Ancient Indian Education (Brahmanical and Buddhist) c23.26

c23.26

**Jīvaka the Physician of the Buddha.** The medical treatment of the Buddha and his fraternity was entrusted by the generosity of the Magadha King Seniya Bimbisāra to Jīvaka Komārabhachcha, "the royal physician, an excellent young doctor" who had orders to wait upon the king, his "seraglio and the fraternity of Bhikkhus with the Buddha at its head" [*Mahāv.*, viii, 1, 15–16]. He was a most distinguished medical authority of his times, well versed in both medicine and surgery, and had calls from distant places like Sāketa, Benares, and Ujjenī, always to treat diseases which baffled the skill of other medical practitioners. The free provision of such expert medical aid for the Order was one of its other temptations to the lay public to join it. There is a story that on the outbreak in Magadha of the five diseases of leprosy, boils, dry leprosy, consumption, and fits, the people suffering from them approached Jīvaka and said: "Pray, Doctor, cure us and all that we possess shall be yours and we will be your slaves." But the Doctor said: "I have too many duties, Sirs, and am too occupied. I have to treat the Magadha King Seniya Bimbisāra, and the royal seraglio, and the fraternity of Bhikkhus with the Buddha at their head. I cannot cure you." Now those people thought: "Indeed the precepts which these Sākyaputtiya Samaṇas keep and the life they live are commodious; they have good meals and lie down on beds protected from the wind. What if we were to embrace the religious life among the Sākyaputtiya Samaṇas: then the Bhikkhus will nurse us and Jīvaka Komārabhachcha will cure us." Thus these persons got themselves ordained by the unsuspecting Bhikkhus and then secured the Bhikkhus to nurse and the physician Jīvaka to treat them. The demands of the sick made the Bhikkhus constantly beg for food for the sick and for the tenders of the sick as also medicine for the sick, while Jīvaka, having to treat so many sick Bhikkhus, neglected some of his duties to the king. This stratagem worked so well that persons similarly afflicted with one or other of those diseases began to offer themselves for monkhood not for the sake of the religious life but simply to exploit the Order, to get themselves nursed and cured and then "to return to the world", for the entry into the Order was as easy as exit therefrom. The entire corrupt practice was, however, one day completely exposed when Jīvaka in the course of one of his medical rounds noticed a runaway renegade tramping the public roads and subjected him to a cross-examination which revealed the whole truth. On Jīvaka reporting the matter to the Buddha he ruled that no person seeking the Order in sickness should be admitted [*Mahāv.*, i, 39].