Koan #13...

By Vichara

Koan Monday is back…”Make medicine from suffering”. Sounds strange to use the many forms of suffering to cure what ails you but using suffering, as a tool of a restorative measure, will help you find the answers. When we try to avoid suffering it is like patients in a hospital refusing to take their medicine. They never get well. Zen master Yun-Men says “medicine cures illness, all the world is medicine”. Use what we learn from the world and suffering to develop our own cures to not only help ourselves but those around us based in compassion. By trusting the natural process of life and embracing the suffering that comes our way we allow it to heal us.

encomium • \en-KOH-mee-um\ • noun

: glowing and warmly enthusiastic praise; also : an expression of this
Example Sentence:
"The book is beautifully written and unquestioningly deserves the encomiums of critics who compared it to 'The Great Gatsby' for its elegiac tone." (David Milofsky, The Denver Post, August 2, 2009)

Did you know?
"The love of praise, howe're concealed by art / Reigns more or less, and glows in every heart." British writer Edward Young knew how much people love to hear praise -- and so did the ancient Greeks, the originators of "encomium." They formalized that particular expression of praise and named it an "enkōmion," from their terms "en," meaning "in," and "kōmos," meaning "celebration." The original encomiums were eulogies or panegyrics, often ones prepared in honor of a victor in the Olympics. The term was later broadened to refer to any laudatory ode. Since then encomiums have been written praising everyone from Julius Caesar to Elton John, although not all have been entirely serious -- one of the best known is the satirical "Moriae Encomium" ("Praise of Folly") by Erasmus.