History of Asian Medicine

The substitution of materia medica in Tibetan medicine was an important issue in the past, and still is today. This article will offer a brief survey of references found in Tibetan written sources, and discuss the only three Tibetan treatises that deal exclusively with the subject. It will explore the underlying modes of substitution, and provide insights into the criteria that are used to determine suitable substitutes. Ultimately it will be demonstrated that one can distinguish seven criteria—namely the taste, healing potential, type, substance, name, shape, and smell—that are used to determine an appropriate substitute for rare or expensive materia medica in the Tibetan medical tradition.

Asian Medicines: Encounters, Translations and Transformations
Asian medicines are engaged in complex global networks of actors: conservators who watch the changing supplies of wild plants in Asian mountains, medical botanists who study the substitution practices of collectors and marketers in Asia, policy makers who control or prevent the entry of drugs into European countries, corporations who seek to exploit drugs based on Asian medical knowledge, professional associations who seek to regulate Asian medical practice.  ICTAMs VII and VIII both took place in Asia (2009 in Bhutan, 2013 in Korea). The European location of ICTAM IX will allow us to take stock of the current state of Asian medicine and to examine the global flows of medical knowledge, practice and materials from a different but equally significant vantage point.
Traditional Asian medicines play a significant role in improving the wellbeing of people worldwide, both as a health care system in their own right, and as a resource for bio-discovery projects. Their applications will only grow, and to reach a full understanding of traditional Asian medicine, it is crucial to integrate professionals from many disciplines, including medical anthropologists, traditional medicine practitioners, clinical trial specialists, ethnobotanists, ethnopharmacologists, ethnopharmacognosists, ethnochemists, herbalists, businessmen, historians, economists, political scientists, conservationists, botanists, translators and more. ICTAM IX will bring together these professionals to share their experience, findings and knowledge, and work out appropriate strategies and networking to enhance research on traditional medicines.

This three-day long workshop at EASTmedicine, University of Westminster London (May 8-10, 2015), organised by Mona Schrempf, brought together international expert physicians and scholars of Tibetan medicine – medical anthropologists, historians, ethno-and medical botanists, pharmacologists – working with and/or on Tibetan medicine, and also experts in Chinese medicine as well as IT specialists. The aim was to discuss and contribute to how an interdisciplinary and multilingual digital knowledge base should look like that could be used in the future as an analytic tool for documenting and analysing Tibetan medical formulas for a variety of scholarly users, and physicians of Tibetan medicine alias Sowa Rigpa. The workshop was funded by the British Academy/Small Leverhulme Research Grant, the Sino-British Fellowship Trust and IASTAM.

Gerke, Barbara. 2016. "Buddhist Healing and Taming in Tibet." In The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Buddhism, edited by Michael Jerryson, 576-590. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

This chapter centers on Tibetan Buddhist patterns and themes of healing and addresses the inter-relationship of medicine and religion in the practice of Tibetan medicine, also called Sowa Rigpa (gso ba rig pa), the “science of healing,” and how Buddhist rituals are employed to enhance the potency of medicines and to protect the pharmacy and the people working in it from accidents and obstacles during difficult manufacturing processes. Examples focus on the refinement of mercury in mercury sulphide ash for use in “precious pills” (rin chen ril bu). The chapter establishes an argument for a parallel between Buddhist ideas of “taming” demons into becoming protectors of the religious teachings and the pharmacological transformation of poisonous substances, especially the pharmacological practices of “taming” mercury into a potent elixir, and what this tells us about Tibetan medical approaches to what is considered “beneficial” and “harmful.”