The World the Medicine Buddha Built: Tibetan Medical Governance in Qing Inner Asia

During the period remembered today for the rise of science along global sea routes, an inland network of roughly two hundred medical colleges emerged within Buddhist monasteries across the Inner Asian borderlands and imperial centers of Qing China (1644–1911). Mapping this vast network, this project reveals how Buddhist medical institutions brought Tibetan and Mongolian technologies to the heart of imperial governance as the Qing Empire expanded over Inner Asia. It employs a range of Tibetan, Chinese, and Mongolian sources, including premodern and modern monastic surveys, monastic regulations, medical and monastic histories, biographies, and medical (including ritual) texts. Bridging institutional and cultural history, it examines how monastic medical colleges bolstered sometimes-competing projects of local, regional, and imperial rule, and how Buddhist medical institutions became crucial to structuring a distinctively Inner Asian sphere of education and statecraft that both complemented and competed with the Qing Confucian bureaucracy. It considers an arena of ongoing debates (largely in the Tibetan scholarly lingua franca) between monastic scholarly and lay medical practitioners, in which the nature of expertise, access to expertise, and the negotiation of effective versus appropriate methods for both medicine and governance were all at stake. Finally, by tracing these debates into the post-imperial period, it demonstrates how institutional competition produced distinctions that became constitutive of fragmented national subjectivities—evident through projects of public health reform—in twentieth-century China and Inner Asia.