Why We Suffer And How Not To

Buddhism teaches you to look for the silver lining and focus on that. On the other hand, it doesn't teach you passively to accept the bad stuff.

Welcome to the Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman, and that's Pharmacy with an F, F-A-R-M-A-C-Y, a place for conversations that matter. And if you care about waking up as a human being, this conversation is one you should listen carefully to because it's with someone who was the person that got me going on the path that I'm on many years ago when I was 15 years old. Professor Robert Thurman, who's a professor emeritus of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist studies in the Department of Religion at Columbia University, is the president of Tibet House, which is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the preservation and promotion of Tibetan civilization. And he's the president of the American Institute of Buddhist Studies, a nonprofit center affiliated with the Center for Buddhist Studies at Columbia. And he's dedicated to the publication of translations of really important artistic and scientific treaties from the Tibetan world. Time Magazine chose Professor Thurman as one of its most 25 influential Americans in 1997, describing him as larger then life scholar activist destined to convey the Dharma, the precious teachings of Shakyamuni Buddha from Asia to America. And the New York Times recently said Robert Thurman is considered the leading American expert on Tibetan Buddhism. He's known as a talented popularizer of Buddhist teachings. He's a riveting speaker and author of so many books on Tibet Buddhism, art, politics and culture.

Welcome Professor Thurman. Thank you.

I'm so happy to be with you, Mark. So wonderful. Here's the story of Professor Thurman. I'm 60 and I won't tell you how old he is, but 45 years ago, my sister was at Amherst College in Massachusetts as a student. And Professor Thurman was then a professor of Tibetan studies there at Amherst. And she dragged me to one of his lectures on Tibetan Buddhism. And, you know, it was obviously an impressionable time at 15 years old, but it was the most, I think, important lecture of my life because it set me upon thinking about the world and consciousness and personal development and the meaning of life in a way that has literally guided my entire life.

I'm so amazed.

It's true. And my sister turned out was a babysitter for Professor Thurman's children as well, which is so ironic. And then it led me to go on to study in college Buddhism. That was my major. Tibetan Buddhism.

Really?

Chinese Buddhism, yes.

Where was that?

At Cornell. I studied Buddhism at Cornell. You might know my professor Alan Grapard.

Oh yeah, sure. Yeah, he used to be a Columbia.

Yeah, he was at Cornell, Columbia. He was this, guy from Paris who was this very eccentric, crazy professor who studied Zen Buddhism in Japan. And then I studied the Medicine Buddha with Raul Birnbaum, who you probably also know.

Sure.

And a nice Jewish guy, but...

He was great. Oh, I love Raul.

Yeah, and I began to think about healing and Buddhism. and the kind of methodology of Buddhism as a system of healing of the mind.

Yes.

And that's really what led me to choose medicine, was that's so great. And to understand the interconnection of things, the interdependence of things, the nature of reality. It was always what I was trying to find and seek. And it's ultimately what led me to functional medicine, because it's a deep systems thinking model about root causes, which is what Buddhism is. It's a root cause analysis of suffering.

Exactly. And happiness. And happiness.

And happiness.

How to get rid of suffering.

How to get rid of suffering. Exactly.

Yes, yes, yes.

So, you know, I feel so honored and privileged to be able to have Dr. Thurman on my podcast, because without him, I wouldn't be thinking like I think I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing. He was a catalyst. It was like the spark that lit the flame that's guided my whole life.

That's really great. It's your own karma, you know, but I must say that just from what you said about the deep causation, then functional medicine, and connecting to that through the discovery of relativity by Buddha 2700 years ago, 2600 years ago. That's why as a doctor, you have done this wonderful thing of looking at the causes in the food system, in the life system of our somewhat distorted culture that has gone wrong and is mistreating our bodies in this amazing way that blows my mind. I'm so amazed and so thrilled at what you have done. No, seriously, I really am. I mean, I knew you, I liked your metabolism books and your other books before, and I tried to use some of them for our own health, and I found them helpful. But when I discovered that you actually were tackling the whole industrial disease forming system, a corrupt system in our country, which doctors are often loathed to do, I was so excited. I honor that. And so I am deeply honored to be with you.

Oh, thank you. Thank you. So that means so much to me. You know, it's actually, you know, as I think about it now, it's the same methodology. So Buddhism is a methodology for understanding the root causes of suffering and the root causes of healing, right? Or happiness.

Yeah, absolutely.

And functional medicine is the same exact thing. It's a methodology for understanding the root causes of suffering slash disease and an understanding of how to create healing and happiness. So, it's actually the same and it's sort of like this complete layering over of a framework and it's the It's the training I had in Buddhism and Tibetan Buddhism that really helped me to see what I see in a different way. And that's why I'm such a weird doctor.

No, no, you're right. Every doctor, that's what I'm going to talk about with you. It's every doctor should be doing what you're doing. I'm sure you read, I'm sure you have, you read Ivan Illich's medical nemesis book.

Yes, I did. I read that in college.

You know, and what that What that book, among many other things, about that book, although he's kind of disappeared off the radar of people, but nowadays, but what that said was that the great advances in medicine are not this and that high tech drug and not this and that skill in surgery developed from war experience, but what it is the public health initiatives over the centuries, over the last century or so, that medical awareness has caused, you know, sewage, you know, clean this and that, you know. So what they do for public health as a group, the doctors, is actually almost more important than inventing some gimmick.

Yes.

That does some symptomatic thing, you see. But in order to get back to that, we have to break through the corruption. And that's what we're gonna do. That's what we're doing. Right away, we're starting on November, whatever it is, and we're gonna do it now. Definitely, definitely, and you're a big part of it.

Well, thank you. I'm actually gonna have the privilege of being on Dr. Thurman's podcast as well, and talking about this work from a different perspective.

Okay, so yeah, you asked me a question, yes, sure.

So, there's many, many things that Dr. Thurman's done. He's published so many books, and he's translated so many important texts like the Tibetan Book of the Dead, He wrote the Forward to one of my favorite books. It was so influential. The Way of the White Clouds by Lama Govinda.

Lama Govinda, yes.

And this guy, Lama Govinda, was a Viennese guy who went and became a monk and was studying a certain type of Buddhism. And on a whim, went to a conference in India where he learned about Tibetan Buddhism and he moved to Tibet. before the doors were all opened up to the world through China.

Yes, that's right. And the early people.

And it was just an incredible kind of tapestry of discovery of what that culture was that focused not on outer space or discovery of the material world, but inner space and the discovery of the inner world because they had nothing. except their minds and the inquiry into their minds. And that's really what Buddhism is. People think it's a religion, you know, it's become that, but it really is this deep inquiry. And I want to sort of start the conversation with your journey, which is quite unusual. You were a student at Harvard, and then you had an accident, or you lost an eye and you got out of school, you went to Europe, Middle East, Asia, and you found your way to India where you met the Dalai Lama in 1962. And he had just emerged from Tibet in 1959.

So that's right.

Can you kind of take us through the accident, your spiritual quest, and how you ended up meeting the Dalai Lama and becoming the first ordained Tibetan Buddhist monk that was a westerner ordained by the Dalai Lama.

Well, it's kind of an involved tale. I'm working on an autobiography actually a little bit, although my wife's autobiography takes precedence, which is very interconnected. But yes, what happened was I lost an eye, and as my old Mongolian guru used to say, who was my first teacher before the Dalai Lama, he used to say, Whenever you talk about that, Say you lost one eye and you gained a thousand. Just say that so people don't feel worried. You know, there's a thousand armed Buddhist icon of compassion, you know, have a look at Dushara, you know, the Buddhist icon of all the compassion of all the Buddhas. And the thousand eyes means, is only a symbol of the fact that from the, for the Buddhas, Mahayana Buddhists especially, The presence of enlightened beings is everywhere and they are trying to help us to heal us because this is the big breakthrough from Buddhism. If you want Buddhism in a nutshell, the big breakthrough from Buddhism in India, in ancient India, it's not an East-West thing. It's in every culture. But Buddhism is an education and a healing system. based on the insight that Shakyamuni Buddha Siddhartha achieved, which is that we can be healed and that we can be happy. And that's a breakthrough because all cultures in history in the last few thousand years, according to history, terrorize their participants, the humans, by telling them that there's no hope for them. except via a religion or a high priest and a religion, a medicine man if it's a tribe, or through the chief political if they obey the orders of the king or the president or the prime minister. And then after they die as an unknown soldier or as whatever it is, then neither the king will take care of them because he's God, or God will take care of them because God is God. But no one can really help them in this life because it sucks life and therefore they're not going to be well, it's a veil of shadows, a valley of tears and all this. And so Buddhism is not, and on top of that, what is strange about it is it doesn't help that much. It helps a little to believe that. So it's not saying you have to believe that. What he's saying is, it's, he was so cool, actually, I really love the Buddha. You have to realize this. You know, you discovered it in a college classroom just by my very imperfect channeling of this system. Because what he did was he did understand much better than me everything about what reality is. And then he said, oh, good news, reality is great. If you know what it is, if you don't know what it is, which I hadn't been doing and most of us don't, you think it's a terrible situation and you're struggling with it and you're losing. Because reality is you're part of it, but it's bigger than just you. And if you're fighting with it, you'll lose. But if you know you're part of it, then everything is fine. But then he said, Problem with that is that explanation by itself was not going to help you that much if you just think, oh, I want to believe that explanation. So what you have to do is experience that for yourself. So you have to discover what reality is for yourself. And then here's the really revolutionary thing that caught me initially about Buddhism. Before I lost my eye, actually, but I was in denial that that's what I really should be doing with my life.

I mean, there weren't yoga classes on every corner in 1962. There wasn't meditation classes. Nobody was talking about this.

How did you get into it? Well, even at high school, I read Hermann Hesse and Siddhartha and Jung and the Jung's thing about the Book of the Dead and etc. You know, I was reading those things because I was a non-conformist already, where I was always teaching, taking my own class. I wouldn't go to some rotten professor teaching Buddhism. I would read my own book, you know, and then they would teach what they would teach, Kant and Hegel, you know, this kind of thing. So, but what I'm saying is, it's therefore he was an educator. It's like in education, when you go to medical school, the, the, you don't, the doctor doesn't say, believe you're a doctor and you'll be fine. And you can practice. No way. You have to study biology, you have to study anatomy, you have to study Karma. chemistry, pharmacology, blah, blah, blah. So Buddhism is like that. You have to study it. No authority can just tell you it's like so and so, and then you believe it, and that's that. And that's why the Four Noble Truths, the sort of main framework of Buddhism, they translate it as truth, and that's not wrong, but if you translate it as the Four Noble Facts, that would be better. Yeah. In other words, aspects of reality. And the first one is, if you don't know what it is, you're going to misunderstand who you are and where you are, and you're going to suffer. But you can learn what it is. That's the big kicker. Everyone else tells you in school, the religious people told me you can't understand anything. You just have to believe, and you have to believe whether it makes sense to you or not, just believe. And I said, I don't like that. I refuse. That's no good. And then there's a great joke on that. Do you know the joke about that, the theologian's joke? No. Where a theologian was asking the congregation like, define faith. Tell me, folks, what is faith? Can you tell me? And nobody would speak. So then the little Johnny in the front row was going like, I can tell, I can tell. And he didn't go to him because he was a little kid. Then finally nobody had grown up would speak. So he says, Well, you all should be ashamed of yourself. Little John is the only one who's answering the question. Okay, little Johnny, you tell these good people here, what is faith? He says, oh, I can say, I know what it is. Well, what is it? He says, faith is believing what you know ain't true. Langdon Gilkey, a theologian at the University of Chicago, told me that joke. I love it. It's a little bit cynical, you know? Yeah. Anyway, so the point is you can understand yourself and the world and you don't have to be Einstein. Every human being with a brain is a kind of Einstein if they develop it, you know? And that's what he said. The human life is so fortunate, not because animals are not former humans, they are. But because they have souls, et cetera, that he's like Albert Schweitzer, Buddha was like Schweitzer on that one. But the point is, you have the ability to understand one and two, you have to understand to be happy. And when you really understand your world, you will be happy.

So, you know, we kind of misinterpret our reality and that's what causes the suffering.

Exactly. And then they, reinforce our misinterpretation by telling us ignorance is bliss. You don't want to know what it is because you'd be so scared of it, you know, and they misinterpret Darwin as thinking that it's red in nature, red in tooth and claw, you know, they're going to all destroy us if we don't have nuclear weapons or something, which is absolutely wrong, you know, and, but the point is, you know, even death that they tell us is so terrible and scary and they threatened us with hell and things like that. Then the scientists, they tell you, oh yeah, we don't believe all that. We're atheists and et cetera. But we also think we're looking to understand this gene and this atom and this subatomic particle and that bacteria and this virus. But we know that we'll never know everything. So we still never will know. So we just always keep looking for more stuff. But we have a preconceived idea that you can't understand everything. If any scientist jumped up and said, Eureka, I know everything now, like Buddha did, they would have them arrested or give them a tranquilizer, you know, because they have a preconceived idea that you also, you can't understand, you see. Yeah. But then I used to ask them, well, if you can't understand everything, how do you know you can understand? And they could never answer that one.

Well, I mean, to me, Buddhism is the science of the mind.

That's it. So that, but it's also, it says, you, your mind, you, Mark Hyman, your mind, Bob Thurman, you, whoever it is, if you really develop your mind, it is capable of understanding.