Buddhist Medicine in Tibet: Reconciling Religion and Nation in the Tibetan Medical Tradition

Join the Indiana University Central Eurasian Studies center for a lecture on the change in traditional Tibetan medical practices.

Dr. William McGrath from Coe College gave the following summary for his lecture:

Beacuase early histories of the Tibetan medical tradition include conflicting narrative details, scholars outlining the development of this enduring tradition must navigate many potential accounts of origins and developments. Ranging from narratives of divine inspiration to transmissions from South, East and Central Asian physcians, my examination of Tibetan historical manuscripts reveals previously undetected controversies about the origins of medicine in Tibet. I argue that it was the physicians of the Sakya Medical House, under the aegis of Mongol (Yuan) Hegemony in Tibet (ca. 1250-`350), who finally combined and reconciled the conflicts between Buddhist inspiration, cosmopolitatn transmission, and Tibetan redaction into the unified historical narrative still taught in Tibetan medical schools. Given the growing global popularity of Tibetan medicine, this new research into its formative history may help reshape modern understandings of its place among other medical traditions, as well as the geographic purview of Buddhist medicine as a whole.