This blog was published in the Penn Museum Blog and the Penn Press Log.
Knowledge about healing and disease has held a central place within Buddhist thought since the earliest times. Taken collectively, Buddhist perspectives on health, disease, healers, patients, therapies, and bodies are often spoken of by scholars and devotees as “Buddhist medicine.” Over the course of the first millennium CE, Buddhist medicine (if we can borrow that term) spread alongside Buddhism as far as Iran, Mongolia, Japan, and Indonesia. Today, it is the foundation of traditional medicine in Tibet, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and other parts of Asia and has become the object of scientific study under the rubrics of “mindfulness” and “meditation.” At the same time that Buddhist medicine has become a transnational tradition, it has always been reinterpreted locally through the lenses of the many different cultures that have adopted it.