Part of Tibetan Medicine series
Twelve hundred years ago, the people of Tibet developed a comprehensive medical system whose practitioners understood how powerfully the mind affects the body. They made medicines from plants and minerals blessed in lengthy rituals. They encoded this knowledge in a series of elaborate paintings known as The Atlas of Tibetan Medicine.
At a time in Europe when doctors dissected corpses in secret and herbalists were being burned at the stake, Tibetan medicine flourished. Its monk doctors traveled throughout Central Asia taking both their spiritual and health practices with them. With the British invasion in 1904 and the Chinese invasion in 1959, vital texts and paintings-and with them, the primary means of teaching Tibetan medicine-survived only because they'd been smuggled into Russia. Unbeknownst to Stalin, the cloth panels of The Atlas had been secreted into museum archives in Siberia and quietly spared from his purges.
The Journey of the Blue Buddha surveys the evolving practice of Tibetan medicine in today's Chinese-controlled Tibet, as well as in the exile community of Dharamsala, India, the Russian republic of Buryatia and North America. With its message of natural healing, human connection and right living, Tibetan medicine is all the more precious for having nearly been lost.
Titles included in this series:
The Blue Buddha in Russia
