Being Human in a Buddhist World: An Intellectual History of Medicine in Early Modern Tibet
Language: English
Pages: 544
ISBN: 0231164971
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Critically exploring medical thought in a cultural milieu with no discernible influence from the European Enlightenment, Being Human reveals an otherwise unnoticed intersection of early modern sensibilities and religious values in traditional Tibetan medicine. It further studies the adaptation of Buddhist concepts and values to medical concerns and suggests important dimensions of Buddhism's role in the development of Asian and global civilization.
Through its unique focus and sophisticated reading of source materials, Being Human adds a crucial chapter in the larger historiography of science and religion. The book opens with the bold achievements in Tibetan medical illustration, commentary, and institution building during the period of the Fifth Dalai Lama and his regent, Desi Sangye Gyatso, then looks back to the work of earlier thinkers, tracing a strategically astute 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 moral character of the physician, who had to serve both the patient's and the practitioner's well-being. Being Human ultimately finds that Tibetan medical scholars absorbed ethical and epistemological categories from Buddhism yet shied away from ideal systems and absolutes, instead embracing the imperfectability of the human condition.
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capable of rotsa. The companion is grown up, beautiful and charming, and wearing ornaments. She has a sweet voice and soft words. She is appealing and her behavior is becoming. In preparation, cleanse with an oil massage and a purgative. Administer the niruha and ’jam rtsi enemas.72 The image of the place of ardor suggests a balmy climate that can only be a fantasy for most Tibetans, while the next verse provides a well-nigh universal image of a beautiful woman, not a product of salacious
combinations of humors and heterogeneous pulse types, including the possibility that one’s sex will be at odds with one’s pulse type. 197. (R)kyang pa’i mi rigs dang rtsa rigs … ming tsam zad do. Bkra shis dpal bzang n.d., 309–10. 198. On the preference for sons, see Schaeffer 2004, 133; and Havnevik 1999, e.g., vol. II, 149–153. 199. The Desi’s medical paintings also display an egalitarian view of gender in everyday life despite their androcentrism and misogyny in the anatomical plates.
containing the all-important specifics on therapeutics and remedies.62 He emphasizes how he resorted to his own research to teach himself. I was able, with one or two exceptions, to figure out the meaning of most of [the Four Treatises]. On the few issues left over, I figured out the majority from the Aṣṭāṅga and its commentary, the translation from the Sanskrit that is located in the Tengyur, and also Tibetan-composed commentaries. I did deep research and therefore, even though I never received
religious morals, discipline, and learning in Tibet. But the Desi uses them to describe the state of medical learning during his lifetime as well. When he goes through pronouncements from the ancient ordinances of the kings or the visions of the Northern Treasures about the noxious demons who will plague Tibet, he adduces the result, rather than the usual point about the decline of the Dharma, that “other than having general knowledge, people’s minds won’t get into Ayurveda.”114 Characterizing
to Tibet from India by Vairocana during the imperial period, centuries before Yutok lived. As already suggested, the entire reason the Treasure theory was brought into the Four Treatises’ transmission history in the first place was to address the lack of evidence of the work’s existence in Tibet during the period from the time of Vairocana down to Yutok. The answer that the Treasure narrative proffers is that no one knew about it because it was hidden in the pillar at Samyé and discovered by