©2011 C. Pierce Salguero — All Rights Reserved

Research Summary

I am a researcher of Buddhist medicine, a system of healing that spread widely throughout Asia in the first millennium CE along with Buddhism. Originating in India, Buddhist medical ideas are closely related to Indian Ayurveda and ancient Greco-Roman medicine. Historically, this system spread as far as Iran, Mongolia, Japan, and Indonesia. Today, it is still the foundation of traditional medicine in Tibet, Thailand, and other parts of Asia. At the same time that Buddhist medicine has become a transnational tradition, however, it has been reinterpreted locally through the lenses of the many different cultures that have adopted it. My research explores this interplay between transmitted and indigenous knowledge.

Although I maintain a crosscultural and transnational perspective in my scholarship, my current work primarily focuses on the reception of Buddhist medical doctrines in medieval China. This historical process is a fascinating window onto China's involvement in a Eurasia-wide network of cultural exchange via the Silk Road and maritime trade routes. It is an important case study of the role of translation in the transmission and reception of medicine. The exploration of this topic also touches on larger theoretical questions, such as what we mean by "religion" and "medicine" in a global historical context, and how to theorize the interactions between cultures.

In my work, I employ interdisciplinary methodologies and perspectives from History of Medicine, Religious Studies, Sociology, and Translation Studies, among other disciplines. It is also important to me to present my research in ways that are accessible for practitioners of Buddhism and traditional Asian medicine, as well as for general audiences. Some of my publications are listed in my CV.

Academic Book Manuscripts in Progress

Chinese Buddhist Medicine: Disease, Healers, and the Body in Crosscultural Translation

As huge volumes of Buddhist literature were transmitted to China in the early medieval period, translators faced the challenge of rendering in a new language the wide range of Indian technical and scientific terminology found in their source texts. This project takes a close look at the translation of medical doctrine in a large collection of Chinese Buddhist sources translated during the medieval period (200-800 C.E.) in light of methodologies developed in the field of Translation Studies. I examine the wide range of translation strategies employed in the attempt to make foreign knowledge accessible to Chinese readers. The decision to use translation terms that underscored the foreignness of the source texts, or conversely to use vocabulary drawn from the Chinese context that emphasized Buddhism's compatibility with indigenous knowledge, were important choices that had an appreciable impact on Buddhism's ability to position itself within the Chinese religiomedical landscape. Acts of translation were not only means by which Buddhist ideas and practices could be explained to Chinese audiences, but simultaneously were also acts of boundary-work and identity-construction by which claims of superiority over other contemporary traditions could be established and maintained, and by which Buddhism's unique contributions to China could be showcased. Understanding the Chinese reception of Indian medicine as a process of negotiation and adaptation allows historical analysis to move beyond a limited focus on the so-called accuracy of translations, instead revealing the cultural resonances and social logics of translated texts in their historical context.

Chinese Buddhist Medicine: Global and Local Perspectives

This project approaches Chinese translations of Buddhist texts as windows onto the transnational exchange of medical knowledge in Asia during the first millennium CE. The numerous discourses on medicine embedded within Chinese Buddhist texts challenge some of the basic assumptions in the history of Asian medicine. This project includes translations of a series of Chinese Buddhist medical treatises with annotations that shed light on the connections between these texts and a range of other Eurasian medical systems. Such crosscultural connections significantly reshape our understanding of the history of medicine in Eurasia, encouraging a shift from focusing on the origins and development of distinct regional traditions as isolated units to an examination of the pervasive effects of transnational medical communication and exchange along a network that spanned from Europe to East Asia.