Jīvaka, the Buddhist "Medicine King"

I am working on a book-length project on the many manifestations of Jīvaka, the Buddhist "Medicine King." Tradition holds that Jīvaka was the personal physician of the Buddha, and a biography of Jīvaka is found within the Buddhist scriptures in multiple languages. In this story, it is said that Jīvaka was an orphan who was raised by Prince Abhāya. When he came of age, he studied medicine with a well-known master in northwestern India, apprenticing with this teacher for a period many years before returning back home. Different versions of the biography relate up to a dozen instances where Jīvaka healed different individuals, including instances of major surgeries like the opening of the abdominal and cranial cavities. Among Jīvaka's patients were merchants and their wives, kings, and in some versions even the Buddha himself, who came to him for a purgative of powdered lotus flowers.

Regional traditions of the Medicine King have grown around this core narrative:

Southeast Asia

In the Theravada Buddhist canon, the biography of Jīvaka is found in the Mahavāgga section of the Vinaya, the monastic "basket of discipline" composed from the fourth to the first century BC. In addition, Theravada writings mention Jīvaka in several places as the donor of a mango grove called Jīvakarama, which he gave for the use of the Buddha's order of monks as a retreat for the rainy season. He also on occasion is mentioned as a listener of the Buddha's preaching, including in one text named for him, the Jivaka Sutta.

In contemporary practice, Jīvaka is the "patron saint" of traditional Thai physicians, and is widely propitiated for assistance in healing client's ailments (see video at right). Many Thai practitioners believe that Jīvaka invented traditional Thai herbal medicine, therapeutic massage, and other healing practices himself, and treat him as the progenitor of their lineage. Statues of the "Father Doctor" often are found in Thai temples where they receive the prayers of the sick (see photos at right). While he is widely recognized as a Buddhist patriarch, he also is viewed as a powerful spirit ally in the indigenous Thai cosmology, whose presence can be invoked by a healer in order to di spell disease.

China

In China, where Jīvaka is known as Qipo 耆婆 or Qiyu 耆域, he is said to have been born with acupuncture needles in his hands and to have performed various Chinese medical diagnostic procedures. (Note that he is not to be confused with the second- to third-century healing monk with the same name.) His biography is found in the Chinese Tripitaka in different recensions dating from between the fourth and fifth centuries. (These texts are T. 553, 554, 1428, and 2121, available from CBETA). Several Chinese medical formulas were named after Jīvaka in the medieval formularies compiled by Sun Simiao, and his names appears in numerous medical texts composed in China up to the Song dynasty.

Although historians long have considered the biography of the Medicine King to be an important example of the introduction of Indian medicine to China, in a 2009 article I argue that in Chinese translation the purposes of the text were not medical but hagiographic. The texts mobilize language from popular literature to transform the Medicine King into a familiar figure from the medieval "anomaly tale" genre: the miracle-healing wonder-worker. Employing both classical frames of medical authority and popular literary conventions, the text demonstrates the importance of medical hagiography to Buddhist proselytism and legitimization in China.

Central Asia and Tibet

By the late first millennium C.E., Jīvaka was being worshipped at Dunhuang and Turfan along the Silk Road. A medical text attributed to him (the Jivaka-pustaka) written in Sanskrit and Kohtanese discovered in this region demonstrates his importance to medieval medicine in India and Central Asia as well.

Jīvaka also appears in Tibetan translations, where he is said to have been an expert in trephination (the surgical opening of the skull) for the extraction of parasites. He is considered an important forefather by the Tibetan medical tradition, for example being depicted in the Medicine Buddha mandala from the Blue Beryl Treatise (completed in 1688 by Sangye Gyamtso, 1653-1705) along with other important healing deities from Buddhism and Hinduism (see image and detail at right).

Sources

• Chen Ming 陳明, Dunhuang Chutu Huhua Qipo Shu Yanjiu 敦煌出土胡話《老婆書》研究 (A Study on Sanskrit Text of Jīvaka-Pustaka From Dunhuang [Sic]), Hong Kong: Xin Wen Feng Chuban Gongsi.
  
• Horner, I.B. 2000, The Book of the Discipline (Vinaya-Pitaka), Oxford: Pali Text Society.
  
• Salguero, C. Pierce 2009,“The Buddhist Medicine King in Literary Context: Reconsidering an early example of Indian influence on Chinese medicine and surgery,” History of Religions 48 (3): 183-210. [PDF]
• von Schiefner, F. Anton, Tibetan Tales Derived From Indian Sources: Translated From the Tibetan of the Kah-Gyur (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co, 1906).
  
• Zysk, Kenneth G. 1998, Asceticism and Healing in Ancient India: Medicine in the Buddhist Monastery, New Delhi: Motilal Bansarsidass.
  
• Zysk, Kenneth G. 1982, "Studies in Traditional Indian Medicine in the Pali Canon: Jīvaka and Ayurveda," Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 5 (1): 70-86.