The Miracle of Tibetan Medicine.
In Exile From The Land Of The Snows by John Avedon is one of the best books ever written on the Dalai Lama and Tibetan culture. One of the most interesting parts of the book is a chapter called “Tibetan Medicine: The Science Of Healing”.
Dr. Yeshi Dhonden, for many years the Dalai Lama’s personal physician, was sent in the winter of 1980 to introduce Tibetan medicine to the West. According to Avedon, American doctors and patients were “enthralled…with his unique skills”.
Avedon describes Dhonden’s visit to the University of Virginia and his diagnosis of William Schneider, a man he had never met before. Placing the three middle fingers of his right hand along the inside of Schneider’s left wrist, Dhonden made an amazing assessment:
“Many years ago, you lifted a heavy object…at that time you damaged a channel in the vicinity of your right kidney, blocking the normal flow of wind through your back. The wind has accumulated outside the channel, there is bone deterioration and the disease has become quite severe.”
Schneider confirmed that for the past three years he had indeed suffered from acute arthritis along the neck and lower back and he was in such pain that he was forced to give up his job. Schneider was amazed at Dhonden’s ability to reconstruct his past.
“In 1946, I injured my back lifting a milk can out of a cooler. I was in bed a week, and as soon as I got up I re-injured it and was bedridden again. That must have been the start of the whole problem.”
While in Virginia, Dhonden agreed to perform experiments with cancerous mice. With only a visual examination, Dhonden prescribed a general Tibetan cancer drug, consisting of over 60 ingredients. Six mice refused the cancer drug and died within 35 days. Three mice took the drug and survived for 53 days. This was the most successful result attained up to that time with that particular cancer tumor.
Dhonden described the Tibetan view of cancer as follows:
“I’ve treated perhaps one thousand cancer patients of which sixty to seventy percent have been cured. Our medical texts specify fifty-four types of tumors which appear at eighteen places in the body in one of three forms. We consider cancer to be a disease of the blood. It begins with pollutants in the environment. These, in turn, affect seven types of sentient beings in the body, two of which are most susceptible. They are extremely minute, but if you could see them, they would be round, red and flat. They can travel through the bloodstream in an instant, are formed with the embryo in the womb and normally function to maintain strength. In general, the Buddha predicted that eighteen diseases would become prevalent in our time due to two causes, low moral conduct and pollution. Cancer is one of the eighteen.”
Tibet’s medicine has a long history. It began 2,600 years ago in the great monastic universities of northern India, from where it was taken to Tibet in the 1st century B.C. From there it expanded, until by the 6th century, there were over 100 Buddhist medical texts. Some 2,000 drugs are routinely used in Tibetan medicine, many of which have found their way to China.
But unlike the U.S., where drugs are massed produced, Tibetan drugs are created individually for each patient. The goal is to restore balance to the entire body rather than attack the disease.
Tibetans believe that three factors govern the body: “wind”, which is related to the nervous system and includes the heart; “bile”, which involves the liver and the digestive system; and “phlegm”, which influences the organs of the upper body. If any of these are out of balance, the person gets sick.
Perhaps most interesting of all is chu-len, or “extracting the essence”, which deals with rejuvenation. By using these medicines, Tibetan lamas were able to survive on a single seed or flower a day on their 3, 9 or 12-year retreats.
Chu-len can restore hair and teeth, while increasing lifespan by many decades. Dhonden describes it as follows:
“Each of us breathes 21,000 times a day; 500 of these breaths are associated with lifespan. Chu-len medicines, taken in conjunction with the correct meditation practices, increase the number of these breaths. From my own experience I can definitely say they work. I’ve known people in their hundreds who have undergone the full course of treatment, beginning at the age of fifty, and been restored to a state of middle age. I met one lama when he was 170 years old. He had gray hair but the face of a forty-year-old.”
Tibetan Buddhism has perhaps the world’s most complex spiritual practices. However, it essentially involves a lifetime quest for enlightenment.
Avedon traveled with the Dalai Lama on a 1981 pilgrimage to the holiest sites of Buddhism. The Dalai Lama’s meditation is described as follows:
“By various procedures he endeavors to strip away the outer, more coarse levels of consciousness to expose the fundamental essence of mind: Clear Light. Once it is manifest, he focuses this most refined state of mind on emptiness, thereby beginning to eliminate the innate misconceptions of concrete existence, as well as their latencies or underlying traces, which together obscure omniscience.”