Preparations for a medicine factory (November 5)
After spending a lot of time building my artistic skill, I am looking forward to focusing back on building my skills in medicine while helping to build the medicine factory. As a doctor I will be able to contribute to what kinds of medicine we will be able to make and how to make them. The area in which we live is surrounded by many plants that we will be able to collect and store in our medicine factory. Even just walking through the village I have spotted some very valuable herbs and have started to collect them. Additionally, we have some farmers in the village that may help by contributing animal substances and plants that we can use to make medicine. There has been some debate on whether or not we should use animal substances in our medicine, but the flesh, bones and blood of many animals can be useful in many ways. I have read that goat’s blood can even cure smallpox and can extract poisons. I have heard that there is a group of people going on a cave expedition; perhaps we can even ask them to bring us back some minerals such as coal, iron, sulfites and some semi-precious stones that they may find, maybe if they find these we can even make some precious pills for our village. We will be able to make mainly pills in our factory but we may even have the chance to make decoctions, powders, and medicinal butters or other medicines such as these. First to make the pills, we must collect the ingredients, cleanse them, dry them and then sort them. Then comes mixing together the different herbs, flowers, minerals or animal substance into a powder, depending on the pill you wish to make. Then you can form them into pills, and dry them. You can use things like butter to give them a coating and you can dye them afterwards. I am excited about the possibility of having more machines that will help us through this long process of pill making. Traditionally, pills are dried in a bag that is swung back and forth in the sun. This can be a very tiring process. We will have a lot more space now that can be dedicated to these tasks, and we can find the tools that we need such as mortars and pestles that can crush large amounts of a substance all at once. We will have to find a ritualist that will be able to bless some of the pills so that they may be effective. I know from my experiences as a doctor that they must chant the mantra of the Medicine Buddha in order to do so. In our medicine factory, we will be able to organize and categorize different types of medicine that we can make. We will have so much space to lay out all of the herbs we can collect and all of the doctors in the village will have a place where they can work to help the community. Of course this is all just speculation about what is to come in the future. It’s time to start organizing who will be building the factory and decide on what pills we are going to make!
Growing up, my family told me stories of the very famous medicine factory in Lhasa, it was able to make 300 different kinds of medicines every year and had many kinds of machinery and was able to supply many of the hospitals in the region. It was able to help people with things like toothaches, upset stomachs and many disease and health issues. In the nunnery we have a book on diagnosis and treatment of illnesses like these, and I have learnt that beyond visual diagnosis, there is urinalysis and pulse analysis that are very useful in helping with diagnosis. I still have yet to learn fully how this works since I am a very young woman and have not had as many experiences as some older doctors. I am hopeful that in the future with this new medicine factory I will be able to learn more about diagnosis and treatment with the pills, decoctions, powders, and medicinal butters we may be making. I will do some research while the factory is being built on how to make particular pills and their use.
