A medicine for treating the ills of life

Dhamma (Teaching of the Buddha), when well practiced, is like a medicine for treating the ills of life, enabling us to live our lives well. The Buddha, as the proclaimed of the Dharma, it like a skillful doctor who prescribed particular medicines for particular illnesses. If a doctor is not skillful, even though he may have good medicine, he may prescribe it wrongly. His treatment will then not be very effective. If a doctor is skillfull and astute he will be very effective in treating his patients, because he thoroughly understands the properties of the various medicines.

Now I’ve heard it said, “This religion has been with us now for thousands      of years and yet we still see people fighting and in conflict. Evil still Bounds. Riligion seems incapable of dealing with it, it’s useless. We may as well dispense with it.” Some people see it like this.

It this idea of theirs true? They say that even though we’ve had this Buddhist religion for so many years, people are still corrupt, they still live in conflict. Religion seems powerless to stop these things; one can see no concrete  results from religion at all. Better to do away with it.

To these people I say, “The science of medicine has been with us for many thousands of years. Medicine is plentiful and there have been doctors curing illnesses throughout the ages, for thousands, even tens of thousands, of years. And yet we see disease and illness still abound. If what you say is true then  we must also say that the science of medicine is redundant, we may as well throw that out, too.”

           (Referance from “Helping Yourself To Help Others” Phra Debvedi

                                             (Prayudh Payutto

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