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Podcast: New Books in Buddhist Studies
Episode: Janet Gyatso, Being Human in a Buddhist World: An Intellectual History of Medicine in Early Modern Tibet (Columbia University Press, 2015)
Description: Janet Gyatso‘s new book is a masterfully researched, compellingly written, and gorgeously illustrated history of medicine in early modern Tibet that looks carefully at the relationships between medicine and religion in this context. Being Human in a Buddhist World: An Intellectual History of Medicine in Early Modern Tibet (Columbia University Press, 2015) looks carefully at the “double movements” of medicine and religion from the twelfth through seventeenth centuries: at the same time, medical learning in Tibet encouraged a critical approach to religious authority while also maturing within the context of Tibetan Buddhism. Gyatso finds a turn to “evidence of the empi...