Buddhism and Medicine in Tibet: Origins, Ethics, andTradition
2017
This dissertation claims that the turn of the
fourteenth century marks a previously unrecognized period of
intellectual unification and standardization in the Tibetan medical
tradition. Prior to this time, approaches to healing in Tibet were
fragmented, variegated, and incommensurable—an intellectual
environment in which lineages of tantric diviners and scholarly
literati came to both influence and compete with the schools of
clinical physicians. Careful engagement with recently published
manuscripts reveals that centuries of translation, assimilation,
and intellectual development culminated in the unification of these
lineages in the seminal work of the Tibetan tradition, the Four
Tantras, by the end of the thirteenth century. The Drangti family
of physicians—having adopted the Four Tantras and its corpus of
supplementary literature from the Yutok school—established a
curriculum for their dissemination at Sakya monastery, redacting
the Four Tantras as a scripture distinct from the Eighteen Partial
Branches addenda. Primarily focusing on the literary contributions
made by the Drangti family at the Sakya Medical House, the present
dissertation demonstrates the process in which the Tibetan medical
tradition transitioned from controversy, competition, and change,
to a narratively unified set of theories and practices that came to
be taught at Buddhist institutions throughout the Tibetan plateau.
From the fourteenth century onward, sharing an established Buddhist
origin, bodhisattva code of ethics, and monastic institutional
center, the theories and practical instructions of the Tibetan
medical tradition continued to be transmitted and diffused
throughout the Buddhist networks of Asia, from the center of the
Tibetan plateau to the periphery of the Mongolian steppe and
beyond.
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