This Introduction to Buddhism course was designed around a year-long role playing game called Disposition. Students began the year assigned a character (e.g., scholar, ritualist, farmer, trader, doctor), and as a class we imagined ourselves to be living together in a Buddhist village in the Himalayas. Periodically events would occur in the village (hailstorm, epidemic …
Inspired by Digital Humanities models of working collaboratively on research projects uniting students and community members, Matt Price (History) and Frances Garrett (Study of Religion) taught two undergraduate courses in the fall of 2011 that engaged students in the practice of oral history using a range of new media technologies. The two courses were designed …
Mapping Buddhist Sites was run in a year-long Introduction to Buddhism course. Course development was sponsored by the U of T Arts & Science Student Experience Fund. Throughout this course, undergraduate Field Teams developed partnerships with diverse Toronto communities as they conducted research on Buddhist institutions and practices in the area. Students created a web portal …
This book examines representations of the human body in pre-modern Tibetan literature. The work links aspects of Tibetan religion, medicine, art and literature through a study of embryology—descriptions of the development of the human body from conception to birth. Accounts of embryology are found in all forms of Tibetan religious literature, as well as in …
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This paper addresses the development of scholastic medical traditions in Tibet through examination of lists of physicians. I consider debates that such lists and their accompanying narratives engender for Tibetan historians and reflect on contributions they make to the identity of the medical tradition. By examining the structure and content of classificatory methods in medical …
This article comments on a centuries-old controversy in Tibetan literature: how the complex descriptions of the human circulatory system found in Buddhist tantric contemplative texts can be reconciled with descriptions of the circulatory system in Tibetan medical texts. In an essay translated within this article, the eminent twentieth-century Tibetan scholar of religion and medicine, Tsultrim …
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This essay examines historical and contemporary connections between Buddhist and medical traditions through a study of the Accomplishing Medicine (sman sgrub) practice and the Yuthok Heart Essence (G.yu thog snying thig) anthology. Accomplishing Medicine is an esoteric Buddhist yogic and contemplative exercise focused on several levels of “alchemical” transformation. The article traces the acquisition of …
This paper presents a set of thirteenth-century Tibetan texts that prescribe the consumption of human by-products, such as flesh, excrement or urine, and consider several discursive contexts in which these prescriptions may be understood. I argue that Tibetan tantric prescriptions to consume human by-products are in an important way “medical” in their language, and that …
This essay considers the relationship between eating and maintaining health or curing illness, as seen in Tibetan pre-modern texts. In particular, it focuses on selected “ritually” enhanced food practices that are aimed at treating illness and improving one’s psycho-physical health and power. It begins with a look at practices that model hunger as an illness …
This film documents traditional food collection, production and consumption practices in the filmmaker’s remote Tibetan village. Filmed entirely in Tibetan regions of China. Screenings: June 2011: Strolling of the Heifers Farm & Food Film Festival, Vermont, USA March 2011: University of Toronto Film Festival, Canada February 2011: New Voices, New Visions: Documentary Filmmaking in Tibet …