Abstract
This article introduces the life and medical histories of the luminary Khalkha Mongolian monk, Lungrik Tendar (Tib. Lung rigs bstan dar; Mon. Lungrigdandar, c. 1842–1915). Well known for his exegesis of received medical works from Central Tibet, Lungrik Tendar was also a historian of the Four Tantras (Tib. Rgyud bzhi; Mon. Dörben ündüsü). In 1911, just as Khalkha Mongolia began separating from a flailing Qing Empire, Lungrik Tendar set out to append the story of Mongolia and of Mongolian medicine, political formation, and religious life to the Four Tantra’s well-known global histories. In addition, he provided an illuminating summary of how to present the Four Tantras to a popular audience in the twilight of the imperial period. This article introduces the life of Lungrik Tendar and analyzes his previously unstudied medical history from 1911, The Stainless Vaiḍūrya Mirror. On the basis of this understudied text, this article explores ways that monastic medicine in the frontier scholastic worlds of the late-Qing Empire were dependent upon aesthetic representations of space and time and of knowledge acquisition and practice, and how such medical aesthetics helped connect the religious, political, legal, economic, and social worlds of Asia’s heartland on the eve of nationalist and socialist revolution and state-directed erasure.
Highlights
This article introduces the life and medical histories of the luminary Khalkha Mongolian monk, Lungrik Tendar
According to the histories of monastic medicine that Lungrik Tendar inherited and dramatically extended at the turn of the 20th century, the Buddha taught techniques to diagnose and treat symptoms of imbalance or malice as diverse as constipation, war, deficiencies of the womb, While Lungrik Tendar lived in Khalkha, this was decades before the language reforms that replaced the vertical Mongolian script with a standardized Cyrillic alphabet and spelling conventions based on Khalkha dialect
Lungrik Tendar was most celebrated for his turn of the 20th century exegesis of Central Tibetan medical praxis, and for building upon that knowledge based on the ecologies of local Khalkha botany and ritual tradition
Summary
One of the most vexed debates in the monastic historiography about medicine in Inner Asia concerned the authorship of its central text, the Four Medical Tantras. Fifth Dalai Lama but not Sanggyé Gyatso, Lungrik Tendar identifies the historical Buddha Śakyamuni as the well-spring of not just Buddhist medicine and the Four Tantras, and of several non-Buddhist medical systems as well His evidence is lifted from previous Tibetan and Mongolian authors of khog ‘bugs and sman gyi chos ‘byung, from many sūtras and tantras containing medical narratives, the abhidharma corpus, as well as vinaya scriptures that regularly describe the Buddha and his immediate disciples involved in matters medical.. This history is well known in secondary scholarship and there is no need to summarize it here.
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