Buddhism & Asian Medicine

This blog was published on BuddhistDoor Though he lived in the sixth century, Zhiyi (538–597) has a lot to teach the modern practitioner of meditation, whether Buddhist or secular. He is best known as the founding patriarch of the Tiantai

This blog was published in Patheos.  I am not a scholar of Buddhist meditation. My own research has only touched on meditation insofar as it was claimed to have therapeutic benefits in a handful of texts in premodern Asia. But,

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,

This blog was published at Patheos.com. Recently, I invited my Facebook friends to submit questions on the topic of Buddhism and medicine. I collated the questions together, and wrote the brief responses below…. Is there such a thing as “Buddhist medicine”?

This post appeared on Patheos.com While I am not a historian of yoga per se, my academic research focuses on the crosscultural exchange of Buddhist ideas about health globally, and I specifically focus a great amount of attention on the many acts

This blog appeared on Patheos.com  TIME magazine’s 2 Feb 2014 cover announces the arrival of the “Mindful Revolution.” The publication joins a flurry of recent examples confirming that a shift is taking place in the representation of meditation in American popular media. The

Preliminary Readings The Encyclopedia of Buddhism has an entry-level essay on the Buddhist canon by (see Vol. 1, pp. 111–5). The Encyclopedia of Religion (2nd Edition) has two articles that serve as useful starting points. Under “Buddhist Books and Texts” in Vol.

Here are some resources for getting started in the study of Chinese medical history. This page will be updated on a periodic basis, so feel free to suggest any additions via email or Facebook. The date above reflects the last time this page

In this blog, I provide short abstracts of important Buddhist medical sources in Pāli. Note that I have only included texts, chapters, or sections that are primarily about medicine or nursing. There are many Buddhist texts that include isolated or

Zhiyi’s shorter treatise on śamatha and vipaśyanā (Xiao zhiguan 小止觀) exists today in several printed and manuscript versions, the most readily accessible of which appears in Taishō Tripiṭaka no. 1915. Based on extensive comparison of the extant versions, however, the Japanese scholar Sekiguchi Shindai has