The Parable Of The Royal Doctor


On the banks of the river Sattvika, there once lived a Buddhist sage called Prajnaparamita who was known throughout the kingdom of Dharmarakshita for his ability to teach noble truths through the means of parables. One morning, after three of his disciples had taken refuge at the feet of the statue of the Great Master, the Sakya Muni, one of them asked Prajnaparamita why in the world outside the hermitage motherhood was regarded as such an exalted state that the followers of the Vedas had, in a fit of anthropomorphic frenzy, even raised the Mother to the status of the Deity.

Prajnaparamita smiled for a moment, as if he had been waiting all these years for one of his disciples to ask him this very question.

'Listen, dear keepers of the noble Dharma', he told them, 'Ignorance, ignorance, and ignorance, that alone is the source of all human suffering. And wisdom, wisdom and wisdom that is gained through the practice of the Dharma, that alone is the means of liberation from it. Men outside our hermitage regard motherhood as a noble state, and indeed they shall, burdened as they are with the pernicious load of aeons and aeons of unreaped karma that casts a veil over their powers of discernment into the nature of reality. Listen, my beloved keepers of the noble Dharma, listen to this story of the great Avalokitesvara.'

Once upon a time, there was a young man called Avalokitesvara who travelled from the holy land of Magadha to the cold plains of Tibet. He travelled through the land for twenty years, during the course of which he saw many an amazing sight. But none, none of them was more intriguing than his encounter with the royal Doctor who lived in the palace of Khorkistan in the kingdom of Turkebiztan. Every morning, the Doctor would cut off the right hand of one of the courtiers and then spend the next three months treating the hapless man. At the end of the year, all the courtiers had their right hands cut off but they survived due to the constant and unfailing treatment given to them by the indefatigable Doctor. Indeed, when they had all recovered, they even praised the Doctor, 'You are the greatest Doctor of all. Doctorhood is indeed the highest state of human existence'. Avalokitesvara asked them, 'But why did you let the royal Doctor cut off your right hand in the first place? Why allow him to increase suffering?', and to this question, they all replied in unison, 'Without suffering there is no happiness. So we had to allow him to first inflict pain on us so that he could later lead us to greater joy.'

Then Prajnaparamita turned to his discplies and spoke : 'Such indeed is the state of our sisters outside out hermitage who have not been enlightened by the teaching of the noble Dharma. Every moment, one of them becomes a mother and even glorifies in her state of motherhood, and gives birth to yet another sentient being that cries, thirsts, hungers, grieves, decays, sorrows, and rots. And when it cries, the sister gives it her warmth, without realising that she is simply behaving like the royal Doctor from Turkebiztan : first increasing suffering, and then desperately trying to remove it. If she cares so much that her baby should not suffer, why bring it into this world where existence itself is suffering?'

At that very moment, a young woman rushed into the hermitage with a dead baby in her hands. She came running towards Prajnaparamita, flung the lifeless body at his feet, and appealed to him : 'I take refuge in you. You who are acclaimed to have removed the suffering of the four heavens with the light of your wisdom, can you not remove the suffering of one poor woman?'

The three disciples immediately stood up and asked the woman to leave the hermitage at once with her baby. However, Prajnaparamita made a slight nodding movement with his head and asked them to leave. Then he slowly raised his old body and asked the young woman to follow her towards the other end of the hermitage where they could see the tired sun setting into the distant hills. A gentle evening breeze was rustling through the yellow autumn leaves. There was a colour of orange in the exquisite sadness that pervaded the air.

Prajnaparamita stood in front of the young woman, looked into her eyes brimming with tears, and then fell down to this knees.

'Dear sister', he painfully whispered under his breath, 'I too once had lost my baby daughter.' And he began to weep uncontrollably.

His sobs echoed into the falling dusk.