Care In Buddhist Culture

In the context of Buddhist culture, care is a broad construct; it is difficult to describe in a few words. Care is holistic, all encompassing, cyclical, and performative. Good care is ritualistic and dependent on the sincerity and kindness of the caregiver. The actions and services of caregivers need to be reciprocated or remunerated by those who are being cared for. And like most other aspects of Buddhist culture, care has deep roots in karma: the ever fluctuating force determining a person’s fortune in this life and the next. Providing care to a person can increase your merit, which is sort of the currency of karma. Merit can also be gained through prayer or meditation with someone who possesses a great amount of karma. These more traditional

It is as if the care provided by monks, people of high karma, and families, is the root of the goodness and happiness of many southeast Asian Buddhist people, in their endeavors, as well as their struggle to reach Nirvana. One of the keys to understanding the importance of care in Buddhist society, is understanding who actually provides care. In her article The Healing Power of the Gift Healing Services and Remuneration in Rakhine, Céline Coderey refers to the monks, diviners, spirit mediums, exorcists, and traditional specialists as “belonging to the informal sector of the health care system” (406). These are the people who do their work out of love and “dana” or generosity, which “corresponds to an ideal model which largely derives from the Buddhist tradition” (Coderey, 407). Working out of love and kindness, is the only way monks can justify their work as givers of care. Many of the techniques they use to provide care are literally forbidden by Buddhist scripture, including astrological calculations and the summoning of supernatural forces. Monks, and to a similar

Felicity Aulino’s article Rituals of care for the elderly in northern Thailand, discusses the care given to an elderly woman by her family. This woman, whose name is Tatsanii, fell and entered a coma which she would likely never come out of. Tatsanii’s family, mainly her daughters, had a “basic routine” of “bathing, diapering, turning, propping, stretching, powdering, massaging, medicating and feeding” their mother (Aulino, 1). While at first, this routine took three hours, the family eventually honed the time needed to one hour, which is good because they had to do this same routing four times a day. Taking care of Tatsanii was a ritual for the family, and because this routine was a ritual, “the actions themselves, rather than internal cognitive orientations, are of utmost importance” (Aulino, 6). What Aulino, means here is that the sincerity of the family, does not matter much. And this is not meant to say that the family did not want Tatsanii to get better. It is just safe to assume that the family knew that Tatsanii was never going to wake up from her coma. The ritualistic nature of the care the family provided for Tatsanii is what was important; everyday, rising, completing all of the necessary steps to ensure comfort for Tatsanii. These ritualistic actions had karmic implications for everyone involved. The family, and those who provided care for Tatsanni are accruing merit through their