Health and Sickness of Body and Mind: Selections from the Yogācāra-bhūmi

Health and Sickness of Body and Mind

Selections from the Yogācāra

Dan Lusthaus

T he passages translated in this chapter illustrate ways that Asaṅga incorporated medical knowledge into his largest work, the Yogācāra-bhūmi , a foundational scrip-ture for the Yogācāra school (pronounced “yoga-chara”).

Asaṅga and his half brother Vasubandhu are credited with founding Yogācāra in the fourth century. As one of the two forms of Mahāyāna that was practiced in India (the other is Madhyamaka), it focused on mental development and cleansing the mind of distorted understandings ofreality.The Yogācāra-bhūmi details seventeen contextual experiential domains called bhūmi

The selections here draw from dierent bhūmis, each showcasing distinctive ways that the Yogācāra-bhūmi

applies medical knowledge. The rst and longest passage is from the second

bhūmi , the “mentalizing domain” ( mano-bhūmi ), 3

and moves from psychosomatic interplay to the medical and hygienic activities aecting life and death. This excerpt uses medicine as a source of ethical guidelines.

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The second selection, a very short ex-cerpt from the tenth bhūmi

on “ways of acquiring and learning the teachings” (ś

rutamāyī-bhūmi ), provides a terse overview of the science of medicine. The third passage, found in the same bhūmi but in the section on epistemology, occurs as part of the explanation´of the denition of perception. 5

Intriguingly, it uses the example of an expert physician selecting appropriate medicine to explain the nonconceptualizing nature of a momentof perception. The nal selection from the thirteenth bhūmi , the domain of the “Hearers” 6

(i.e., theories and practices of non-Mahāyāna Buddhists), lists repulsive impurities