Life in the Buddha’s Hospital
March, 2002
The Dhamma is like medicine. You can see this from the way the Buddha teaches. He starts off with the four noble truths, which are very much like an analysis of how to care for a disease. In his case, he’s offering a cure for the basic disease of the mind: the suffering that comes from craving and ignorance. That’s what we’ve got to cure. So he analyzes the symptoms of the disease, diagnoses it, explains its causation, discusses what it’s like to be free of the disease, and then shows a path of treatment that leads to the end of the disease, to a state of health.