UC Berkeley

After the conclusion of the bitterly sectarian Mongol-Tsang war in 1642, the Fifth Dalai Lama Ngawang Lopzang Gyatso (1617–1682) created a state system of medicine in Central Tibet – patronizing medical schools, printing textbooks, and implementing official examinations – as a central project of Buddhist governance. Reasoning that medicine was a type of non-sectarian or impartial knowledge that could "benefit enemies, [and] make enemies into friends," he began to patronize the Sanctuary of Assembled Sages (Drang srong 'dus pa'i gling), a medical school of the Tsarong family lineage, previously associated with the defeated King of Tsang, the Zur medical tradition, and the Kagyü order of Tibetan Buddhism (rivals to the Dalai Lamas' own Gelukpa order). In 1676 the Fifth Dalai Lama wrote a set of regulatory guidelines (bca' yig) for the Tsarong school in order to reconfigure the school's primary ritual practice, the Yutok Heart Essence (G.yu thog snying thig), and institute his own new Medicine Buddha Sūtra liturgy (Sman bla'i mdo chog). Within these Guidelines, the Fifth Dalai Lama distinguished a faulty tantric ritual framework and "wrong views" associated with the Kagyü tradition, which he claimed could be refuted, from the Tsarong school's medical treatment methods, which he argued could still be suitable to practice through a reliance on correct bodhisattva motivation and ethical discipline. In doing so, the Fifth Dalai Lama laid the groundwork for an official Tibetan Buddhist medical orthodoxy, or ritual framework for medical learning and practice, that would bracket differences in "view" between medical lineages and authorize the transmission of medical technologies across Tibetan and foreign contexts.