ABSTRACT
In an obvious way, medical systems are naturally about human bodies. In the previous chapter, however, we wondered whether the organized presentation of the human body’s structure and functional features may, in fact, play less of a role in the history of Tibetan medical literature than we might have assumed. Indeed, strange as it may sound to the modern ear, it will serve us to note that the inclusion of the study of the body in the field of medicine in Europe – in the form of physiology, anatomy, or embryology for example – is a particular historical occurrence in our own intellectual history.1 Even a cursory look at Buddhism, on the other hand, tells us that systematic presentations of the body are of vital importance for religious thinkers of that tradition. It is well known that Buddhist theorists have generated tomes of scholarship on the classification and functions of various aspects of mind or mentality – a topic clearly separate in Buddhism from the study of the body. But narratives of gestation are, on the most literal level, explicitly focused on the development of the body, not the mind. What it is that this topic allowed Tibetan writers to say about the body?
