There were numerous traditions of healing in Tibet. Many centered on ritual puri-fication or the ingestion of sacralized substances. Many invoked Buddhist deities, and some were connected to Indian Buddhist texts on healing. But the mainstream practice of the “science of healing”(sowa rigpa)in Tibet depended instead on physical means of healing. These were adapted from Indian Ayurveda, East Asian diagnostics, Central Asian medicine, and knowledge from Greco-Arabic medicine. They involved medicinal herbs, balance of the bodily humors, moxibustion, bloodletting, massage, splints, purgatives, and surgery. These are described in the classic text of Tibetan medicine,the Four Treatises (Gyushi;see