Judith Simmer-Brown: We’ve been working at Naropa University with a Master of Divinity program that is relevant to this discussion. It trains students to be Buddhist chaplains, working with the sick and dying in hospital. That’s the ambition most of them have. Some of them would very much like to work in prison, and it seems that that’s the main direction our students are moving. When our students do internships in the hospital, they work under supervisors who are mostly Christian chaplains. But it’s been a very interesting dialogue for our students, because we train them in Tonglen as Geshe Lobsang taught yesterday, and the students develop a stabilized Tonglen practice that they then take into the hospital.

The students go into rooms where people are sometimes in great suffering or sometimes have very minor things happening. Many times, however, people are dying. Our students work in the emergency rooms and critical care situations. Instead of doing the Jesus prayer or Pure Land practice, they are doing Tonglen. This is an incredibly powerful practice. This is how we are taught to work with our own suffering and directly with the suffering of others at the bedside. There is an atmosphere in the room with someone dying that is an incredible teaching for us as practitioners: to open to suffering, to let it teach us very directly about our own mortality, and to share our presence with those who are dying, who want someone very much to just be there.

It has been such a powerful thing for us to be able to take our own experience of this and teach students to do it. One of the most interesting things for us has been to work with Christian supervisors who tell us that there is something about our students that when they go into the room they seem to be able to be there. That’s true even if students are relatively new, simply because of Tonglen practice. Tonglen is a practice that could be used by any of us as a way to open to an environment in the hospital or the bedside of a dying person.