Glimpses into the Tibetan medicinal system

In Tibetan medicine, we say there are three principal energies or humours in your body, rlung, mkhrispa and badken, which are there when you are born, and they need to be in balance to allow you to function properly, both physically and mentally. If the balance is disturbed this may manifest, under the influence of factors like diet, age, lifestyle, behavior and the season, as a disease. The Tibetan doctor seeks the specific cause for each individual, unlike Western medicine which often does not diagnose the deeper reason for a disease.

Medicines will act differently on different people according to the predominant nature of the individual. We divide people into seven different natures. In Tibetan medicine, we give the medicine according to the predominant nature of the individual. In other words, the Tibetan approach to treatment is holistic and penetrates to the underlying causes of disease. This is why many diseases which are untreatable in the West can be treated by Tibetan medicine.

We believe that the mind is the number one cause of many illnesses because the state of the mind determines what happens in the body. Tibetan medicine, like Buddhism, teaches that the mind is the creator and destroyer. It can cause both disease and health, depending on the thoughts and emotions that are predominant in one’s experience.

There is also the influence of karma. We believe you have been a human being many times before, and the karmic action, or consequences, of what you did before will manifest in later lives. So karmic action combined with an imbalance in the energy in the body can also cause sickness.

However, a karmic disease will not respond to any treatment. The doctor can help by reducing the intensity of the suffering to a certain extent, but the patient has to suffer until it is over: there is no escape. The Buddha said you have to suffer the consequences of what you did and learn from it.

Tibetan medical science is called Sowa-Rigpa, the “science of healing”. Every Tibetan doctor has to undergo rigorous training before he qualifies. It takes six years to attain the first qualification, a degree equivalent to a MBB, but 30 to 40 years to complete the full training, although, of course, one continues to learn for a lifetime.

Every doctor learns how to diagnose, and how to treat the patient through astrology, herbal and mineral remedies and to use what we call external therapy. This can be moxibustion, compression, massage, purgatives etc. He will also learn about proper diet and lifestyle because in Tibetan medicine we say proper diet and lifestyle are the two major ways of maintaining health and prolonging life.

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Auroville’s connection to Tibet has a long history. His Holiness the Dalai Lama first visited Pondicherry and Auroville in 1973. On January 17 that year, he met The Mother in her room in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and the next day he visited the Auroville site. Twenty years later, on December 23 and 24, 1993, he paid his second visit to Auroville to lay the eight kg foundation stone of the Pavilion of Tibetan Culture – an earth brick that Aurovilian Claude Arpi had brought from Tibet. During his third visit in January 2009 he inaugurated the Pavilion of Tibetan Culture._ [see Auroville Today # 240, February 2009_]