More Than Being Noble

In my last post I talked much about the nobleness of doctors, or at least the potential for nobleness that all physicians possess. I fused this idea with Brad and Emily’s hero theory to create this vision of a potential super-doctor. How quickly, I must say, did Rinpoche address my argument in Chapter 12: Learning to Monitor Our Mental State. He says that “having a noble attitude is still not sufficient” (Rinpoche 94), and that nobleness still has its imperfections. A perfectly compassionate doctor deals more with love than I had previously envisioned. Love also encompasses concentration, diligence, and most importantly, patience. A successful doctor requires all of these traits to pursue perfect compassion in his or her practice. Rinpoche argues that without love, everything else is nearly useless in training ourselves in compassion.

Like compassion, love must be practiced in a “perfect” sense as well, “for when love expects a reward, it may appear to be pure love, but actually it’s more like a business transaction” (Rinpoche 92). This statement stopped me dead in my tracks as I started reading again. In the subsequent chapters nothing caught my attention more than those words: “a business transaction.” Many students in our class aim to go into medicine and pursue the compassion that Dass and Rinpoche describe. Until now, I was not quite sure my profession would pertain to this material. How will I keep myself noble, patient, and compassionate in my own career someday? Will I be able to do this through practice, or will I fall into crunching numbers all day long and not worrying about being compassionate? I certainly do not want my friendships and relationship to become mere “business transactions,” therefore the subject of pursuing perfect compassion pertain to me as much as they do to the pre-med students in our class like Prianka and Emily. Though there might not be much compassion necessary in the business world, even my BA324H professor argues that a good manager must keep others’ feelings in mind. Ironically, we just covered in our class how to effectively communicate with “feelers” (the F in the personality test). Therefore I might use compassion more than I thought in the workplace. But the workplace will not be my only concentration once I graduate; I will still need to pursue compassion in my personal life as well. My initial thoughts of disregarding this material were poorly informed. Keeping love in mind is the only way to achieve the mindfulness, or Tibetan drenpa to pursue ultimate compassion. Practicing one will be practicing another.