Buddhism, Medicine and the Everyday World: Issues around Religion and Science in Tibetan Intellectual History: 3rd Annual Khyentse Lecture

Lecture | February 17 | 5-7 p.m. | Institute of East Asian Studies (2223 Fulton, 6th Floor), IEAS Conference Room, sixth floor, 2223 Fulton Street

Speaker/Performer: Janet Gyatso, Harvard Divinity School

Sponsor: Center for Buddhist Studies

By the 12th century A.D. academically based medical science in Tibet had already developed an intellectual and institutional trajectory that was separate from that of Buddhism, even though it was frequently taught at schools that were part of Buddhist monasteries. Looking at the sites of disjuncture -- as well as the overlap -- between Buddhist systems of knowledge and those of medicine helps us to appreciate the ways that religion interacted with the everyday world of people in traditional Tibet. While on the one hand medicine posed an epistemic challenge to Buddhism, the relation between the two systems was close enough for it also to serve as the principal example of Buddhist influence in human culture more generally in Tibet. This talk will look closely at several moments in Tibetan history when the two came into conflict, and how such conflicts were resolved.

Janet Gyatso is a specialist in Buddhist studies with concentration on Tibetan and South Asian cultural history. Her books include Apparitions of the Self: The Secret Autobiographies of a Tibetan Visionary; In the Mirror of Memory: Reflections on Mindfulness and Remembrance in Indian and Tibetan Buddhism; and Women of Tibet. Her current book project is an intellectual history of traditional medical science in Tibet, and raises questions about early modernity and disjunctures between religious and scientific epistemologies. She has also been writing on conceptions of sex and gender in Buddhist monasticism, and on the current female ordination movement in Buddhism. Previous topics of her scholarship have included visionary revelation in Buddhism; issues concerning lineage, memory, and authorship; philosophical questions on the status of experience; and autobiographical writing in Tibet. Gyatso was president of the International Association of Tibetan Studies from 2000 to 2006, and is now co-chair of the Buddhism Section of the American Academy of Religion.

Event Contact: buddhiststudies@berkeley.edu, 510-643-5104