Finding Time for Stories: An Exploration in Buddhist Pastoral Dharmology
Howard Ruan, MDiv Student, University of Chicago Divinity School
In recent decades, medical research literature has demonstrated a relationship between spirituality and health. Despite the association between religion/spirituality and health benefits, a traditional Western scientific division persists, demarcating the realm of the biomedical to physicians and the realm of the spiritual to clergy. Because this division does not sufficiently acknowledge religion/spirituality as a thick, expansive category that works laterally across multiple dimensions of well-being, it can be all too simple to overlook and neglect the spiritual health of the patient. The Western biomedical framework limits the possibilities of a patient’s care to that which primarily concerns the physical body; the cultural priority of the scientific worldview often subordinates the spiritual over the former.
Often the care of a patient is bound to the temporality of the physical body and the haunting of a prognosis: “How much time is left?” How may we reimagine the parameters and the experience of this body? We must ask questions about how the patient-as-person tells the story of their own illness, how this story fits in meaning-making systems, and what spiritual care can provide in illuminating this storytelling. How can we cultivate and make a space in which there is time for hard conversations about pain, suffering, and the potential expiration of time?
This paper explores time/temporality, the body, and storytelling within a Buddhist pastoral dharmology. This paper uses various teachings of Dōgen as a textual basis for establishing a Buddhist theory of spiritual care. This exploration is framed by the physician-patient dynamic as characterized by Rothman’s Strangers at the Bedside and informed by illness narration as articulated in Arthur W. Frank’s The Wounded Storyteller.
How do we and the patients or clients to whom we provide care begin working with the ambiguous tension between the time we think we have and the time that is actually given to us at every moment? The central paradox - and liberating notion - of Buddhism is that it is going through our emotions, going through the act of storytelling, going through that which we think we cannot go through that we find that the obstacle has disappeared. This paper hopes to offer a “practical theory” of Buddhist pastoral care informed by both clinical experience and dharmological reflection.
Often the care of a patient is bound to the temporality of the physical body and the haunting of a prognosis: “How much time is left?” How may we reimagine the parameters and the experience of this body? We must ask questions about how the patient-as-person tells the story of their own illness, how this story fits in meaning-making systems, and what spiritual care can provide in illuminating this storytelling. How can we cultivate and make a space in which there is time for hard conversations about pain, suffering, and the potential expiration of time?
This paper explores time/temporality, the body, and storytelling within a Buddhist pastoral dharmology. This paper uses various teachings of Dōgen as a textual basis for establishing a Buddhist theory of spiritual care. This exploration is framed by the physician-patient dynamic as characterized by Rothman’s Strangers at the Bedside and informed by illness narration as articulated in Arthur W. Frank’s The Wounded Storyteller.
How do we and the patients or clients to whom we provide care begin working with the ambiguous tension between the time we think we have and the time that is actually given to us at every moment? The central paradox - and liberating notion - of Buddhism is that it is going through our emotions, going through the act of storytelling, going through that which we think we cannot go through that we find that the obstacle has disappeared. This paper hopes to offer a “practical theory” of Buddhist pastoral care informed by both clinical experience and dharmological reflection.