The Buddha's Art of Healing: Tibetan Paintings Rediscovered

Tibetan medicine--its ancient knowledge, its pragmatic use of herbs--is gaining increasing attention in the West. This book presents the world's most important collection of Tibetan medical art, an illustrated 17th-century medical text known as The Atlas of Tibetan Medicine, created by the teacher and scholar Sangye Gyamtso, regent of the Great Fifth Dalai Lama. The paintings are currently held by the History Museum in Ulan Ude, near Lake Baikal in Siberia. It is an area of Russia where the Tibetan-Buddhist monasteries that were destroyed under Stalin are now being rebuilt, a reminder of the vast extent of Tibetan cultural influence.

The book is important both as art--the paintings are imaginative and of very high quality--and as the outline of an entire system of medical diagnosis and treatment. Introductory chapters describe the history and foundations of Tibetan medicine, the exciting story of the atlas's salvation from destruction in the 1930s, and the basic theories and concepts that underpin Tibetan medicine. Forty of the most important thankhas that make up the atlas are illustrated and explained in detailed commentaries. Readers discover a work that is more than a treatise on medicine, embodying a total concept of humankind as biological and social beings, combining physical and spiritual attributes in sophisticated ways that are the antithesis of the fragmentation and alienation of modern Western life. --John Stevenson