Being Human in A Buddhist World: An Intellectual History of Medicine in Early Modern Tibet. By Janet Gyatso. Columbia University Press, January 20, 2015. 544 pages. ISBN-10: 0231164963 ISBN-13: 978-0231164962
摘要
The “Great Fifth” Dalai Lama, Ngawang Losang Gyatso, and his chief minister and then regent, Desi Sangyé Gyatso, designed an impressive centralized state, the Ganden Podrang (Tib. Dga' ldan pho brang), in seventeenth‐century Tibet. Gyatso writes an intellectual history of medicine's episteme and its influence on the character of the Ganden Podrang during a time of shifting intellectual and religious climate in the Tibetan cultural sphere. She argues medical knowledge was leading (perhaps?) to the modern, a breaking with tradition and authority; more importantly, Gyatso would have us see Tibet as participant in what scholars now periodize as the Early Modern, and it's the book's depicting of Tibet as such that is perhaps most challenging. The book, through intriguing case studies, displays Tibetan medical knowledge's empiricism, cumulative knowledge, and breaking with tradition and authority, through methods of criticism, record keeping, and realistic depiction. Gyatso stresses the near‐modernity of the Ganden Podrang state in its innovation in administration and its will to centralization and universality; and the medical episteme with its focus on empiricism is at the heart of such trends, pumping vital intellectual influence to the limbs of the new state. But the book's connections to scholarship on similar intellectual movements in East Asia or on periodization of “early modern” in Asia are buried in the notes, which seems a missed opportunity to more plainly locate Tibet, in its own right, in current scholarly terrain. This book greatly increases our understanding of Tibetan medical history, and could complement well readings in a graduate course on the history of science or medicine in Asia.
