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Janet Gyatso is Hershey Professor of Buddhist Studies and Associate Dean for Faculty and Academic Affairs at Harvard Divinity School, and author of Being Human in a Buddhist World: An Intellectual History of Medicine in Early Modern Tibet, published by Columbia University Press and winner of the 2017 AAS E. Gene Smith Award for Best Book in Inner Asia.
<p>Critically exploring scientific thought and its relation to religion in traditional Tibetan medicine, Being Human expands our sense of Tibetan cultural history, unpacking the intersection of early modern sensibilities and religious ideals during the time of the Fifth Dalai Lama. Studying the adaptation of Buddhist concepts and values to medical concerns, the book also advances an appreciation of BuddhismÕs role in the development of Asian and global civilization. Through its unique focus and sophisticated reading of source materials, Being Human captures the religious character of medicine in Tibet during a period when it facilitated a singular involvement in issues associated with modernity and empirical science, all without discernible influence from the European Enlightenment. The book opens with the bold achievements of medical illustration, commentary, and institution building, then looks back to the work of earlier thinkers, tracing a subtle dialectic between scriptural and empirical authority on questions of history and the nature of human anatomy. It follows key differences between medicine and Buddhism in attitudes toward gender and sex, and the shaping of medical ethics to serve both the physician and the patientÕs well-being. Being Human ultimately finds that Tibetan medical scholars absorbed ethical and epistemological categories from Buddhism yet shied away from ideal system and absolutes, embracing instead the imperfectability of the human condition.</p>
; Reviews the book `Curators of the Buddha: The Study of Buddhism Under Colonialism,' edited by Donald S. Lopez, Junior.
This essay studies the representation of women and gender in the unprecedented, elaborately detailed medical paintings created by Desi Sangye Gyatso at the end of the seventeenth century in Lhasa, Tibet. It compares die textual version of die information rendered in the paintings with their visual translation. The study discovers a rather complex and mixed picture. It finds that the more systematic portrayals of human anatomy betray a deep androcentrism, withimages of female bodies either marginalised or entirely absent. However, other less standard parts of the set diat depict a wide swathe of daily life on the Tibetan plateau show much more diversity in gender conception. A far greater number of females are depicted there. Women are still shown almost exclusively in gender-specific roles and are virtually never deployed to stand for a gender-neutral medical condition, which is always represented either by a default male figure or a gender-ambiguous one. And yet some of these less standard depictions show either gender egalitarianism, or indeed show little gender differentiation at all, even with respect to attire and bodily features such as breasts and hair. Some images even suggest that gender differentiation was not an important issue, at least some of the time. Yet still other portions of die less standard vignettes do display strict gender distinction and also indicate die greater importance of male medical issues and the inferior status of die female body. In sum, the medical paintings suggest that a wide range of gender conceptions operated not only in Tibetan medicine but also across society more broadly, and these were neither consistent nor fixed.
Filling a gap in the literature, this volume explores the struggles and accomplishments of women from both past and present-day Tibet. Here are queens from the imperial period, yoginis and religious teachers of medieval times, Buddhist nuns, oracles, political workers, medical doctors, and performing artists. Most of the essays focus on the lives of individual women, whether from textual sources or from anthropological data, and show that Tibetan women have apparently enjoyed more freedom than women in many other Asian countries. The book is innovative in resisting both romanticization and hypercriticism of women's status in Tibetan society, attending rather to historical description, and to the question of what is distinctive about women's situations in Tibet, and what is common to both men and women in Tibetan society.