Introduction: Medicine and Healing in Tibetan Societies

Abstract

This introduction to the special issue of EASTS begins with a survey of recent social scientific work on medicine and healing in Tibetan and Himalayan societies. The author considers the specificity of the Tibetan encounter with biomedicine in comparison with that experienced by other traditions of Asian medicine and introduces both the traditional Tibetan medical system (Sowa Rigpa) and the wider context of approaches to healing of which it forms part. He discusses the significance of Sowa Rigpa's religious dimension and its techniques of pulse and urine examination, suggesting that these open up important questions for medicine in general regarding the relationship between “subjective” and “objective” aspects of the healing process. The political economy of Sowa Rigpa is considered, including questions of access, of the production of medicines, and the impact of new regulatory regimes. The article ends with an introduction to the remaining articles in the special issue.

Keywords:

• Tibetan medicine
• Sowa Rigpa
• Himalayas
• yoga

Notes

1 The conference, titled Issues in the Anthropology of Tibetan Medicine, took place at St. Michaels College, Llandaff, Cardiff, on 21–22 January 2011, as part of the project titled Tradition and Modernity in a Bonpo Medical School and Hospital in Western Tibet, funded by the Leverhulme Trust.

2 The term Gyüshi (Wylie rgyud bzhi) refers to the Four Tantras (or Four Treatises), the most important textual source for this tradition (see, e.g., Clark 1995). Tibetan terms are given here in phonetic transcription; for Wylie transliteration, see Table 1.

3 The term Sowa Rigpa (see below, section 2) originates as a Tibetan translation for medicine and healing as one of the fields of study in the ancient monastic universities of Buddhist India.

4 See Samuel 2011 for the divergences between Western and Tibetan participants that were revealed on that occasion.

5 No doubt because many people had chosen to go to the 2009 International Conference on Traditional Asian Medicine conference instead, the 2010 Vancouver IATS conference had fewer papers on Tibetan medicine, but it had a panel on ritual and healing organized by Colin Millard and myself and a number of papers in other sessions.

6 Edited volumes include Schrempf 2007; Pordié 2008, forthcoming; Schrempf et al. 2010; and Adams, Schrempf, and Craig 2011. Special journal issues include Craig and Glover 2009 and Fjeld and Hofer 2010–11. For significant monographs, see Craig 2012, Gerke 2012, and Hofer 2012.

7 Two further papers from the conference have been published elsewhere: Garrett 2010–11 and Saxer 2012.

8 The Gyüshi was probably compiled in the twelfth century by Yuthog Yonten Gonpo (1126–1202; see Yang Ga 2010) and is generally studied in whole or part by practitioners as part of their medical training. The Bumshi is the equivalent text in the Bon medical tradition, associated with the Tibetan non-Buddhist religion of Bon (see Millard this issue). The two texts are closely related, and one is clearly based on the other. The Bon tradition claims that the Gyüshi was based on the Bumshi, and certain internal features of the text suggest that this may in fact be the case (Millard and Samuel forthcoming; Blezer 2012).

9 I am not suggesting that the Gyüshi and the Bonpo equivalent, the Bumshi, are entirely derivative from the Indian Ayurvedic tradition. Leaving aside their mythological origins as Tantric revelation in one case and the teachings of Tönpa Shenrab in the other, this is clearly not the case. While Ronald Emmerick (1977) and others have demonstrated conclusively that substantial parts of the Gyüshi are directly based on Vāgbhata's writings, other parts would seem to be almost certainly derived from China or the Greco-Arab tradition or to represent local Tibetan developments (see Yang Ga 2010).

10 These efforts may even succeed some day in re-creating Sowa Rigpa in the Western context as a holistic tradition, but that is not my topic here.

11 This connection is stated in chapter 8 of the Shégyü (Explanatory Tantra), the second part of the Gyüshi, and is often emphasized in popular Western presentations of “Tibetan medicine.” My impression is that it is not generally significant in relation to medical practice but has become increasingly important in Western contexts, where it reinforces the sense of Sowa Rigpa as a specifically Buddhist practice.

12 See, for example, the texts by these and other authors included in Chenagtsang 2004. Dr. Nida Chenagtsang's International Academy for Traditional Tibetan Medicine is now teaching mantra healing practices widely in Europe, North America, and Australia (see http://www.iattm.net).

13 See Millard this issue on possible conflicts with UK and similar legislation for complementary and alternative medicine. Many of the same problems arise in relation to pulse examination techniques in Chinese and Indian medicine.

14 Similar questions might be asked in relation to the political economy of long life practice and of spirit mediums, though these topics are not pursued here.

15 The project was titled Tradition and Modernity in a Bonpo Medical School and Hospital in West Tibet and directed by Geoffrey Samuel in 2008–11.