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their foot on the path of enlightenment, the path to understanding the nature of their own mind. In Tibetan Medicine, suffering is seen as an opportunity to discover more about oneself, to grow and expand one’s consciousness. While attending a Buddhist gathering in a small temple courtyard in Northern India in 1997, a small and frail-looking Lama returning from the United States told an interesting story that has since made its way around Buddhist circles, with varying details:
A medical doctor, a surgeon of known repute, was in a terrible car accident. His car was hit head-on by a drunk driver, and he swerved to the other side of the highway, tipping his car over twice, thus causing a monumental 16-car accident. The man’s car landed in the ditch at the side of the highway. It took several hours to extricate him from the car. He was then rushed to the emergency room, suffering from a severe head wound that caused blindness in one eye. Both arms and legs were broken, and he was rushed into surgery to place permanent pins in both arms and to extract metal from his right leg. Multiple bruises and injuries to internal organs meant that he had to stay in the hospital for over three weeks, until all his vital signs had stabilized. He was not married, but friends gathered every day and evening to attend to his needs. On the tenth day, his Buddhist teacher visited him and bent over him as he lay in traction on the bed. The venerable teacher shook his head vigorously back and forth, back and forth, and repeated to himself, “Lucky, lucky man!”
You may ask how anyone could look at that broken man in a hospital bed and say to him that he is a lucky man. But think about the reasoning of the Tibetan mind. The Lama recounted that the Buddha described three kinds of suffering: 1) the suffering of pain, 2) the suffering of change, and 3) the suffering of conditionality, or conditioned, limited existence on earth. The lucky man from the story is indeed “lucky” because in
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