A Global History of Buddhism and Medicine

The dizzying pace of globalization today has fueled the rapid spread of healing knowledge from diverse Asian traditions. Many of these traditions have a strong Buddhist connection, one prominent example being the various mindfulness exercises that have become popular in recent decades thanks to their alluring promise of reducing stress and promoting well-being. C. Pierce Salguero's A Global History of Buddhism and Medicine is a timely book that traces the deep roots of the Buddhist healing traditions and their dynamic circulation and transformation in Asia and beyond.Considerable scholarship has explored Buddhist medicine in both historical and contemporary settings, but these studies tend to focus on specific times and places with scant attention to cross-cultural connections. Pushing the field forward, Salguero makes a bold move by producing the first monograph in English that offers a bird's-eye view of the 2,400-year history of Buddhist medicine across Asia (mainly India, China, Japan, Tibet, and Southeast Asia, but also covering Korea, central Asia, and Mongolia). It is recommended that the book be read together with two anthologies of sources edited by Salguero and containing contributions from eighty-eight scholars, which assemble selected translations of key texts on Buddhist medicine and ethnographic interviews with Buddhist healers.1 As the final installment of the trilogy, the book provides a concise and broad synthesis of the existing scholarship on Buddhist medicine that will appeal to Asianists, religious studies scholars, and medical historians.First of all, it is necessary to clarify what is “Buddhist medicine,” which Salguero elucidates in the introduction (3–7). Fully aware that this is not a historical category, he uses it as “a fuzzy term of convenience” (4) that casts a wide net of covering any Buddhist ideas, practices, and texts on healing. This turns out to be a useful umbrella term that defines both “Buddhism” and “medicine” in their broadest sense, encompassing the physiological, ritual, and magical aspects of healing activities in both elite and lay communities. In the first half of the book (chapters 1–4), Salguero surveys the healing traditions of the three major forms of Buddhism (Nikāya, Mahāyāna, and Tantra). He further identifies some commonalities across these traditions (chapter 4), such as the ritual invocation of Buddhist deities to cure ailments, the use of karma to explain the cause of illness, and the intimate connection between mind and body.Bearing these shared features in mind, Salguero, on the other hand, tirelessly underscores the plurality and transformative potential of Buddhist medicine across time and space. As he asserts, “Buddhist medicine has never been one-dimensional” (174). Instead, it has always been subject to change according to specific local conditions and dynamic transcultural interplay. In the second half of the book (chapters 5–9), he devotes the energies to illustrating this central point of the book, delineating the circulation of texts, medicinal substances, and people across premodern Asia (chapter 5), the adaptive translation of Buddhist texts on healing (chapter 6), and distinct modes of localizing Buddhist medicine in various Asian cultures (chapter 7). He then moves to the modern and contemporary periods, discussing different ways of interaction between Buddhist medicine and modern biomedicine as well as the popularization of Buddhist healing practices around the globe today (chapters 8 and 9).Besides sketching the history of Buddhist medicine in broad strokes, Salguero also pays attention to specific issues prominent in the field. For example, he discusses gender throughout the book, be it powerful goddesses in Tantric Buddhism (50–52), the misogynistic view of the female body (71–72), or women's reproductive health (132–33). Those who seek to further explore any of the particular topics in Buddhist medicine should consult the endnotes, which mention some of the major debates and theoretical questions in the field, and a comprehensive bibliography including primarily English but also some French, Chinese, and Japanese references. The book also provides a list of major primary sources on Buddhist medicine organized by genres (116–22) and a number of online databases (112), which are useful for further research. Another valuable feature of the book is its inclusion of over two dozen images—most taken by Salguero himself during his field trips in Asia, vividly portraying Buddhist medicine as a living tradition.Overall, by producing A Global History of Buddhism and Medicine and its two accompanying anthologies, Salguero has made a major contribution to the emergent field of Buddhist medicine. This was achieved by his exemplary effort in bringing together a large group of scholars of different disciplines and geographical foci to foster a productive conversation on the topic. As he concludes compellingly, “[T]here can be no doubt that medicine has been a central concern of Buddhism or that Buddhism has been a vitally important part of the history of medicine globally” (181). Written in a lucid, lively, and jargon-free prose, the book is accessible to a broad audience of students, scholars, practitioners, and the general public. It will become a standard book for orientation about the history of Buddhist medicine in the years to come

Buddhism · Citation · Download · Icon · Library science · Section (typography) · World Wide Web · Computer Science · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · History of Science and Medicine