John F. Avedon

Arthur M. Sackler Gallery (Smithsonian Institution)

The Buddha's Art of Healing provides a rich introduction to the world of Tibetan medicine, a cultural achievement considered by the Dalai Lama to be one of Tibet's most valuable contributions to the modern world. Illustrated with intricate and vivid scroll paintings based on The Atlas of Tibetan Medicine, a seventeenth-century masterpiece that is the foundation of Tibetan medical education, this volume explores pertinent global concerns and contributes profound insights to enhance rather than supplant Western medical science. The paintings, commissioned around the turn of the century and now in the collection of the History Museum of Buryatia in Russia, are from the only surviving set of medical tangkas outside Tibet. Together they express the high point of an ancient and uniquely effective system of healing based on a combination of precision and intuition. The integration of physical, mental, and spiritual health inherent in this system and its emphasis on ethics and ecological balance are both relevant and timely. Complementing the paintings are essays by renowned scholars that elucidate the conceptual and theoretical foundations of Tibetan medicine and describe the role of the paintings as mnemonic and meditational devices in the training of physicians. Each of the forty paintings is reproduced as a full-page plate and described in detail with commentary on its visual content and symbolism. The paintings illustrated in The Buddha's Art of Healing will be seen for the first time in the West in an international exhibition that opens at the Michael C. Carlos Museum in Atlanta and travels to the Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C., and other venues.

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