The Buddhist Visual Culture of Tibetan Medicine

BUDDHIST STUDIES FORUM

SPEAKER: Briana Brightly, Harvard University

When imagining the creation of Buddhist art, few picture the artist observing dissections, studying materia medica, or diagramming disease. Yet this is precisely what happened in seventeenth-century Lhasa. In this talk, I follow a Tibetan Buddhist painter into the history of science. My focus is the Blue Beryl paintings, a set of seventy-nine paintings which blur the line between sacred image and medical diagram. Trained to paint buddhas and bodhisattvas, the Blue Beryl artists adapted the techniques of their trade to depict everything from embryology and anatomy to botany and divination. By tracing the making of these paintings, I challenge conventional distinctions between religious art and scientific illustration. The history of medicine in Tibet, I argue, cannot be told apart from the history of Buddhist art.

About the Speaker

Briana Brightly is a Ph.D. candidate in the Committee on the Study of Religion. Her dissertation, titled “Anatomy of the Buddha: Making Images during the Golden Age of Tibetan Medicine, 1600–1800,” investigates the intersection of medicine and Buddhist visual culture in early-modern Tibet. Recurrent areas of interest include the history of science, medicine, and technology; history of pharmacy; craft knowledge; and the study of religion, science, and material culture, more broadly. Brightly holds a B.A. from Reed College, and an M.A. in Religious Studies from Vanderbilt University.