Fwd: "Dr.Bheshajam-bhishak" : The Unseen Healer - Part 1

June 9, 2005

tiruvenkatam, "Sudarshan K Madabushi"

<mksudarshan2002> wrote:

Dear members and friends,

In the "Sri Vishnu Sahasranamam" there are Sanskrit "nAmAs" for the

Almighty so euphonious, merely listening to their beautiful sounds

is feast enough for both the ear and soul. When you listen to them

you don't really even want to know their meaning. Their mere sound

is enough. (My own favourites ones are "pradAna-

purushEshwarah:", "pushpa-hAsah:" and "devaki-nandana").

There are some "nAmAs" whose sounds are rather intriguing to the ear

and mind. They make you wonder what they really mean. They are

fascinating to contemplate upon. They make you want to reach

immediately for a commentary, either traditional or contemporary, on

the Sahasranama. The "nAmAs" soon enough become 'earworms' i.e. they

keep ringing in the ears and just won't go away until you have

whetted your curiosity about what Sri Sankara BhagavathpAda may have

had to say about the "nAmA" or how Sri Parashara Bhattar interpreted

it in his famous Sahasranama "bhAshya", the treatise

titled "bhagavath-guna-darpana".

Due to poor grounding in the Sanskrit language or inadequate

understanding of our ancient scriptures, you may not entirely

comprehend the full significance of a "nAmA" through mere study of

the various commentaries – the "vyAkhyAna" or "bhAshya-granthA-s" --

on the Sahasranama. Yet the sweet "nAmA" itself will go on haunting

you even as you go about your daily life and routine. Such is its

power of attraction that it can make part of your mind go "offline"

to silently work away, seeking at least some sort of intuitive if

not intellectual understanding of its real intent. Not just the

superficial, dictionary sense of the term (which any Sanskrit

lexicon such as the "amarakOsam" can provide), but, more

importantly, its underlying truth and substance, without grasping

which one may never relate the beauty of the Vishnu Sahasranama with

one's own personal experience and appreciation in life

('svAnubhava').

*************

A couple of months ago I met with a rather strange but nasty

accident. I fractured a small bone in my back. I was changing seats

inside my car when I plonked down very heavily on the hard metal

buckle in the seat-belt contraption.

For weeks thereafter I became a semi-invalid. Waves and waves of

stabbing pain, like some malevolent tsunami, kept lashing my back.

Unable to move normally, sit or sleep in normal postures, I found

myself virtually crawling about the house like some giant amoeba in

distress. The doctor, a specialist called an orthopaedician, looked

closely at my condition. After studying test-reports (which

consisted principally of a "digitally created high-resolution X-ray

image" of my posterior), he diagnosed my problem to be a

fractured "coccyx bone". I had so little idea of human anatomy to

imagine I actually possessed a bone with such a distinguished

sounding name. And so I asked the "ortho" what it really was.

"You should consider yourself lucky", he said to me gravely, "that

you did not damage your sacrum, your spinal column. The coccyx is

only a small "tail bone" at the southern extremity of the column.

It's what you may call a "biological left-over", a bony remnant of

man's evolution, a tiny reminder of his earliest biological

origins", he said.

I do not generally care much for or comprehend medical-speak very

well, but I quickly understood the specialist's words to mean, lest

I forget, I had actually evolved as a species from the monkey and it

was my "coccyx" that was proof of that irrefutably Darwinian fact.

"Don't worry", the doctor went on to reassure me, "In a few weeks

the fracture will heal by itself and the coccyx will reset. There is

really no clinical cure for fractures of this kind. Only complete

rest, complete absence of strain or stress for a few straight weeks

can set things right. Go home now and rest. Trust your body and in

the deep and unseen powers of self-healing it possesses".

*********************

I left the doctor's clinic that evening with deep misgivings -- not

to mention a duly stamped receipt for a hefty sum of money paid

towards "doctor consulting fees". First, the bone-specialist had

added insult to my injury by reminding me of my simian ancestry.

Next, he had also left me clinically high and dry: abandoned me to

the mercy of such airy, mysterious things in life that he had

called "self-healing powers of the body".

I went home that afternoon severely distressed in body and mind. I

was in abject pain; I had no idea of the cure; I had no reasonable

basis on which to expect I'd be alright again. I feared I'd just

been made victim of an elaborate fraud by modern medicine: instead

of clinically treating me, my pain, my misery… my whole medical case

instead had just been nonchalantly turned over to some great,

invisible and anonymous "faith healer" believed to be residing

within me and who had curative powers far greater, far more

miraculous than any known to man or medical science!

*************

Physical illness is frustrating life-experience especially when it

lays you low, down and bed-ridden for prolonged periods of time. But

the abject passivity it imposes upon you can at times be a disguised

blessing. It urges the patient's mind, even if only very briefly, to

turn to spiritual or religious contemplation. In this narrow

respect, illness can indeed be said to be a sort of "tapas", a very

special and Vedantic form of meditative penance. The inertia of

lying in bed with a broken back – a broken "coccyx" to be more

accurate – and being unable to do anything for a whole fortnight,

made me reach for my favourite bedside scriptural book, the Sri

Vishnu-Sahasranamam.

Desperate to ward off boredom and creeping depression, I kept

silently repeating in bed the sacred "sahasranAmAs" when, all of a

sudden out of the blue, four specific "nAmAs" that seemed

particularly appropriate to my distraught physical condition, caught

my attention. As I kept repeating them over and over again I became

truly fascinated by them. I could not then wait to learn what

exactly the 4 enchanting names of the Lord truly signified.

Picking up the standard commentaries of Sankara and Parashara

Bhattar, I reflected long and hard upon the 4 divine names,

savouring both their sound and substance, again and yet again, in my

mind until, finally, I thought I had perhaps intuited, even if it

was in the foggiest sort of way, the essential crux of the 4 "nAmA-

s". In my fevered mind, I believed I had gleaned some deeper nuance

of the truth behind the 4 "nAma-s".

******************

The 4 delightful "nAmAs" in the Vishnu-Sahasranamam, the sacred-4

that kept me constant, soothing company all through my painful

illness, are the following:

"vaidyah:"

"oushadham",

"bhEshajam" and

"bhishak".

We will discuss them in the next posting.

Regards,

dAsan,

Sudarshan

--- End forwarded message ---

June 9, 2005