Knowledge about physical health and disease has held a central place within Buddhist thought, and healing has remained a persistent part of Buddhist practice since the earliest times. Though there is no universally agreed-upon term, Buddhist perspectives on health, disease, healers, patients, and therapies are typically spoken of by East Asian scholars and devotees as “Buddhist medicine” (Ch. foyi佛醫 or fojiao yixue佛教醫學, Jp. bukkyō igaku仏教医学), and this terminology is used here as a convenient shorthand for a complex topic. The earliest expressions of medical doctrine in Indian Buddhist texts are closely related to ideas found in Āyurveda and have suggestive similarities with other Eurasian medical systems (including Hippocratic, Galenic, and Islamic medicine) as well. Integrated into Buddhist philosophy, meditation, and ritual, these core doctrines and perspectives were influential in India and China, and they came to be spread as far as Iran, Mongolia, Japan, and Indonesia. Healer-monks and monastic medical institutions played a major role in this dissemination, as did the large-scale translation of texts concerning a wide range of Buddhist medical topics. In the early 21st century, many of the ideas and practices imported from India continue to lie at the foundation of traditions of medicine in Tibet, Nepal, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and other parts of Buddhist Asia. At the same time that Buddhist medicine can be understood as a transnational or cross-cultural phenomenon, however, it has always been reinterpreted locally through the lenses of the many cultures that have adopted it. Historians working on Buddhist medicine have thus focused both on the transmission of medical knowledge to new cultures and societies, as well as on the unique ideological and rhetorical uses of Buddhism by medical practitioners in many specific historical and modern settings. Social scientists have studied the degree to which Buddhist values continue to inform health policy in Asian countries and the complexities of the relationship between Buddhism and biomedicine. This article includes a selective range of scholarship on the history and modern relationship between Buddhism and medicine, with a focus on the former. Scientific studies on the health benefits of meditation, health policy advocacy, and works of a nonscholarly nature geared toward practitioners and devotees are excluded. Also omitted are topics tangential to matters of physical health, such as mental health, conceptions of the body, bioethics, the science of meditation, and so forth. Many publications of all of the above types are available and are covered in other Oxford Bibliographies in Buddhism articles, such as “Buddhism in Psychology and Psychotherapy,” “Buddhism and the Body,” and “Meditation.”
Prototype Design and Experimental Evaluation of Autonomous Collaborative Communication System for Emerging Maritime Use Cases
