Famous for his contributions to art and grammar, Situ Panchen is also claimed by Tibetan medical historians as one of the great figures of medicine. He was a major supporter of institutional medicine, sponsoring the reprinting of a number of important medical works, and establishing a medical college at Dpal spungs monastery. Not only did …
This essay addresses the transmission of medical knowledge in Tibet spanning a period of roughly six hundred years. I begin with an overview of several of the major traditions of Tibetan medicine during this period, emphasizing both how intertwined they are with each other and how connected they are to contemporaneous Buddhist traditions. I then …
This program’s general research goal – to map the King Gesar epic’s “therapeutic geographies” as a way of studying the intersections between religion and medicine in Inner Asia – was organized around three intertwined research objectives. We planned (1) to examine episodes in this vast epic tradition that depict healing acts or geographic sites that …