A Missing Link in the History of Chinese Medicine: Research Note on the Medical Contents of the Taishō Tripiṭaka

Abstract

Numerous texts were produced roughly between 150 and 1100 CE that introduced Indian medicine to East Asia. These have historically represented a relatively discrete corpus of health-related knowledge, relatively unintegrated into Chinese medicine and often ignored in mainstream Chinese medical historiography. Buddhist texts do not provide straightforward evidence of a unitary tradition of healing that was transplanted from India to China. However, these sources are critical to understanding the history of medicine in medieval China. In addition, it is not an exaggeration to say that this corpus offers one of the most voluminous sources of textual evidence for the transregional communication and reception of medical ideas in first millennium CE Asia that is available anywhere. Despite the fact that over the long term they were not nearly as significant in Chinese medical history as classical medical models, Buddhist ideas and practices deserve more attention than they have received thus far from our field. This brief research note is meant to introduce historians of Chinese medicine to one easily accessible collection of texts that can be used to begin to fill in this ‘missing link.’