Tibetan Medicine

The Creation of Inner Mongolia Inner Mongolia was created as a separate entity from the rest of Mongolia by the Manchus, because the Mongols in this region submitted to the Manchus in the mid-seventeenth century, about 60 years before Khalkha, or what later became known as...

Introduction  This seminar is about how the five Buddha-family traits create our view of the universe. This is a topic that deals with what we call in Buddhism “Buddha-nature.” The word “family” in “Buddha-family” is actually the Sanskrit word for caste, a social system that...

A Q&A session between Dr. Berzin and his students about the principles and usages of Tibetan medicine.

Inner Kalachakra concerns the cycles that the body undergoes, such as the life cycle and the passage of the breath during each day.

Tibetan medicine is based on the principle that overcoming disease requires balancing not only the humors and elements in the body and one’s diet and behavior, but also gaining balance on the emotional/mental level.

Diagnosis of disease in Tibetan medicine is done by a three-fold process: visual examination, pulse and urine analysis, and questioning the patient about symptoms.

Examine the contents of the first two chapters as they appear in “The Abridged Kalachakra Tantra” and its commentary, “Stainless Light.” The first concerns the external cycles of time, the second the internal cycles.

Treatment is made by suggesting patients modify their diet and behavior, and then prescribing herbal medicines, as well as sometimes acupuncture, moxabustion or other external proce­dures.

An overview of the history of Tibetan medicine from the pre-Buddhist Bon tradition, the Indian Buddhist medical tradi­tion introduced by Vairochana, to the spread of the Tibetan medical system to the Mongol regions.

There are various systems of classification of diseases in Tibetan medicine in which they are viewed as imbalances caused by internal or external factors or both. The most common classifications are in terms of imbalances of the three humors (wind, bile and phlegm) and the...