truly the foremost medicine for curing illness. Buddhism often speaks of counteracting a particular unhealthy emotion; "counteracting" means treating the mind in response to a situation. Whenever a false thought arises in our mind, the first thing we should think is: I have gone wrong again, I am being hard on myself again—not: how hateful this world is, how hateful that guy is. Because as long as we think that way, the emotion rises up again.
The reason old monks can enter deep samadhi is that the outside world can no longer shake their inner minds. Day after day they counteract the greed, anger, delusion, pride, and doubt in their hearts; they have become calm and detached to the point where any worldly matter can be met with a faint smile. In that state, how could the body and mind be unsettled to the point of being entangled by malignant disease?