One of the most important scholars of Tibetan and Buddhist studies of the past generation, Janet Gyatso charts what is new territory for her in the history of medicine with Being Human in a Buddhist World. This is a beautifully produced, amply illustrated, and well documented history of Sowa Rikpa (the ‘Science of Healing’) that charts Tibetan medicine’s secularising (albeit incomplete) divergence from Buddhism by the seventeenth century. Previously, Gyatso had been primarily interested in the visionary dimensions of Tibetan Buddhism starting with her Berkeley PhD thesis on the fifteenth-century visionary saint Tangtong Gyalpo (1981). This focus continued with her first edited book In the Mirror of Memory: Reflections on Mindfulness and Remembrance in Indian and Tibetan Buddhism (1992), which focused on Buddhist notions of memory (smŕti). Her contribution was about how dhārańı̄ sounds and letters functioned as auditory and visual mnemonics for basic truths and teachings. She then, with Hanna Havnevik, edited Women in Tibet (2005), a major contribution to Tibetan gender history. Her work on the visionary and gendered dimensions of Tibetan Buddhism came together in her first monograph, Apparitions of the Self: The Secret Autobiographies of a Tibetan Visionary (1998), in which she examined the autobiographical dimensions of visions as well as the enigmatic female figure (dākinı̄) who appeared within them.

Being Human in a Buddhist World marks a shift in direction from Gyatso’s previous scholarship by focusing on one of the most important political figures of seventeenth-century Tibet, Desi Sangyé Gyatso (1653–1705). Although primarily known as the regent for the Fifth Dalai Lama, Ngawang Lobsang Gyatso (1617–1682), and chief strategist behind creating an independent Tibetan state, he was also responsible for major transformations in Tibetan medicine during the same period. Indeed, many of the medical texts and artwork produced under Desi’s patronage became integrated into the rich textual tradition of Sowa Rikpa. Although the primary sources for this book span the twelfth to the seventeenth centuries, it is organised thematically rather than chronologically around the major argument that Tibetan medicine had separated out from Tibetan Buddhism as an independent realm of inquiry beyond the realm of ‘religious revelation’ by the second half of the seventeenth century. Gyatso shows through close reading of visual as well as textual evidence how Tibetan medical authors and artists challenged the prevailing religious authority based on ‘Buddha’s word’ through processes similar to those found in early modern science and medicine in Europe – empiricism, scepticism, individualism, etc. – but independent of any European influence. Gyatso’s bold comparative framing with science in early modern Europe as well as arguments about modernity (or rather modernities), and conflicts between religion and science, makes the Tibetan historical record more broadly significant.

The book’s seven chapters are divided into three parts that move in reverse chronological order from the second half of the seventeenth century when Sowa Rikpa reached its high point back to the twelfth century when its textual foundations were established. Part I, ‘In the Capital’ (Chapters 1–2), thereby introduces the reader to Desi Sangyé Gaytso and the political, institutional and medical world of seventeenth-century Lhasa in which he lived that made it possible for him to patronise a rare set of seventy-nine illustrated tangka scrolls on a wide range of medical issues; the voluminous biographies of both the Fifth and Sixth Dalai Lamas; the history of the Gandenpa medical school in Lhasa and Desi’s history of medicine up to that time. Part II, ‘Bones of Contention’ (Chapters 3–5, plus a coda), then examines several debates within Tibetan medicine that put textual and religious authority in conflict with authority based instead on historical experience, material conditions and observations of the human body. The second part’s coda examines how Desi’s responses to these earlier debates favoured authority based on Buddhist revelation over medical knowledge despite having contributed significantly to the development of medicine as a realm of inquiry separate from religion. Finally, Part III, ‘Roots of the Profession’ (Chapters 6–7), goes back to the formative Tibetan medical texts in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that discussed empirically the human body, gender differences – even a third sex – as well as the medical ethics, virtues, values and ways of learning necessary for the formation of a good physician.

Although a historical narrative would have been more conventional and one I would have preferred, the reverse chronological structure of this book – from the seventeenth-century highpoint of Sowa Rikpa back to its foundations from the seventh century on – works as Gyatso’s narrative strategy to capture her readers’ attention. She thus first places her main protagonist, Desi, and his medical legacy within the broader late seventeenth-century political world in which he was a key player. She then disentangles the various ‘bones of contention’ and ‘roots of the profession’ that Desi inherited from his medical predecessors. The final chapter on the ‘Ethics of Being Human’ details the key virtues the ideal Tibetan physician should embody based on both clinical experience and real-life professional competition and sums up the ‘medical mentality’ or human way of practising Tibetan medicine that stressed compassion toward patients and an understanding of the absoluteness of death. Being Human in a Buddhist World is written for historians of medicine and religion in Asia with an eye toward historians of medicine, science and religion in Europe but with its clear structure, well-articulated arguments, and beautiful illustrations it could potentially capture the attention of Buddhists and healers anywhere in the world.