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Tibetan medical diagnostics provide a powerful lens for understanding embodied expertise among Tibetan physicians. This investigation probes the transmission and practice of Tibetan medical diagnosis as a gateway to understanding the epistemic grounds for Tibetan conceptions of illness and healing. Participatory research as a student at two major sites for Tibetan medical training, Men-Tsee-Khang in north India and at Sorig Loling in Amdo, focused on the role of embodied knowledge in diagnosis along two analytic dimensions, namely physician as embodied diagnostic instrument, and patient as embodying disease processes. Training of physicians as diagnostic instrument is elucidated using biocultural methods, Mauss’s notion of habitus, and understandings of enacted cognition, memory, metaphor, and visualization from cognitive neuroscience. Disease processes embodied in the patient are tracked through a bioecocultural model of development and logics of biomarkers. Grounded theory from seventh century Buddhist logician Dharmakīrti’s approach to valid cognition—pramāna theory–acts as interlocutor with Western scholarship on these dimensions.This work challenges common assumptions about “rote memorization” and pedagogical values in Western education. It suggests that memorization, recitation, metaphor, and learning through praxis generate a conceptual-perceptual dialectic that drives processes cultivating embodied knowledge transmission. For the Tibetan physician, “methods of becoming” are “methods of diagnosis” by developing the senses, training the mind, and sculpting the physician’s skilled body as vessel and instrument for diagnosis and healing. Rigorous practice and associated self cultivation form the grounds for acquisition of expertise. This project documents a distinctive approach to medical education that simultaneously fosters rigorous medical knowledge and humanistic skills with distinctive diagnostic and therapeutic value.