Religion, Medicine and the Human Embryo in Tibet

Frances Garrett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134068913
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Central Asian History
• Index: History

This book explores the cultural history of embryology in Tibet, in culture, religion, art and literature, and what this reveals about its medicine and religion. Filling a significant gap in the literature this is the first in-depth exploration of Tibetan medical history in the English language. It reveals the prevalence of descriptions of the development of the human body – from conception to birth – found in all forms of Tibetan religious literature, as well as in medical texts and in art.

By analysing stories of embryology, Frances Garrett explores questions of cultural transmission and adaptation: How did Tibetan writers adapt ideas inherited from India and China for their own purposes? What original views did they develop on the body, on gender, on creation, and on life itself?

The transformations of embryological narratives over several centuries illuminate key turning points in Tibetan medical history, and its relationship with religious doctrine and practice. Embryology was a site for both religious and medical theorists to contemplate profound questions of being and becoming, where topics such as pharmacology and nosology were left to shape secular medicine. The author argues that, in terms of religion, stories of human development comment on embodiment, gender, socio-political hierarchy, religious ontology, and spiritual progress. Through the lens of embryology, this book examines how these concerns shift as Tibetan history moves through the formative 'renaissance' period of the twelfth through to the seventeenth centuries.

1
BECOMING HUMAN IN TIBETAN LITERATURE

In 1479, the Tibetan physician Kyempa Tsewang suggested that during the early stages of a woman’s pregnancy, a doctor should recommend certain procedures to ensure that the fetus will be a boy. On the astrologically auspicious day when the Victory star and the moon are aligned, he explains, a blacksmith should create the form of a male child out of three, five or seven types of metal. The form should be heated in a coal fire until it glows red, and then soaked in the milk of an animal who has given birth to male offspring, measuring an amount of milk that corresponds to however many types of metal were used. Two handfuls of cooled milk should be given to the woman. Alternatively, he continues, to achieve the same effect a medicinal concoction, a mixture of Seaberry, grape and molasses, could be administered to the pregnant woman. Finally, if these procedures are ineffective or impractical, the woman could try wearing an amulet. “Make three strands of thread with wool from the right shoulder of a breeding male sheep,” Kyempa Tsewang explains, “and tie it around her waist with the tip hanging down.”¹

Kyempa Tsewang’s text is a commentary on the Four Tantras, a work that came to be known in Tibetan medical circles in the thirteenth century and which is still the most influential textual authority on Tibetan medicine. Kyempa Tsewang’s treatise is widely respected and studied in the halls of medical learning today, and yet some contemporary readers, Tibetan and non-Tibetan alike, are inclined to disregard recommendations such as those above. For many, these prescriptions are artifices now considered unscientific, arcane remnants of a foreign past. In the fifteenth century, however, Kyempa Tsewang was a leader among physicians, part of a community who saw these techniques as critical to medical practice and scholarship. If these intellectuals agreed, during the heyday of Tibet’s scholarly renaissance, that such therapies were important to medical practice and knowledge, should we not take them seriously? What was medicine in the history of Tibet, if its recommendations included magical acts and amulets?

Roughly a hundred years earlier, an influential religious thinker known as Longchen Rabjampa composed a long treatise on Buddhist tantric practice. Early in that work, he discusses pregnancy and gestation. He explains how the embryo begins to form in the first few days after conception. During the first days immediately after conception, the embryonic constituents are gathered together, dispersed, and reintegrated repeatedly by the actions of the natural elements, water, earth, fire, and so forth. On the very first day after conception, he writes, “an extremely subtle water-element circulatory channel originates by stretching straight out toward the right side of the woman, roughly the size of one-hundredth of a horse tail’s hair. During this time, the woman feels cold.” On the second day, another circulatory channel develops, and the woman feels of dizzy and sluggish. On the third day after conception, yet another channel emerges and the newly pregnant woman perspires and feels hot.²

Longchen Rabjampa was a prominent Buddhist scholar not known to have any training in medicine. His work covers what we may easily agree to be religious topics, such as contemplative and yogic practices and enlightened experience, and yet we also find a sizable portion of this text devoted to a detailed discussion of human gestation. Is it surprising to find data on embryology in an esoteric religious treatise? What was religion in the history of Tibet, if its treatises addressed conception, pregnancy and fetal growth?

This book reflects on these questions, considering a period of history when Tibetans themselves were negotiating similar matters. With the wide-scale dominance of “Western biomedicine” today, most of us assume we know what medicine is, and what it is that one must know to practice medicine. Topics such as anatomy and physiology, for instance, are unquestioned as the foundations of medicine in our day. In this book, however, we will recognize the fact that the categories of religion, medicine and science are products of particular times and places. In the past, in the history of Tibet just as in the history of European thought and practice, the disciplinary boundaries of knowledge were fluid or fixed in different ways than they are now. All of these terms, and the bodies of knowledge and action that surround them, have histories, their meanings changing often quite radically over time.

Medicine, science and religion in European thought

The history of disciplinary boundaries in Europe is intricate, and this has been a matter of interest for thinkers in all times. By the fourth century B.C.E., the Hippocratic school was pondering the role of philosophy in medicine. The writings of Plato and Aristotle had a strong shaping influence on the formulation of Greek medicine, and it was an influence that lasted: the discipline of biology in Europe was largely based on Aristotle until the eighteenth century.³ While the close relationship of medicine to philosophy has been tolerable for most, medicine’s connections to “religion” have been more problematic. For most historians, ancient Greek medicine was prized as a rational tradition that went beyond “superstitious” beliefs, which were seen to be part of religion. Until the 1970s, historians saw in the rationality of Greek medicine a precursor to modern scientific medicine: calling it rational was to say that, like contemporary scientific medicine, it rejected a superstitious view of demons and gods as agents of harm and healing, and it fought disease by natural means, such as diet, drugs or surgery.⁴ In recent decades, however, with a recognition of the cultural specificity of the very notion of rationality, the history of Greek medicine has been slowly revised. A distinction between “natural” and “supernatural” is no longer considered appropriate for the early Greek world. While its influence was lasting, the elite scholarly tradition of Greek medical texts is seen as but one tradition of knowledge in the Roman Empire and beyond. Temple medicine, for instance, with its emphasis on prayers and magical healing, is recognized as a key part of ordinary life for the Greeks.⁵ Historians now realize that in the context of healing illness, religion, philosophy, astrology, alchemy, botany, magic and medicine all intermixed in the thoughts, practices and writings of various peoples around Europe.

Articulating the connections between the disciplines of religion, philosophy, medicine and science has been contentious for centuries.⁶ By the thirteenth century, these subjects were formally investigated in the universities of Western Europe. Bringing students from all over Europe to towns such as Paris, Oxford and Bologna, medieval universities focused learning on four faculties, an arts degree forming a preliminary stage for professional degrees in theology, medicine or law. All university students were therefore similarly trained in the disciplines of the arts, which included a natural philosophy largely based on Aristotle.⁷ While university educated Europeans received a comparable core schooling, defining the differences and interactions between these subdisciplines remained problematic, particularly when it came to the relationship between theology and science.⁸

While much has been written about cross-disciplinary scholarly exchange in Europe, less is known of such interactions in Asia. As in medieval Europe, large monastic universities in Tibet united students from around Central, East and South Asia to master a complex corpus of scholarly learning on topics as wideranging as logic, grammar, religious practice and medicine. This book will consider how portions of that vast body of literature came to be defined and differentiated during this formative period in Tibetan history.

The study of Asian medical traditions and their connections to religion has been troubled by a heritage of learning that divided disciplines of knowledge in particular ways. In European scholarship, Asian religions were initially defined under the cloak of an Enlightenment concept of religion that placed emphasis on the cognitive, intellectual and doctrinal elements of religious traditions. With the nineteenth-century emphasis on rationality, and with the increasing availability of information about non-European religions from missionaries, cognitive accounts of religious belief, akin to a scientific description, served to objectify religion. The idealization of rationality used to define philosophical and other forms of scholarly thinking affected early Indologists such as Frauwaller, who attempted to prove Indian thought to be unconcerned with soteriology, for example, or Matilal, who tried to show Indian thought to be purely “scientific.”⁹

Today, many scholars have noted that the epistemological frameworks that shape our conception of Asia and Asian religions are themselves shaped by the polemics and ideological concerns of our scholarly forebears. This is a cloak we have yet to shed. To this day, texts classified as medical or scientific are rarely consulted in the study of Indian religion. The study of Indian medicine largely consists of non-analytical descriptions aimed at identifying effective medical healing techniques. Some presentations of

yurveda are still colored by the desire to prove it a “secular” and “empirically objective” science, and many translations from Sanskrit of seminal

yurvedic treatises are purged of “magical” or “superstitious” elements that might lend doubt to the scientific authority of the system as a whole.

For historians studying the relationship between science and religion generally, such a reading of present concerns into the past is known as “presentism.” Today, however, influenced by the work of feminist and other theorists, this strategy has been largely dismissed in favor of “contextualism,” a model that attempts to look at ideas or events on their own terms or in their own contexts, to the extent possible. Within this framework, rather than define the boundaries of Tibetan medicine and Tibetan religion by our own standards, we should instead try to think about how these lines were drawn by particular Tibetan thinkers at particular points in history. How did fifteenth-century Tibetan scholars themselves characterize the categories of “religion” and “medicine”? What sorts of topics did these disciplines contain? How can we describe the interactions between religion and medicine in Tibet at that point in history?

Models of comparison: science and religion, science and Buddhism

Characterizing the nature of the relationship between religion and science or medicine has been important to the historians of Europe. These thinkers have focused on models of conflict, mutual support, complementarity or total separation.¹⁰ Recent scholars have criticized the long held dominance of the “conflict thesis,” which claims conflict to be the defining mode of interaction between science and religion.¹¹ Richard Olson notes that in the early modern period, science, religion, law and history all used common language, methods, and concepts; he also observes that publishing scientists and religious thinkers were often the same individual. Science and religion were linked institutionally as well as conceptually or biographically, sharing or competing for resources, personnel, authority and prestige. Olson suggests that in general, projects of science and theology are driven by such differing concerns that a model of conflict is a misguided stereotype.

Colin Russell traces the expansion of this stereotype over nearly a century of writings on the relationship of science and religion, suggesting that while certainly there have been conflicts in the history of science and religion, a thesis of conflict as the defining characteristic in the relationship is inadequate for the “sensitive and realistic” historiography of science and religion.¹² He explains that the conflict thesis (1) occludes an understanding of any other sort of relationship between science and religion, (2) discounts many instances of a close alliance between science and religion, (3) emphasizes a Whiggish view of history as aiming at “victory”, (4) ignores the richness of diversity of ideas in science and religion, and (5) exaggerates what were historically minor debates to the status of major conflicts.¹³ James Moore, likewise, criticizes the conflict thesis’ “military metaphor” for promoting false dichotomies between science and religion, scientists and theologians, or scientific and religious institutions.¹⁴

While some historians and scientists still accept the conflict thesis, most historians of science have rejected it as misleadingly presentist, now focusing instead on a “complexity thesis” that became the dominant methodology in the 1980s and 1990s.¹⁵ With the complexity thesis, new studies of science and religion acknowledge a changing and multifaceted relationship between the two, and also recognize that specific and pervasive definitions for science and religion are unattainable, given that the terms have so many meanings in so many contexts. In this book I will agree with this position, seeing that in Tibetan history as in European history, the definitions of science and religion and the relationships between them are in flux and inherently contextual.

The study of science and religion in European history is well developed. More recently, scholars have been considering the relationship between science and Buddhism specifically. In Buddhism and Science: Breaking New Ground, B. Alan Wallace surveys attitudes on the relationship between religion and science that emphasize either conflict or connection. At the outset he questions the applicability of the term “religion” to Buddhism, pointing out that definitions of religion are based on Judeo-Christian models of religion. Pressing Buddhism into these molds results in a distorting neglect of many key features of practice and thought that could, with a broader definition in action, be reasonably considered part of a continuous tradition; classifying Buddhism as religion encourages one to overlook aspects of that tradition that many may consider philosophy, psychology or science, for example.

For Wallace, science is a method more than a geographically and historically situated discipline: it is an “organized, systematic enterprise that gathers knowledge about the world and condenses the knowledge into testable laws and principles.”¹⁶ With this definition, he reasons that elements of Buddhism are strongly scientific: “Buddhism, like science, presents itself as a body of systematic knowledge about the natural world, and it posits a wide array of testable hypotheses and theories concerning the nature of the mind and its relation to the physical environment.”¹⁷ Recognizing the strict disjuncture between religion and science in both popular and scholar...