Academic Resources for Buddhist Medicine

Texts from across the Buddhist world list illness alongside birth, aging, and death as one of the four great torments that inevitably accompany life in a human body. Since Buddhist doctrine and practice at its very core is focused on the relief of all suffering (Ch. ku 苦; Skt. duḥkha), Buddhist texts frequently address the question of how to cope with this particular tribulation. Buddhist philosophy confronts the suffering of illness by stressing the illusory nature of the physical body, the non-existence of the separate self, and the promise of universal salvation. At the same time, however, Buddhists have not been limited to a fatalistic or passive approach to dealing with corporeal disease. The sick and those who care for them have for over two millennia found practical, this-worldly advice for preventing and curing maladies within the context of this religion. In Chinese- and Japanese-speaking cultures, devotees and scholars alike conventionally refer to such teachings as “Buddhist medicine” (Ch. foyi 佛醫 or fojiao yixue 佛教醫學, Jp. bukkyō igaku 仏教医学).

“Buddhist medicine” is at once a transcultural body of knowledge and a locally specific socio-cultural construct. Like Buddhism itself, the doctrinal core of Buddhist medicine emerged in the Indo-European world in the last four centuries B.C.E. Embedded in Buddhist scriptures and practices, these ideas were spread by merchants and missionaries along the Silk Roads and maritime routes to the rest of the Asian continent in the first millennium of the Common Era. Buddhist ideas about the body, disease, and healing eventually crossed significant cultural and political boundaries, becoming influential in lands as varied as China, Korea, Japan, and many kingdoms in Central and Southeast Asia.

In the same sense that scholars conventionally refer to Buddhism as the first “world religion,” Buddhist medicine might similarly be reckoned the first “world medicine.” Today, Buddhist medicine continues to transcend its association with a single geographic region or culture. Buddhist medical doctrines and therapies still form the basis of traditional medicine in Thailand, Burma, Sri Lanka, and Tibet, among other places, and are now being studied in many parts of the world under the rubric of “complementary-alternative medicine.” At the same time that it has remained loosely based on a core set of ancient Indian medical ideas and practices, however, Buddhist medicine is no static, timeless tradition. Like Buddhist itself, it has been continually reinterpreted and reinvented in countless local contexts throughout its history.