Buddhism in the Everyday Medical Practice of the Ladakhi Amchi

Almost the entire content of the medical texts, as well as the therapeutic practices carried out daily by the practitioners of the scholarly medicine of Ladakh, Northwestern India, are of a technical medical and a-religious nature. However, medical ethics and elements of medical epistemology are based on Buddhism, and all healers underscore the importance of the moral dimension in the practice of medicine, a dimension that refers expressly to religion. The ethnography presented in this article therefore shows the importance of religion for medical practice in both moral and practical points of view. The author argues that it is because religion is not constitutive of medicine (like medical theory is), that it can be considered as an "ensemble of supportive paradigms" of medicine.

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.

Acta Bioethica, 2010

It is often said that in Ayurveda, the Indian science of medicine, the scientific concerns are muddled up with religious and metaphysical convictions. This paper reies to show how while retaining the experiential route of science intact, Ayurveda shares certain imporant concerns with religion and philosophy in India. It affirms that this ultimately has helped Ayurveda successfully avoiding the problems associated with multiple ontologies--owing to a separation of science from values. Thsi paper will examine some important religious assumptions that play vital role in the conception and practice of the science of Ayurveda and how such approaches contributed in developing and integraing a strong code of medical ethics into the practice of medicine. The first section of the paper will bring out the experiential route of Ayurveda. The second section examines the concepts of disease and health/wellbeing in Ayurveda, in order to bring tout the ethical outlook ingrained in it. The thirs section will analyse some fundamental postulates fo Indian ethics and attempts to show that with the Vedic conception of Rita -cosmic moral order-Ayurveda uniquely defines itself as a way of physical, mental and ethical living, which aims at a very comprehensive notion of wellbeing.

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.

Mental Health and Human Well Being: Psycho Social and Philosophical Perspective World Philosophy Day Icpr Sponsored One Day International Conference 15 March, 2024, 2024

This report examines the most important aspects of the debate about the bioethical issues within Buddhist ethics. In connection with the development of philosophical understanding of medical knowledge in modern culture, there is a need to show the importance of applying religious and ethical principles to the main modern problems of biomedical ethics. The main purpose of this report is an attempt to formulate a number of Buddhist principles that can be consistently applied to a number of biomedical problems (euthanasia, human birth and death, etc.). The subject of our research is ethics in the context of medicine, namely the relationship between Buddhism and medical practice.

This paper examines the case of a Shiite practitioner of Tibetan medicine in Ladakh, North-western India. It recounts the story of a Buddhist family converted to Islam, for which the abandonment of religion has not led to the discontinuation of a lineal medical practice known to have Buddhist overtones. This situation provides an invitation to explore the social consequences of maintaining the practice in a region characterized by religious conflict, as well as the criteria of sameness and difference, technique and genealogy that make a marked 'other' a practitioner of Tibetan medicine. These religious overlaps are, however, not only apparent at the social level; they are also present in the preparation of medicines, in etiological narratives or in the physical regimes of bodily care. The composite nature of medical practice helps us to observe from a new angle the role of religion in the practice of Tibetan medicine. The way medicine is enacted and performed in this context provides empirical materials to study the paradigms that both structure and confer motion to Tibetan learned medicine. The ethnography of a remote region in the Himalayas opens up research paths for the anthropology of Asian medicine amongst new categories of healers and renewed contexts of practice. la maladie, Paris: L'Harmattan; and Mona Schrempf (2010). 'Between mantra and syringe: Healing and health-seeking behaviour in contemporary

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.

Journal of Buddhist ethics, 1995

This article provides an introduction to some contemporary issues in medical ethics and the literature which addresses them from a Buddhist perspective. The first part of the article discusses Buddhism and medicine and outlines some of the main issues in contemporary medical ethics. In the rest of the paper three subjects are considered: i) moral personhood, ī) abortion, and īi) death, dying and euthanasia. The bibliographic references appended to the article will be updated periodically (contributions are welcome), and the latest version of the bibliography will be available from the journal's "Resources" directory.

The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 72 (1): 194 - 198., 2013

Full title: Medicine Between Science and Religion: Explorations on Tibetan Grounds. Edited by Vincanne Adams, Mona Schrempf and Sienna R. Craig. Epistemologies of Healing, vol. 10. New York: Berghahn Books, 2011. xiii, 371 pp. $100.00 (cloth); $21.95 (paper).Tibetan Medicine in the Contemporary World: Global Politics of Medical Knowledge and Practice. Edited by Laurent Pordié. Needham Institute Research Series. London: Routledge, [2008] 2011. xvi, 271 pp. $188.00 (cloth); $44.95 (paper).

Buddhism and Medicine: An Anthology of Premodern Sources. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017