[Buddha-l] Re: Aama do.sa I

[Dan Lusthaus]

Chris,

> Should we geographically compartmentalise things so much?

Slow down. That people moved around, especially (but not exclusively) for
trade, is not in dispute. What happens when people from different cultures,
or different parts of a shared culture, encounter each other and intermingle
is a complex business, and doesn't entail a wholesome transference by
osmosis of everything from one culture to the other. India was already
engaged in trade with Solomon, so trade routes were quite early. That does
not automatically entail that medical knowledge flowed through those
channels as well.

Medical knowledge is a special case -- a guild of highly trained and skilled
practitioners, that often jealously guard their professional secrets. Some
treatments for common illnesses might be transmitted, but detailed medical
training -- the kind, for instance, described in Caraka-samhita, which
devotes a good deal of attention to aapta (traditional authority, learning
from the teacher, exposing charlatans who give legitimate doctors a bad
name, etc.), is not for general distribution by businessmen. One expects
with cross cultural encounters to find foreign coins, influences on art,
etc. Transference of medical knowledge is something else. If the local
medicine is not working well enough, there may be interest in foreign
versions that seem to offer more effective treatments; if the general theory
or metaphysics on which medicine rests (e.g., certain theories of physics in
Greece; Samkhyan guna theory in the CS -- and, to be honest, the do.sa
theory one finds in the Pali vinaya has much in common with these Samkhyan
elements -- sorry, Joy!) loses favor or shifts, then alternate medical
theories more in line with the new metaphysics will be embraced or
developed. Pulse theory was brought to India late, most scholars think by
Muslims. Chinese pulse theory did not enter India, as far as we know.

When Yijing (old transcription: I-ching or I-tsing) wrote about India and
the Islands around the Malaysian archipelago in the 7th c, after many years
traveling and study there, he included a chapter on medicine, since,
apparently, he had already studied some Chinese medicine while still in
China, and was curious about the Indian counterparts. He gets the basic
countours right, but fudges many details -- an indication of how hard even
an earnest student of medicine (who is not a full time practicing doctor)
would have integrating or even understanding foreign medicine. And that it
was all still very new and exotic to him indicates how little, if at all,
any of that lore had penetrated into China by that time.

One of the reasons CS is considered so early -- despite generally being
recognized as a stratified text (i.e., parts written at different times
eventually stitched together) -- is that some important developments in
Indian medicine, e.g., pulse theory, are not yet evident there. We have a
general sense of how and where medical knowledge traveled through the
ancient world. Our knowledge is imperfect, and there are lots of unknown and
unclear details, but the basics are known. That medical traditions assign
hoary antiquity to their origins with prominent figures as their patriarchs
(Nagarjuna, in the case of this southern medicine; the Yellow Emperor in the
case of Ch. medicine) is also a well known feature, though rarely
historically reliable.

Medical systems built on different theoretical foundations are not that easy
to intermix. The integration of Indian medical knowledge into Chinese
medicine is still only vaguely understood. Herbs and plants unavailable in
one place or another will be useless as treatments. Chinese anatomical
theory is quite different from the Indian version -- the understanding of
organs, their functions, interrelations, etc., are all quite different. One
finds many superficial similarities, but once one scratches below the
surface one finds they rest on very different foundations and contexts.
E.g., for some aspects of Chinese medicine that overlap our recent
discussion of aama, see
http://intl.elsevierhealth.com/e-books/viewbook.cfm?ID=443

(a pdf file, about 48 pp). The similarities and disparities should be
obvious.

The Yoga Ratna Mala contains spells -- this sort thing, in one form or
another, is found everywhere, and is often a part of primitive or folk
medicine. It has late vedic roots (or, one might argue, folk traditions
already on the ground enter the vedic corpus late).

As for Asanga, the medical lore he presents has little in common with this
sort of folk tradition (though, in the non-medical portions of his texts
some comparable "magical" ideas occasionally appear). On the other hand, his
terminology, order of presentation, analytic style, etc., has much in common
with the CS. So some shared tradition -- between Buddhists and CS-style
physicians -- must have existed.

As for alchemy and tantra, there is still plenty of debate on their origins.
In a recent book, _Great Clarity: Daoism and Alchemy in Early Medieval
China_, Fabrizio Pregadio, who has been working on these materials for many
years and is probably our leading expert today, claims that what he
identifies as "alchemical" texts first appear around the 3rd c. This, of
course, depends on how one defines alchemy. Many scholars (e.g. Arthur
Waley) have argued that it is found much earlier, for instance, in the Han
Shu (1st c BCE). I know of no comparable Indian materials in this period
with reliable dates.

As for tantra, Sri Lanka did play a pivotal role in its transmission to
China -- in the 8th and 9th centuries. When Xuanzang was in India (ca.
629-645) he wanted to travel to Sri Lanka because he heard that Yogacara was
dominant there. Due to warfare and political problems, he had to abort his
attempts to travel there (Sri Lanka underwent several centuries of civil war
that spilled over onto the mainland). A century later, tantric missionaries
came to China, either from Sri Lanka, or with tantric texts acquired in Sri
Lanka; they were called in China Yogacaryas or Yogacaras, probably not
because they were followers of Asanga and Vasubandhu, but because they
considered their practice a kind of yoga (one wonders whether Xuanzang's
informants were also dabbling in this conflation; that some form of
Yogacara-type teaching existed in Sri Lanka is, however, suggested by the
title of the Lankavatara Sutra). Were it not for that transmission to China,
we probably would know nothing about that, since the traditional Sri Lankan
histories are virtually silent on the subject.

It is also curious that while the "center" of gravity for India, at least in
the Indian self-image, always seemed to reside in the Central areas
(Banares, Nalanda, Ujjain, Vallabhi, etc.), the greatest innovators and
innovations seem to come either from the South (Nagarjuna, Bhavaviveka,
Dignaga, Candrakirti, etc.) or Kashmir. They "made it," however, when their
ideas and works were adopted and accepted in the "center."

Dan