There's that accusation that Buddhas shouldn’t suffer pain: I know some people who believe that anyone who’s spiritually advanced should not have disease, should not have pain. And that’s totally deluded.

"You probably know the story of how Devadatta tried to kill the Buddha. He rolled a rock down a mountain, hoping to crush the Buddha. Fortunately, the rock hit another rock that diverted it. But still, a sliver broke off from the big rock and pierced the Buddha’s foot, causing him a lot of pain.

The texts tell us how, after the sliver was removed, the Buddha went to lie down and rest. Mara came to taunt him, accusing him of moping and being depressed and not facing pain like a real Buddha who apparently should get up and walk around even though he was in a lot of pain.

The Buddha replied, “I’m not moping. I’m lying down out of sympathy for all beings.”

We can take two lessons from that. The first is that when the body is sick, you look after it. You don’t try to prove that you’re able to deal with pain to the extent that you abuse the body.

Lying down out of sympathy, the Buddha was preserving his strength so that he could help other beings.

At the same time, that accusation that Buddhas shouldn’t suffer pain: I know some people who believe that anyone who’s spiritually advanced should not have disease, should not have pain. And that’s totally deluded.

Some diseases come from present karma, but a lot of them come from past karma. And everybody, no matter how awakened, has past karma. So it’s simply a fact of life that even fully awakened beings, will face disease. They’ll face pain.

The Buddha himself points this out in the difference between the ordinary person experiencing pain and the awakened person experiencing pain. They’re the same in that they both are subject to pain. The difference is that the ordinary person shoots him or herself with extra arrows. The physical pain is one arrow, which is actually manageable. It’s all those extra arrows: when we get upset, we get distraught, worried about the body. Those are the arrows that cause extra suffering to the mind and also add pain to the body.

So our responsibility when we’re sick or injured is to look after the body as much as necessary, but to look primarily after the mind, realizing that our experience right now is a combination of past karma and present karma. We can’t do much about the past karma but we do have a lot of control over our present karma — if we train the mind.

In fact, the more trained the mind is, the more control you have over how you’re going to actually be experiencing that past karma. And part of understanding the situation is to realize that your past karma doesn’t present you with just one option at a time. You’ve got lots of potentials. There are potentials for pain in the body, and there are also potentials for pleasure."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "A Mind Bigger than Pain"

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