Visualizing Buddhism and Medicine

In this paper, I explore the role of Buddhist iconometry in the production of new anatomical knowledge in early-modern Tibet. In 1687, the painter Lhodrak Tenzin Norbu went where no Tibetan artist had ever gone before: the surgeon’s dissection table. There, he carefully observed and sketched the liver, heart, and spleen of a recently dissected corpse. Before his work as an artist-anatomist, Norbu earned widespread recognition as a master of Buddhist iconometry, the tradition of divine proportions foundational to sacred art in Tibet. I argue that Norbu adapted iconometry into a technology of scientific visualization that provided a precise system for anatomical mapping. As I show, at the end of the seventeenth century, iconometry answered more than just the question, “How should the Buddha be represented?” It also addressed a new and pressing challenge: “How do we visualize human anatomy?”

Paper talismans were among the most frequently ingested medicines in the premodern Buddhist world. Within the diverse forms of “Buddhist edibles,” this paper examines talismans from the Chosŏn period that were specifically employed to counteract gu poisoning, one of the most potent and feared toxins in premodern East Asia. The first half of the paper analyzes the visual elements of gu talismans, demonstrating how the deliberate arrangement of symbolic and textual components contributed to their perceived therapeutic efficacy. The latter half explores the inverse process—ingesting the talismans—to illuminate the interplay between the revelation and concealment of their visual potency. By situating this practice within the broader discourse on iconophages, this study foregrounds an understudied dimension of the “internal visualization” of healing talismans, offering new insights into their role within the material life cycle of powerful ritual objects such as paper talismans.

This paper discusses the integration of visual narrative tropes within illustrations of disease-demons produced by Buddhist monks in medieval Japan. In particular, it examines On the Types of Corpse-vector Disease (Denshibyō shu no koto, ca. 1300), a ritual and medical manuscript. Although On the Types has remained entirely unknown in research on art history and Buddhism in Japan, this work made an outsized contribution to the iconography of illness, supplying what would become the template for graphically representing pathogens. What made On the Types influential, I argue, was how its compilers depicted scenes of pathogenic horror inspired by narrative: the harrowing moment when demons assault their human victims and induce a fatal affliction. This attempt to channel the captivating power of narrative horror into disease representation, I demonstrate, cannot be understood through ritual and medical texts alone, but must be grasped alongside currents of narrative visual culture in medieval Japan.

In the post-mortem meditative state of tukdam, the bodies of advanced Tibetan Buddhist practitioners stay lifelike for days or even weeks after clinical death. These extraordinary bodies share in characteristics of images as articulated by film and cultural theorists as well as anthropologists writing on mortuary traditions. I focus on the dynamic of presence and absence, central to images, life and death, and tukdam. Unlike images and normal corpses, which make present what is absent, a tukdam body is, by definition, imbued with presence. Beyond astonishing physical signs like non-decay and suppleness, tukdam bodies exhibit dhang (mdangs). Sometimes translated as “radiance,” this can be understood as a visual manifestation of presence. Challenging photographic representation, once seen as the paragon of objectivity, as well as attempts at scientific measurement, the perception of dhang seems to resist categorization into objective or subjective domains through a visuality – and felt presence – that exceeds both.