Religion: Say 'Om' and call me in the morning
How did you get involved in Tibetan Buddhism?
A lot of people forced out of Tibet resettled in Nepal. During my first year at the clinic, I heard about a Tibetan Buddhist monastery, and I thought, why don't I go there one day a week and have a sick call, because it seemed like a nice way to give something back. The head of the monastery, Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche, invited me for tea, and we'd sit and have a chat and start talking about stuff.
How did you get interested in teaching western doctors compassion?
In 1998 I left Nepal and moved to Jackson Hole, Wyoming. I had this idea that I could put on a conference about compassion and have Chokyi Nyima be the teacher. All of these very remarkable compassionate doctors and nurses came. One of the best qualities of compassion is feeling that you're not compassionate enough.
How do western and eastern ideas about compassion differ?
Compassion is not a fixed commodity that you're born with a certain amount of. That's how we [mistakenly] view it in the West. In Buddhism, compassion is malleable. It's our natural state, but sometimes we just can't access it fully or very well because attachment, irritability, or anger obscures it.
Don't medical schools already teach compassion?
There are programs addressing the need, but they're not very effective. They teach empathy, which is a process of experiencing feelings from a patient's viewpoint. You take in a little bit of the suffering. The problem with that is that at first, doctors are like everyone else—the experience of seeing suffering is raw. To protect against that, a lot of practitioners develop a professional detachment. Compassion increases the capacity to take in a patient's feelings without being adversely affected by them.
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