Meditation as Medicine: Tibetan Buddhist Contemplative Practices for Health and Wellbeing

By the eleventh century, Tibetan contemplatives devised practices to intentionally dispel obstructions to their health and wellbeing. These new practices were designed to both counteract challenging experiences that emerged during meditation and to enhance meditative performance. Meditators integrated novel and known principles of Buddhist contemplation to remedy psychosomatic and psychosocial disorders. Contemplative remedial interventions for dispelling and methods of enhancement were recorded in Tibetan meditation manuals, compiled in anthologies, and circulated among practitioner communities. This paper gives attention to a suite of practices that were innovated from the eleventh through the fifteenth centuries and recorded in anthologies by the founder of the Drikung Kagyü order, Jigten Gönpo Rinchen Pel (1143-1217) and the Sakya scholar Minyak Drakap Dorjé (d. 1491). Our analysis of select practices will provide an understanding of the generative processes employed in the design of practices for human health and insights about an ethnopsychology of Tibetan contemplative practices.