This is a recorded recitation of the Medicine Buddha practice, led by Khenpo Ugyen Tenzin and the khenpos and lamas of Karma Triyana Dharmachakra, together with the Supplication to the Seven Medicine Buddhas. Running almost an hour, it works as three things at once: a healing rite, a communal dedication of merit, and a sung liturgy that the room is meant to voice together. The video's own description invites listeners to listen or to chant along. What makes it worth a close read is the order of its prayers. The recitation opens with a wish for all beings and then narrows, person by person, to the sick, the dying, the grieving, the animals in the community, and finally the earth itself, scarred by fire and flood.
The recording does not open with an introduction. It opens in the middle of a sentence, with a wish already underway: "be free from suffering and the causes of suffering." That is the practice's tone from its first seconds. Nobody is explaining the Medicine Buddha to a newcomer. The leaders are simply holding a wish in the room, and the room is invited to hold it too.
The wish keeps going. The dedication continues with a line that carries much of the emotional architecture of the whole hour: "May they never be separated from the greatest joy which is beyond suffering. May they come to rest in the great equanimity which is beyond all attachment and aversion." Equanimity, the calm that does not swing toward wanting or pushing away, is the stated aim for everyone the practice names. The healing prayers that follow are not asking for a world where nothing hurts. They are asking that suffering not take over the mind of the person living through it.
From there the dedication widens in a deliberate order. It moves first to His Holiness the Karmapa and his continued dharma activity, then to the community itself: the KTD khenpos, lamas, staff, volunteers, members, and students, and the people at the sister center. Only after the lineage and the sangha are named does the practice turn to the individuals who need the medicine.
This is the part of the recitation that will strike a first-time listener most. The leader moves through a long list of named people, each attached to a particular prayer. Some are asked to regain the resilience needed to recover from a neurovestibular illness. A two-month-old baby is named, along with the baby's parents, who are described as being in anguish over the child's illness. Others are asked for recovery from a heart attack, a successful surgery, and a heart transplant that is still ahead. A man is prayed for through pneumonia, and a family is prayed for healing after an unnamed hardship.
Naming a person in a healing practice is not a diagnosis, and the recitation does not treat it as one. It is an act of attention. The practice asks the room to hold a specific body, a specific fear, a specific family in mind, rather than a general idea of "the sick." The phrase that governs the whole sequence is "swift and complete recovery," repeated for one person after another. The repetition is part of the teaching. Each name gets the same full wish that the Medicine Buddha's healing reach them.
The practice also names animals. Near the middle of the dedication, the list reaches "the Woodstock bear and all the animals around KTD," prayed for good health, safety, and long life. Nonhuman beings sit in the same list as the human patients, with no ranking between them. Anyone who has wondered whether a Buddhist healing rite is only about people will find the answer in the list itself.
Roughly two-thirds of the way through the opening section, the recitation shifts from recovery to death. Several people are prayed for by name for "peaceful passage through the Bardo and a fortunate rebirth." The bardo is the intermediate state the Tibetan tradition describes between death and the next birth, and the practice treats it as a passage that can be helped with prayer and good intention. Some names are followed by two specific destinations: Dewachen, rendered in the transcript as "Dewa Chen," and Sukhavati, the pure land the transcript spells "Sukavati." Both are prayed for as the rebirth the dying person is asked to find.
The prayers for the dying are not written as farewells. They are written as continuations, with the same attention and the same vocabulary of safety and fortune that the prayers for the living use. A listener who has sat with a dying parent or friend will hear in them the old logic of the practice: that care does not stop when the body stops, and that the people left behind are still the ones doing the praying.
The dedication then moves beyond individual illness into the social wounds of the world. It asks for freedom from addiction, "especially young people affected by any form of addiction." It asks for safety and peace for those harmed by violence, and it names violence in its full range: "including domestic violence, random violence on the street, and everything up through the violence of war." The recitation asks for good rebirth for those who have died in that violence and for safety, peace, good health, and long life for those who survive.
What is notable here is the refusal to rank suffering. A domestic violence survivor, a young person in addiction, a street shooting victim, and a soldier caught in war are placed in one continuous breath of prayer. The practice does not claim to fix any of these. It insists that they belong to the same field of concern as a hospital bed, and that the room's attention should cover all of them.
The last major section of the dedication is the one that reframes the rest. The leader turns to "mother earth and all its inhabitants in the human and animal realms," naming the fires, floods, and droughts, and "all manner of extreme weather events caused by climate change." The request is simple and direct: safety, good health, and long life for the living beings caught in those disasters.
This is where the Medicine Buddha practice shows its full scope. The medicine it describes is not only a remedy for one body. The prayer treats the earth as one of the patients. In a single hour, the recitation moves from a two-month-old infant to a dog to a drought-stricken landscape, and it asks for the same thing in each case.
After the spoken dedication, the recording shifts into the Supplication to the Seven Medicine Buddhas and the long sung liturgy that makes up most of the hour. Here the transcript breaks down. Around the four-minute mark the captions begin to render the chant as scattered syllables and fragments. Bell strikes and music cues appear at intervals, including a bell near 1355 seconds and a musical passage near 1660 seconds. Page cues such as "page number eight" and "page number 24" show up as the leaders move through the printed text, around 1991 and 2468 seconds.
That failure is informative. Automatic captions are built for speech, and a sung liturgy spoken by a room of voices does not come through as speech. Reading a transcript of this section tells you almost nothing. The practice is meant to be heard, joined, and carried by breath and melody, and the text here is a shadow of the thing itself. If you want the experience, the recording is the only faithful version.
"May they come to rest in the great equanimity which is beyond all attachment and aversion." (dedication recited near the 0:13 mark of the recording)
Start with the first thirty seconds of the recording, and let the opening wish set the tone. Then listen through the named prayers slowly, noticing how the order moves from the lineage to the community to individual bodies, from the living to the dying, and from people to animals to the earth. If you have someone in your own life who is ill, grieving, or in danger, the practice's method is easy to borrow: name them, pray for them specifically, and ask for the same full recovery the leaders ask for every name in the list.
If you chant along, do it for the length of a single section first. The liturgy rewards repetition, and the bells mark the places where the room is meant to breathe together. The recording runs nearly an hour; you do not need to sit through all of it at once. Return to the parts that move you, and let the practice meet you where you are on that day, which, if you are reading on the 8th lunar day, is precisely the day the tradition asks for it.
