Medicine Buddha Practice as Recovery, Unity and Service

Every week a small circle of practitioners gathers to chant the Medicine Buddha mantra and let go of what they are carrying, and on this October session the teaching was led not by the usual guide but by Tenphel Lhundrub, who opened by apologizing for a summer spent hosting houseguests and missing the group. Lama Rod Owens was away, so the room, virtual or otherwise, belonged to the community. Within a few minutes Lhundrub was describing nine years of homelessness, untreated mental illness, and substance use, and a 12-step rule that became the framework for everything that followed: recovery, unity, and service. Those three words, Lhundrub argued, are not a metaphor laid over the Dharma. They are the three jewels, lived out in a body that needed them to stay alive. What follows is a close reading of that teaching and the practice it sets up, since the ideas are sturdy enough to be useful to anyone who has never sat a Medicine Buddha session.

What is a community-led Medicine Buddha session?

The Medicine Buddha, or Bhaisajyaguru, is the healing buddha of the Tibetan tradition, and the weekly practice Lhundrub was leading is built around his mantra. The stated purpose, from the session's published description, is to nourish healing, deepen spiritual friendship, and "abolish social forces that perpetuate harm for self and others." Those are big aims for an hour on a screen, and the structure of the session reflects them. It opens with a talk, moves into a guided visualization and breathing sequence, returns to the mantra in group recitation, and closes with verses dedicating the merit.

The word "community-led" matters here. Lhundrub did not present himself as an authority standing above the room. He described his own practice as ordinary: "I'm just uh like anyone of anybody else," he said early on, and he noted that he has been practicing Medicine Buddha for close to twenty years and has sat with the Lama's group for the last four as much as he can. That modesty sets the tone. The practice is meant to be done with others, and the teacher's job is to make the mechanics clear enough that people can take them into their own bodies.

How did a 12-step rule become the three jewels?

The most striking thing about Lhundrub's teaching is the origin story, and it is worth lingering on because it is not the kind of biography a Dharma talk usually includes. He was, in his words, "very sick," and he was "struggling with a lot of unhousedness." The specifics are direct: "I was unhoused for nine years and I had a lot of untreated mental health obstacles and untreated substance use disorder." Sobriety came through a 12-step community, which gave him a simple working concept. If he stayed inside what he called a triangle of recovery, unity, and service, he could get through twenty-four hours sober. If he left it, the odds of relapse grew large.

Lhundrub then did something that will sound unusual to people who keep Buddhism and recovery in separate rooms. He noticed that the triangle and the three jewels overlapped. The Buddha, he said, is the natural state, and recovery is a return to it: "to recover means to return to our natural state and our natural state is the Buddha." The Dharma is the unity of all things, a teaching that nothing exists independently of anything else, which maps onto unity. The Sangha, rendered in his talk as "all beings without exception to whom we are of service," maps onto service. He was careful to add a distinction that matters to committed practitioners: a Buddhist takes refuge vows, and he did take them in the three jewels. But before the vows, he said, he had been taking refuge in the triangle "thousands of times a day" so that he could stay sober.

There is a practical lesson inside the autobiography. The triangle was not an abstraction. It was a daily tool for survival, and it was repeated, moment by moment, until it became a spiritual reality. Lhundrub's claim is that the Buddha nature he describes as sitting in the heart "like a cave that it meditates in all the time" was never absent; it was obscured by everything a person thinks he knows. Recovery, in this telling, is the uncovering.

Why do surrender and non-attachment lead to the same place?

Much of the 12-step vocabulary is built on surrender to a higher power, and Lhundrub acknowledged that many Buddhists stumble over it. His solution was to translate the idea into the Buddhist language of attachment. Picture two columns, he suggested: internal, meaning the emotions one holds and the beliefs one takes as truth, and external, meaning the car, the clothes, the apartment. Grasping at either is what keeps a person in pain. You can surrender the whole pile to God, or you can simply practice non-attachment and let go of it yourself. Lhundrub's point was that the results are identical. "Either way, it yields the exact same result."

He tied this directly to the Buddha's teaching: "the Buddha taught that non-attachment was the primary cause for not experiencing suffering anymore. Attachment was the root of suffering. Non-attachment released us from that suffering." The line is familiar in Buddhist circles, but Lhundrub made it concrete by insisting you do not need to box the feeling up, label it, or put it in a container. You only need to let it go. The move is less about belief than about release, which is why he treated the surrender language and the non-attachment language as interchangeable.

How does the three-breath release actually work?

The practice that anchors the session is a sequence of three breaths, each aimed at a different layer of holding. Lhundrub was explicit that the order in which he does it is not a rigid script. He starts in the head, although the usual pattern in the traditional framing moves through body, speech, and mind. The mechanics are simple enough to try at home.

On the first breath, you notice where the body is tight. Lhundrub named the jaw, the spine, the hips, and simply told people to feel where the tightness lives and let it go. "I just relax and allow it to become released." On the second breath, the target shifts to the mental and social material: the us-versus-them thinking, the people you point fingers at and judge, the ways you believe you are different from others. These are the things, he said, that block clarity and unity. You let them go or offer them up, and "you just want to release the tension and allow it to go wherever the heck it wants." On the third breath, the aim is the grip of the self itself. Whatever stops you from having an open mind, whatever you think you already know, you set aside, so that a new experience becomes possible.

The third breath is where Lhundrub's language is most pointed. He describes the ego as a character who should stop acting like "a tyrannical dictator" and start acting like someone in service to all beings. The reasoning is that liberation cannot be pursued for private reasons. "I can't get free because I want to get free. That's selfishness. It's self-grasping." The only route he sees is to get free so that you can benefit beings as fully as possible. That reversal is the bridge between the personal and the communal that runs through the entire session.

The open mind, he said, is itself the Buddha. "You're a Buddha. Yes, you are." The Buddha is there underneath, and what hides it is everything we think we know. Anyone who has tried to meditate on a bad day will recognize the mechanism: you cannot force a tense body to relax, but you can notice the tension and stop feeding it.

Why does the practice reach beyond the individual?

The reason this session carries the mission named in its description, abolishing social forces that cause harm, is that Lhundrub refuses to separate personal suffering from the conditions that produce it. Around the thirteen-minute mark he turned to what he called social conditioning, the patterns handed down through families, institutions, and cultures that shape which people get housed, treated, and believed. The Medicine Buddha practice, in his framing, is a way of noticing those patterns in the body first, then in relationship, then in the systems that organize them. Healing that stops at the self, he implied, is incomplete.

This is also why the mantra recitation matters so much to him. He described it as a physical as well as verbal act, something you feel in the chest and throat, and he asked the group to recite it three times at key points. The repetition is not decorative. It gives the three breaths something to ride on.

What does the guided practice look like?

About thirty-two minutes into the recording, Lhundrub moved from teaching into a short guided sequence, announcing that he would keep the instructions brief and that the practice did not need to feel blissful to be effective. Participants were asked to bring attention to the breath, to the knees and the body, and to let the mantra carry the session forward. Later, after a return to the mantra, the group closed with a verse that the recording preserves: "May I be the boat, a bridge, a passage for those desiring the farther shore. May the pain" and the remainder of the dedication, which asks that suffering be completely cleared away. The shape of that dedication is the shape of the whole teaching, moving from personal release outward toward everyone who is still in the water.

Where to go from here

If this session has you curious, start small. Choose one of the three breaths and use it at a single moment in your day, the way Lhundrub used the triangle thousands of times. Notice where you hold tension, which judgments you are carrying, and what you think you already know. Then ask what it would look like to release that for someone else's benefit, not only your own. For more on the weekly Medicine Buddha gathering, registration and related events are posted on Lama Rod Owens' site, and the recorded practice is available on his YouTube channel. Lhundrub's own words are the best guide to the rest: the aim is not to become someone who never struggles, but to stay inside the triangle long enough to find the Buddha that was never gone.