c. 1996 Religion News Service
JERUSALEM (RNS)-In antiquity, health and healing were the domain of monks, shamans and priests. But that intimate link was broken long ago in most parts of the world.
One exception was the Tibetan highlands, where geographical isolation from the West helped preserve a 1,700-year-old medical tradition that combined spiritual healing and native herbal remedies.
Now, interest in traditional Tibetan medical remedies is being rekindled in another ancient religious center-Israel. The country’s most prestigious medical research institution, Hadassah Hebrew University Hospital, has embarked on the largest study ever of Tibetan medicine, which for centuries was the exclusive domain of Buddhist monk-doctors.
Until now, much of the international medical research into traditional herb remedies has focused on the screening of individual plants for active ingredients that could be duplicated synthetically and patented to create new drugs.
Hadassah’s Natural Medicine Research Unit is one of only a handful of research enterprises around the world that study traditional medicinal recipes-which may include dozens of plant and herb combinations.”There are a lot of people looking at plants. But to look at traditional medical formulas in a scientific way is very rare,”says Dr. Sarah Sallon, director and founder of the small center.
She believes that many of the Tibetan remedies may be effective precisely because of the synergistic effect of different plants and herbs interacting with one another.
Sallon, a British-born pediatrician who has specialized in malnutrition and chronic intestinal illness, became fascinated with Tibetan medicine while working in India in the late 1980s.
After being cured of a persistent intestinal infection by a traditional Indian doctor administering a herbal remedy, she trekked to Dharamsala in the foothills of the Himalayas, where she had heard that an extensive Tibetan medical tradition was being preserved.
It is to Dharamsala that the Dalai Lama and thousands of Tibetan exiles settled following the occupation of Tibet by the Chinese in the late 1950s.
While most traditional Eastern remedies-such as Chinese acupuncture-have largely been severed from the original religious and spiritual philosophies that nurtured them, Tibetan medicine developed differently, says Sallon.”Because Tibet was so isolated, medicine remained the domain of monks until relatively recently and retained its connection to the religious teachings,”she notes.”Because it had been so isolated it was uncorrupted.” Tibetan medicine developed directly from the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama, a Hindu prince of the sixth century B.C. who renounced his title to seek enlightenment. Known after his enlightenment as the Buddha, he spawned a religious movement that spread from India to Tibet, China, Korea and Japan.
The esoteric teachings of Tantric Buddhism gradually permeated Tibet in the fourth or fifth century A.D. There is evidence that writing first developed in Tibet in order to translate Buddhist medical texts from the original Sanskrit, says Sallon.
In the early 1960s, Tibetan monk-doctors, who had traditionally passed on the tradition in remote monasteries, founded the first formal school for traditional Tibetan medicine in Dharamsala and opened it to the broader community.
The school, the Tibetan Medical Institute, represented an effort to preserve the ancient tradition under the new conditions of exile. It was at the Dharamsala center that Sallon first met the personal physician to the Dalai Lama, Tenzin Choedak, chief medical officer at the institute.
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Sallon recalls a remark by Choedak that had a lasting impact on her as a physician.”He said that the Buddha taught that the origin of all disease is ignorance, which gives rise to three mental poisons-hatred, delusion and detachment.”As a Jew I was very drawn to the mystical tradition of Tibetan medicine-since there is much in Jewish tradition, particularly mystical tradition-that connects healing with a spiritual origin. Even if as doctors working in Israel we are very Western-oriented, nevertheless, within religious tradition, the essential metaphysical spiritual connection to healing remains.”(END OPTIONAL TRIM)
Even before the opening of the Dharamsala institute, Tibetan medicine had traveled a circuitous route to the West. Tibetan monks first carried their medical knowledge with them to Mongolia in the 13th century.
In 1857, Sul-Tin Badma, a senior Mongolian lama who had studied Tibetan medicine in a remote monastery in the Russian-controlled region of Siberian Mongolia, moved to St. Petersburg, converted to Christianity and opened the first Tibetan herbal pharmacy in Europe.
The lama, who adopted the name Alexander Badmaev, became a physician to the czar’s court. His nephew, Wladamir, who studied Tibetan medicine in Mongolia and Western medicine in Moscow, fled to Warsaw during the 1917 Revolution, carrying Tibetan medicine even farther west.
In the late 1960s, Swiss pharmaceutical consultant Karl Lutz obtained the original Tibetan formulas from Wladamir’s son, Peter, and established a small, modern drug company, called Padma Ltd., to produce the natural remedies in Zurich.
The company produced exact replicas of the original recipes in a modern laboratory, using imported Tibetan herbs or, when available, organically grown European plants.
In 1993, on her return from India, Sallon visited Padma in Switzerland and shortly after that began running the first trials on the recipes at Hadassah.
When the Dalai Lama visited Israel in 1994, he visited Hadassah at Sallon’s invitation to address the medical faculty on the topic of Tibetan medicine. Since then, the Hadassah research project has grown into the largest study in the world on traditional Tibetan medicine.
So far, most of the medical research has focused on only several of the dozens of traditional Tibetan formulas, particularly a preparation called Padma-28, which has been marketed on a modest scale in several European countries for two decades.
Published clinical research both from Hadassah and Hebrew University researchers, as well as from earlier trials abroad, has indicated that the formula is a powerful antioxidant that may be helpful in the treatment of peripheral vascular disease-or clogged arteries.
It is very fitting that the traditional use of the remedy-which includes marigold, moss, clove, columbine, ginger and valerian-was for the treatment of”heat disorders”resulting from an overconsumption of meat, fat and alcohol, says Sallon.
In a certain sense, modern research has taken Tibetan medicine out of its holistic context in order to test the herbal remedies in the laboratory and in controlled clinical trials, Sallon admits.”A Tibetan doctor would never resort to medicine as a first line of treatment,”she observes.”He would look at diet and at the physical and emotional basis for the disease. That’s why Tibetan medicine was called the `gentle art of treating.'”(BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM)
Still, Dr. Herbert Schwabl, director of Padma and an Austrian-trained biophysicist, says that research into the interactive effects of the complex Tibetan recipes remains in the original Buddhist spirit.”Basic science takes a reductionist view of drugs,”says Schwabl.”It looks at what are the active ingredients, and then seeks to purify these plants and sell them as white powder. We believe there are a lot of scientific findings which don’t fit the reductionist approach.”There are a lot of people running around talking about holistic medicine,”adds Schwabl.”But you have to give meaning to this term, and this can only be done by hard work, scientific work.” In keeping with a holistic approach, Hadassah’s Natural Medicine Research unit also has launched other research projects examining the medical effect of Eastern mind-body meditation techniques, such as yoga-taught with a Jewish slant. Yet another study is seeking to bring natural medicine closer to home by cataloging long-ignored Middle Eastern medicinal plants, many of which were first mentioned in the Bible.
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Ultimately, Sallon sees a deep philosophical link between the Jewish tradition in which she is grounded and the Eastern approach upon which her research is focused.”The concept of holistic healing and the wholeness of the individual is very much a part of Jewish tradition,”she says.”Ultimately, the philosophies are very similar. The Hebrew word for doctor, `rofeh’ is even derived from the name of the angel of healing, Rafael.” Jewish religious tradition, she adds, speaks about a”Book of Healing”that was passed down by Noah through the ancient Hebrew generations and reportedly contained cures for all types of diseases. Hezekiah, the sixth century B.C. king of Judea, was said to have hidden the book, believing that people would have no need for God if they knew the cure for all illness.”Isn’t it interesting that at approximately the same time as that book was said to have disappeared, Buddha began teaching the four tantras of all disease,”says Sallon.”Even as one medical tradition was concealed, another appeared.”
MJP END FLETCHER
