Bodies in Balance: The Art of Tibetan Medicine 2016. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Pp. 325. $74.95 Hardback.
Although Bodies in Balance is the catalogue of an exhibition that was held at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York in 2014, most of the objects depicted are not described or analyzed in terms of art history or iconography. Instead, the numerous images accompanying each essay serve as illustrations for the essays, which together provide an excellent introduction to many areas of Tibetan medicine.
The catalogue is arranged in two parts. The first part discusses the theoretical foundations and practices of Tibetan medicine, whereas the second deals with medicine, Buddhism, and historical developments. The essays are mostly based on previously published articles or books, reproduced here in a simplified form for a wider readership. The catalogue is introduced by the editor, Theresia Hofer, who reflects on the Tibetan medicine known as Sowa Rigpa as a science and a practical art. After briefly discussing the relationship between medicine and Buddhism, the introduction ends by addressing recent developments and future perspectives in the study of Tibetan medicine.
Barbara Gerke’s essay “The Art of Tibetan Medical Practice” focuses on the structure and content of the Four Tantras, one of the most important Tibetan medical texts. She discusses the textual structure of this work, the three-nyepa theory, and ideas about the causation of illness, diagnosis, and therapy. Geoffrey Samuel’s survey on the “Body and Mind in Tibetan Medicine and Tantric Buddhism” examines the problems faced by Tibetan medical scholars in reconciling Tantric and medical views of the body, including the question of whether Tantric physiology ought to have a visible material correlate. Theresia Hofer’s essay deals with “Foundations of Pharmacology and the Compounding of Tibetan Medicines.” After giving a very brief introduction to the core principles of Tibetan pharmacology, she describes its present situation using two examples, a monastery clinic in Tibet and a pharmaceutical factory in Switzerland. The Tibetan scholar and doctor Pasang Yontan Arya writes about “External Therapies in Tibetan Medicine: The Four Tantras, Contemporary Practice, and a Preliminary History of Surgery,” outlining mild external therapies such as medicated baths, massages and oil applications, and rough external therapies such as moxibustion and bloodletting. At the end of this essay, he shares some of his thoughts on surgery, which historically has never occupied a prominent place in Tibetan medicine. The topic of external therapies is also analysed by Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim in her discussion on “Medicine, Astrology, and Divination,” supplemented by a vignette written by Inger K. Vasstveit on a day at the Astrology Department of the Men-Tsee-Khang in Dharamsala, India. Yoeli-Tlalim shows how essential the relationship between medicine and astrology was and still is. According to Tibetan medicine, a vital energy flows around the body in accordance with the lunar cycle. It is important for any medical practitioner to understand this movement, because invasive therapies must not be applied at locations where this vital force is currently residing. The significance of divinatory and astrological practices also applies for urine and pulse diagnosis. Sienna R. Craig provides an anthropological perspective in her essay, “Tibetan Medicine in the World: Local Scenes, Global Transformations.” She presents five scenes of current practices, addressing the various processes of transition and transformation that Tibetan medicine is facing today, including the way Tibetan medicine is transmitted and translated and how Tibetan formulas are given makeovers and new market values.
The second part of Bodies in Balance explores the relationship between medicine and Buddhism as it has developed through the centuries. Gyurme Dorje’s essay “The Buddhas of Medicine” includes a brief survey of paintings and statues showing the Medicine Buddha in Tibet in the past and in Western collections in the present. Yang Ga’s essay, “The Origins of the Four Tantras and an Account of Its Author, Yuthog,” reviews the debate about the origins of the Four Tantras in Tibet and in the West, including the discussion among contemporary Tibetan physicians and historians. He then briefly introduces early Tibetan medical works and the Indian treatise Aṣṭāṅgahṛdayasaṃhitā, which was essential for composing the Four Tantras. He concludes with a reflection on the biographical material on the author of the Four Tantras. Frances Garrett also examines how Tibetan medical knowledge was transmitted in her “The Making of Medical History, Twelfth to Seventeenth Century.” She conceptualizes healing practices as “a mixture of pharmacological, contemplative, devotional, occult, astrological, and dietetic technologies” (180), and stresses the importance of the Nyingma tradition, one of the four major schools of Tibetan Buddhism, in shaping Tibetan medicine. She demonstrates that medical knowledge was often tied to specific families and investigates the genealogical construction of illness and healing. Janet Gyatso provides another perspective on the transmission of medical knowledge and the relationship between medicine and Buddhism in her “Buddhist Practices and Ideals in Desi Sangye Gyatso’s Medical Paintings,” which examines a series of seventeenth-century medical paintings that served as illustrations to a commentary on the Four Tantras. After briefly outlining these paintings’ historical contexts, she questions their Buddhist character, concluding that “any reference to Buddhist values, practices, or symbols is marginal at best” (209). The visual facets of Tibetan medicine are supplemented by a vignette authored by Katharina Sabernig on “The Tree Murals of Labrang Monastery’s Medical College, Eastern Tibet,” discussing the “unfolded trees” that served as a kind of table of contents for the second volume of the Four Tantras. The visual representation of medical information is also discussed in Theresia Hofer’s “Illustrated Materia Medica Prints, Manuscripts, and Modern Books.” After commenting on pharmacology beyond the Four Tantras, she discusses a nineteenth-century illustrated manuscript, the Beautiful Marvelous Eye Ornament, by Jampel Dorje. Her description also includes some further materia media manuscripts now in collections in India, Mongolia, and the West, and their relation to the medical paintings commissioned by Desi Sangye Gyatso. In his essay “The Journeys of Tibetan Medicine,” Martin Saxer describes the Badmayev, a Buryat family of physicians, whose members practiced in the Russian high society of Saint Petersburg and later moved to Poland. Members of this family strongly influenced the way Tibetan medicine became known in the West. Finally, Theresia Hofer and Knud Larsen’s vignette, “Pillars of Tibetan Medicine: The Chagpori and Mentsikhang Institutes in Lhasa,” deals with both of these important medical institutions by describing and reconstructing their architectural layout and design.
In her introduction, Theresia Hofer writes: “Sowa Rigpa encompasses a vast body of knowledge, practice, and experience that is well rooted in its own scientific principles, ethical requirements, and worldwide connections—all features associated with modern Western biomedicine” (7). It would have been desirable to define more clearly the concept of science that she is using here, for it remains unclear what these “own scientific principles” should be. She further claims that “the holistic approaches to an individual’s health and disease that characterize Tibetan medicine are of particular appeal in the West. It is this adaptability and openness to dialogue and change, without the loss of its own scientific and empirical grounds, that constitute Sowa Rigpa’s most significant attributes.” This is a questionable claim, especially in its assertion about adaptability and openness to dialogue and change. In the introduction, one gets the impression that Tibetan medicine is compared with Western medicine and characterized as scientific in order to academically legitimize it and support its implementation and propagation in the West.
Despite these minor concerns, the level of scholarship in this book is consistently high, across an impressive range of topics. Bodies in Balance is an important contribution, and I recommend it unreservedly to students, researchers, and doctors seeking an overview of current academic knowledge of Tibetan medicine.