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This essay examines historical and contemporary connections between Buddhist and medical traditions through a study of the Accomplishing Medicine (sman sgrub) practice and the Yuthok Heart Essence (G.yu thog snying thig) anthology. Accomplishing Medicine is an esoteric Buddhist yogic and contemplative exercise focused on several levels of “alchemical” transformation. The article will trace the acquisition of this practice from India by Tibetan medical figures and its assimilation into medical practice. It will propose that this alchemical practice forms the central nexus of connection between Tibetan medicine and the Buddhist Nyingma tradition, and that this little-studied link is not a marginal feature of Tibetan medicine but rather one that has had a significant shaping factor on each tradition throughout history.
[This paper addresses the development of scholastic medical traditions in Tibet through an examination of lists of physicians. I consider the debates that such lists and their accompanying narratives engender for Tibetan historians and reflect on the contributions they make to the identity of the medical tradition. By examining the structure and content of classificatory methods in medical histories, I argue that temporally organized lists document the place of medicine across time, geographically organized lists document the reach of medical knowledge across space, and thematically organized lists document the intertwining of medical knowledge and skill with other aspects of intellectual and civil life. In making these lists, medical historians paint a portrait of the Tibetan medical tradition that evokes connections to Buddhism and the strength and cosmopolitanism of the imperial period. Medical histories thus emphasize a picture of Tibet in the broader context of Asia--a Tibet whose empire lives on culturally or intellectually, if not militarily.]
Situ Penchen (1700-1774) was an active student, teacher, and practitioner of Tibetan medicine. This paper discusses a few features of the Situ tradition of medicine, based on a study of several works attributed to Situ and to his students. It begins with an overview of Situ’s own medical practice and the state of institutional and textual medicine in his day, and then addresses distinctive features of the Situ medical tradition by examining its dominant and authoritative texts. The paper then focuses on three topics – the use of mercury, the treatment of mad dogs, and remedies for smallpox – proposing characteristics of a distinctive Situ medical tradition.Read more: http://www.thlib.org/collections/texts/jiats/#!jiats=/07/garrett/#ixzz5pK5Eq45s
This article proposes that many Tibetan rituals are shaped by a language of creating, giving, and eating food. Drawing on a range of premodern texts and observation of a week-long Accomplishing Medicine (sman sgrub) ritual based on those texts, we explore ritualized food interactions from a narrative perspective. Through the creation, offering, and consumption of food, ritual participants, including Buddhas, deities, and other unseen beings, create and maintain variant identities and relationships with each other. Using a ritual tradition that crosses religious and medical domains in Tibet, we examine how food and eating honors, constructs, and maintains an appropriate and spatiotemporally situated community order with a gastronomic contract familiar to all participants.
This book explores the cultural history of embryology in Tibet, in culture, religion, art and literature, and what this reveals about its medicine and religion. Filling a significant gap in the literature this is the first in-depth exploration of Tibetan…
Abstract This essay will consider the relationship between eating and maintaining health or curing illness, as seen in Tibetan pre-modern texts. In particular, it will focus on selected 'ritually' enhanced food practices that are aimed at treating illness and improving one's psycho-physical health and power. It begins with a look at practices that model hunger as an illness for both humans and non-humans, observing a resulting blurring of boundaries between food and medicine. The essay proposes continuity along a range of 'culinary' practices, focusing in particular on 'ritual cake' (gtor ma) offerings and 'nectar' (bdud rtsi) recipes involving creation of pills and healing foods. The essay posits a 'culinary aesthetics' of healing and personal enhancement and introduces speculation about Tibetan understandings of food as medicine that may shape our understanding of the relationship between medical and religious thinking and practice in Tibet.
Tibetan medicine is recognized today as one of the world’s mostcomplex and sophisticated systems of medicine. Over the last 1300
years, Tibetan medical traditions have produced a vast corpus of
literature analogous in complexity to the medical scholasticism of India,
China, or Greece. Tibetan medical systems are practised widely today in
the countries of Nepal, Bhutan, and Mongolia; in Tibetan populated
areas of the People’s Republic of China; in parts of Russia (Kalmykia,
Buryatia); and throughout India (Ladakh, Sikkim, and in Tibetan refugee
settlements). The popularity and use of Tibetan medicine is growing in
Europe, North America, and the Pacific Rim as well.