From Medicalizing State to Sacralizing Status of Thai Buddhist Monks in Secular Space: A Case Study of the Priest Hospital (original) (raw)
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Elements of the Buddhist Medical System
History of Science in South Asia, 2023
This article aims to explore the anthropological foundations of early Buddhist medical thought by conducting a comprehensive analysis of Pāli texts and their relationship to the development of Indian traditional medicine, such as Āyurveda. The research investigates the possible existence of an ancient Buddhist medical system and compares it with contemporary medical systems, such as Hippocratic medicine. By examining the Bhesajjakkhandhaka and the Bhesajjamañjūsā, two Pāli texts that discuss medicine, the article seeks to outline the key elements of ancient Buddhist medical conceptions. Furthermore, it emphasizes the importance of understanding the evolution of Buddhist medical practices and their potential role in defining Indian traditional medicine. The findings could provide a foundation for historians of Indian medicine to delve into even more complex aspects of the medical tradition in ancient Buddhism.
An Empowered World: Buddhist Medicine and the Potency of Prayer in Japan
Deus in machina _ religion, technology, and the things in between, 2013
In premodern Japan, before the contemporary demarcation of an autonomous sphere of religion (as distinct from science, the political, and so on), Buddhism was medicine and empowered prayer was an important therapeutic technology. I shall first trace the evolution of the concept of empowerment through Buddhist philosophy and its ultimate embodiment in popular practices in the nineteenth century. Then I shall analyze the Meiji government’s attempts to produce a hygienic modernity situated in a hegemonic amalgam of Western medicinal and neo-Confucian ethical discourses. According to the logic of this new hybrid discourse, as embodied in a series of laws, trials, and textbooks, healing prayer was understood not as a treatment, but as a barbaric “disease” that needed to be eradicated in order to heal the body of the nation. In the final section I shall discuss the radical implications of debates about empowered prayer for the Buddhist conception of the cosmos as a whole. I shall conclude by demonstrating that the division between the technological and the religious, held up as a rhetorical ideal in secular modernity, collapses as a rigorous conceptual strategy. Reconciliation can be found, at least in the Japanese context, in an asymmetrical relationship in which technoscientific modernity is seen as empowered by, rather than undermined by, religious praxis.
This study focuses on the role of monasteries in the medical provision of the late eighteenth-century Hungarian Kingdom, with a special interest in monastery pharmacies located in rural environments. These pharmacies and their apothecaries were gradually disappearing agents of the medical marketplace from the 1770s as a result of the strengthening endeavor of the Habsburg rulers to control the professional standards and business activity of the medical personnel in their realms. This effort coincided with the introduction of new church policies that aimed at reducing the number of monasteries and channeling their resources into pastoral care. By pointing at the impact of ecclesiastical reforms on the medical oeconomy, I argue that state interference did not merely fill the gaps in the medical supply, but it also redefined the already existing networks and activity of various practitioners, as it can be seen from the examples of the apothecary-surgeon brothers of religious orders. I will present three case studies through which I will shed light on the local embeddedness of three monastery pharmacies, namely: the Franciscans of Keszthely, the Capuchins of Hatvan, and the Paulines of Lepoglava. I will explore how successfully (or unsuccessfully) the dissolution of these monasteries could put an end to the activity of the lay brothers who were in charge of running their pharmacies and often fulfilled the tasks of surgeons, too, both inside and outside their monasteries. By exploring the ambiguities surrounding these healers, who were simultaneously associated with a stable place and with the image of itinerant healers and who routinely crossed the borders between domestic and public, charitable and commercialized, professional and popular healing practices, I will also show why they could not be compatible with the standardizing endeavors of the state.
Tzu Chi (Ciji), a lay Buddhist charitable movement under monastic leadership, stands out among the new and large-scale Buddhist organizations in Taiwan, for its continuous focus on medical care. Presently it runs an island-wide medical network in Taiwan and the largest bone marrow databank of the Chinese diaspora. How and why is medical care important to Tzu Chi? What makes Tzu Chi's medical charity Buddhist? This paper focuses on the core of medical concerns in the Tzu Chi movement and the impact Tzu Chi's mission has on medical practice in Taiwan. I will give a brief history of Tzu Chi's medical charity, to show how it unfolds into an engaged Buddhism and the sacralization of its medical practice. I will argue that the process of bestowing sacramental meanings on the scientific is a Buddhist comment on modern medical practice—a sacralization of medical science.
The Buddhist-Medical Interface in Tibet: Black Pill Traditions in Transformation
Gerke, Barbara. "The Buddhist-Medical Interface in Tibet: Black Pill Traditions in Transformation." Religions 10 (4): 282, 2019
This paper introduces Tibetan pill traditions and examines two exceptional pill formulas that emerged from an early Buddhist-medical interface in Tibet, but followed different trajectories due to the increased specialization of religious and medical knowledge. "Black pills" are the most revered consecrated healing compound of the Karmapas (the incarnate heads of the Karma Kagyü School of Tibetan Buddhism), while the "Cold Compound Black Pill"-a precious pill known as Rinchen Drangjor-is one of Tibetan medicine's most complex formulas still produced today. Based on both textual research and ethnographic fieldwork in India, I critically explore the principal factors that link these black pill traditions. I argue that parallels in the use of potent substances and their processing offer examples of how strongly entangled medical and religious approaches are with respect to healing practices that include blessings, protection, spiritual support, and medical treatment. My findings reveal that although there are distinct areas of medical and religious specialized practices in the black pill traditions, consecrated multi-compounds are added to both types of black pills to enhance potency and ensure the continuation of lineage affiliations to certain Buddhist schools. I also show how political and sectarian conflicts within certain Buddhist schools may affect some of these rare pill practices.
Situating Medicine and Religion in Asia: Methodological Insights and Innovations
Situating Medicine and Religion in Asia, 2023
In press, forthcoming 2023... Although Asian practices for health, healing and spiritual cultivation have survived today, they circulate in new forms, whether within a burgeoning global marketplace, in the imaginaries of national health bureaus, as the focus of major scholarly grant initiatives, or as subjects of neurological study. These modern understandings are contoured by the European history of science and do not represent how they were mobilised in their originary times and places. Categories like ‘alternative’, ‘complementary’, and ‘wellness’ privilege medical authority and a distance from religion writ large, implying a distance between ‘medicine’ and ‘religion’ not reflected in the originary contexts of these practices. Situating Medicine and Religion in Asia makes a critical intervention in the scholarship on East, South and Southeast Asia and the Himalayas. Case studies show how practices from divination and demonography, to anatomy, massage, plant medicine and homeopathy were situated within the contours of medicine and religion of their time, in contrast to modern formations of ‘medicine’ and' ‘religion’. The chapters follow a common structure that allows for easy comparison across a broad geographic, temporal and conceptual range, presenting a set of methodological tools for the study of medicine and religion. Taken together, they assemble empirical data about the construction of medicine and religion as social categories of practice, from which more general claims can be made. The volume thus makes a critical intervention in the histories of medicine, religion and science in the region, while providing readers with a set of methodological approaches for future study.
Buddhism and Medicine in Japan: A Topical Survey 500-1600 Ce of a Complex Relationship
2019
If religion and medicine are deemed to be two discretes ocial domains then "Buddhism" mayber egarded as ar eligion, formedi nI ndia by Siddhartha Gautama ("the Buddha"), that is defined by the engagement of various social actors with aset of ideas and practices.Buddhism as areligion proposes apath to end sufferingand expresses aconcern with sicknessassuffering in avariety of ways, while the Buddha is regarded as the Supreme Physician. Buddhism has diversified considerablyinterms of its doctrinal, ritual, institutional, social and material expressions. The diverse traditions of Buddhism in Asia all go backtoacommon root in northern India.²¹ They grew from areligious order of the disciples of am aster, Siddhartha Gautama, who probablyl ived around 448-368 BCE and was revered as the Buddha Śākyamuni. Like many other ascetics of the fifth to fourth century BCE, SiddharthaG autamac hose a lifestyle of homelessness and sexual abstinence. The reason for the wide rangeo ft eachings,e xercises and rituals within Buddhism can be traced to his encouragementstocontinuallyr eflect on his ideas and teachings and formulate them anewo rd ifferently. Them onastic rules of the order,h owever,w eres upposed to remain unchanged and regulate community life within the order itself and with the surrounding laypeople who provided the religious with food and all other objects regarded as necessary for their livelihood, includingm edicines. While the traditionallyi tinerant lifestyle of Buddhist monastics was largely abandoned, the liveso fB uddhist monks and nuns were, and are still, shaped by the rituals of an itinerant lifestyle. It is assumed thatsedentary monastic communities,especiallyfor the elderly or infirm, existed alreadyi na ncient timesi nI ndia. Theh istory of Buddhism has been molded by the establishment of magnificent religious structures and monastery grounds,f unded for the most part by laypeople from the elite. At the same time, the tradition of solitary seclusion in the wilderness has always playedar ole, for example when monasteries in urban settlements werer azed in timeso fw ar or persecution and whent he religious order was in danger of being eradicated. Earlycollections of the monastic rules and codes (vinaya)havestayedlegally binding since the fourth century BCE and even form the foundation for ordination in the present-day orders of the branch of Buddhism called the "Great Ve- The followingp assagesh aveb een in part adapted from Triplett (2016).
Toward a Global History of Buddhism and Medicine
The close relationship between Buddhism and medicine that has become so visible thanks to the contemporary ‘mindfulness revolu- tion’ is not necessarily unique to the twenty-first century. The ubiq- uitous contemporary emphasis on the health benefits of Buddhist and Buddhist-inspired practice is in many ways the latest chapter in a symbiotic relationship between Buddhism and medicine that is both centuries-long and of global scope. This article represents the first steps toward writing a book that explores the global history of Buddhism and medicine ‘from Sarnath to Silicone Valley’. It identi- fies patterns in the transmission and reception of texts and ideas, networks of circulation, and intersections with local and regional histories that shaped the history of Buddhist ideas and practices concerning physical health and healing.