Articles
“The Physician’s Pure Land: Tibetan Medicine in the Mirror of Tanaduk, 1700–1900”
Forthcoming in Asian Medicine, Spring 2026
Abstract:
Tanaduk refers to the realm of the Medicine Buddha that was first introduced in the Four Tantras. This article explores how, in early-modern Tibet, Tanaduk emerged as both a Buddhist pure land and model of an ideal natural order. Even as its existence remained contested in the Tibetan medical community, Tanaduk persisted as a medical paradigm that physicians sought to realize in their own surroundings. I argue the project of seeing the world through the mirror of the pure land was pursued in tandem with the investigation of nature. Here, Tanaduk provided a framework for ordering the natural world; but it was a framework in flux, a product of the physician’s inquiry as much as it was a guide to it. As this article contends, Tanaduk was not merely an object of theoretical speculation but a generative cosmology for Tibetan medicine.
Book Reviews
In Progress, Review of Translating Medicine across Premodern Worlds, edited by Tara Alberts, Sietske Fransen, and Elaine Leong. Asian Medicine.
2025 Review of Buddhist Healing in Medieval China and Japan, edited by C. Pierce Salguero and Andrew Macomber, and Buddhism and Healing in the Modern World, edited by C. Pierce Salguero, Kin Cheung, and Susannah Deane. Asian Medicine 20.2.