JUN-B-22
THE LETTER FOR THE
DALI LAMS’S PERSONAL SECRETARY
REGARDING OUR
MEDICAL MISSIONS AND THE SUBJECT OF PANETICS
Mister Tensing Getche
Personal Secretary to His Holiness
The XIVth Dali Lama
Office of His Holiness
Thekchen Chobling
McLeod Ganj 17629
Dharamsala, HP, India
Dear Mister Tensing Getche:
Thank you so very much for the audience you granted to me and my group of medical students on Thursday, June 27, 2002 in the Palace at Dharamsala. The exchange that we had in discussing Panetics and its origins in Tibetan Buddhism’s philosophic roots in Shunya and Ahimsa was very instructive, and not only enlightening, but most inspiring for my students as well. Many of them had asked me to relay to you their own impressions that he time we spent in the audience was the most stimulating and enriching of their entire medical mission with me on this occasion.
I knew that you were very busy with the preparations for His Holiness’s travels forthcoming the following day, and I am grateful for your extended period of time and attention. I was delighted that you took an interest in the experiences of my multiple medical missions among the peoples of Tibetan Buddhism in the remote areas of Spiti on this occasion, as we held clinics in the Tabo Monastery where His Holiness would have been at the ceremonial occasion of our visit and medical camps there had he not been prevented from doing so. We had also visited the Gompas at Dankar, at Ki and at various places along the long route around through Kaza, Kibber, and the other parts of the Spiti and Lahoul Valleys as well as our earlier work in Sangla in the Kinnaur Valley. This trip to Spiti has been an annual trek for me, as have also been the trips through Ladakh, where I have operated clinks in Thicksay Gompa, in Lei, and at Tangste, Tso Morari (at the time of the installation of the newest Lama Rimpoche there and also in the two years subsequently) and at Panamik and Pangong Lake. Ladakh and its remote regions will be the site of my next medical missions next week. In add-on, I will trek into the roadless regions of Lingshed, carrying in my medical kits and equipment on packstock for the three weeks it will take to do this later medical mission to Lingshed in August.
My prior medical mission last month have included Dharamsala, with clinics in the Sherboling Monastery, the TCV, and in remote Borat, as well as prior annual visits to other parts of Panamik in addition to the regular visit to McLeod Ganj. ON each of these occasions I have brought by my medical students and residents to the Temple in the hopes of adding the additional inspiration of His Holiness’s aura of blessing to our humanitarian undertaking. We have functioned in the context of the remote peoples without regular access to health care services, under the auspices of both the Red-hatted and Yellow-hatted sects of Tibetan Buddhism, united under His Holiness, and have appreciated his support.
I have also completed medical missions in Nepal earlier this year on an irregular biannual basis, and have worked among the Sherpa peoples there beyond the reach o f any roads.
As you so astutely pointed out, the work is very challenging, since access is very difficult, at best, and the weather sometimes makes our visits variable in their location given the glaciers, avalanches and road conditions for hazardous transport, and the conditions of the altitude and lack of power and plumbing makes us improvise newer methods to conduct our clinics, but does not compromise our principles of compassionate competent care. As long as I am able, we will seek to continue these efforts in delivering free health care to those who are without regular access to such medications and consultation as we will provide, including several of the patients as the two young monks we had described to you whom we are sponsoring for cardiac surgery who were discovered in the screening clinics which diagnosed severe heart valvular problems in our most recent camps. Two such patients will be brought out, one to Simla and another to AAIMS, and a third we hope to be able to transfer to the United States to the University of Colorado for cardiac surgical services in the “sister city” of Tibet of Boulder Colorado.
I have detailed some of these itineraries of my repeated medical missions among the remnants of the Guge Empire of Tibetan Buddhism in response to your detailed questions reflecting your interest in these matters, and will attach a listing of the kinds of medical missions and motivations and participants in them for only this year’s list of missions. I also attach a note about some recognition that this sort of activity had elicited this past year. I share one thing with His Holiness---we were both nominated for the Peace Prize, but there the parallel ends, since he has received it!
The specific subject we had discussed was the role of the International Society for Panetics and its interests in furthering the reduction of inflicted human suffering among peoples of the earth. I had given you and your assistant Ngawang Gyalthen the access to our Web Site at www.panetics.org
Because of the global interest in this subject of reduction of inflicted suffering and because of the wide distances and economic disparity among many members and the participants’ states of origin, we have attempted to create a virtual organization which can conduct regular meetings through the medium of the internet. We have a member’s “Forum” which you can access through this website and you can see the principle component parts of the interests of the members, as in Medicine and Health, Law Enforcement, and the subject of a methodology of quantification of suffering in order to judge its reduction.
I had spoken to you about our founder’s interest in Buddhism which was a primary motivation for his producing the large body of work he had published on this subject, and his efforts to determine that the next era in human history would come about when policy makers, world leaders and those who had the offices of representation and power might pattern their actions according to the successful reduction in inflicted human suffering that would ensue upon their actions and policies.
We had discussed how difficult it might be to make the transition from a scientific or philosophic approach to this issue as the monk scholar’s and a number of our thinkers might be doing, and to instill in the “Men of Practical Affairs” the principles that might result in concrete steps for an action agenda to reduce suffering. As plagues, pestilences and famine come under increasing human control, the persistence of these detriments to humankind seems to be manipulated as instruments of political or intended harm to people, rather than as a natural calamity. The “empowerment” of increasingly few over the lives and futures of increasingly more, has meant we must give serious thought to the implications of how to curtail this infliction and mitigate its effects on this suffering. It may be easy to see the macro level of political oppression, as when China seizes Tibet and suppresses the Tibetan culture in subjugation of its peoples for strategic purposes of its own; it may be less easily seen that the economic decisions of business leaders that may result in unemployment, decrease in the standard of living for the lower parts of the global economic pyramid, or the repression of those in positions of authority to allow less autonomy in though and action are insidious larger in their potential impact. Polluters, politicians, advertisers, and those that appeal to the greeds and desires against which Buddhism has stood as a rather solitary antidote may be more inflictors in the aggregate than overt government actions of the type I had mentioned, egregious as it appears.
You had pointed out the Buddhist perspective of Shunya, in which the response to individual acts of infliction is to view such inflictors as teachers, who might tell us what parts of our desires have not yet been purged. One of my own desires that remains prominent in my search for a panetic application is that the single biggest loss I see on earth is the waste of human potential through the denial of the freedoms of choice in intolerant inflictors who wish to superpose their own judgmental standards on others. This may seem to some to be a Jeffersonian faith in the pursuits by all men of “Life Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, but I believe it is larger and deeper than this and may be best exemplified by the Tibetan Buddhism we had discussed in its Masterful form, with my hope that we can institutionalize this in some way of policy application. This focus on the numerator of what human benefit we are getting from our actions rather than acceding to the tyranny of the dismal science’s focus on the denominator because of the higher precision of its quantification systems is a major paradigm shift in thinking on the part of responsible leaders. This sea change is what Dr. Ralph Siu said would characterize the beginning of the “New Era of Humane Renaissance.” I had hoped that this shift might come through the active interest of His Holiness in this policy change for leaders of the world. This would warrant the Kalachakra for World Peace for the new orientation along the Buddhism-inspired focus on peaceful progress and humanitarian benefit above that of Gross National Product or other baser measures of an enlightened society.
I had promised that I would follow up on the conversation we had, and the earlier discussion with His Holiness on the occasion of his visits to the George Washington University where I had first met him, and will forward to your library the volumes written on the subject of Panetics and the group actively seeking to promote these principles. These are forthcoming. You had suggested to me the names of a number of scholars who had studied with Tibetan Buddhist masters and might make most valuable members to help in this transition to a “new plateau” of applications of panetic principles in practice. You had suggested the names of a dozen scholars in the USA, and I can recall now only the two names I had recognized, Dr Jeffrey Hopkins (at Indiana University, I believe?) and Allen Wallace, along with Cesar at Columbia. Could you help me with a listing of such authorities who might assist us with this transition of the theoretic to the practical application of panetic principles in practice?
Once again, I am very grateful for your help. I thoroughly appreciated our opportunity to discuss these panetic principles and their potential application, and judging from the reactions of the ten medical students who accompanied me in our audience, they were thoroughly inspired with this discussion and the origins of much of the thought behind them from the Buddhist principles upon which you had expanded so eloquently. I hope you will relay to His Holiness our appreciation, and my hope that I might meet with him directly in my next visits to Dharamsala for which I will send a considerably longer advance notice to make plans accordingly.
Dandeva and Teshi Dili!
Glenn W. Geelhoed, MD
Enclosures:
Signature,
Listing of Himalayan Health Exchange Itineraries for Medical Missions of 2002, “Humanitarian of the Year” Award,
ISP Statement of Principles