Buddhist Healing Traditions Reimagined

Buddhist contributions to health and wellness are often oversimplified. As editors C. Pierce Salguero, Kin Cheung, and Susannah Deane highlight in their new book, “modern Buddhist healing activities are much more diverse than the narrow range of mindfulness techniques that have dominated the Western popular media.” Exploring the intersection between Buddhist traditions and healing practices, Buddhism and Healing in the Modern World offers a nuanced examination of how notions of health, illness, and healing inform Buddhist communities’ medical and spiritual landscapes. 

The book investigates how traditional healing methods associated with Buddhism have evolved and adapted during various Buddhist communities’ encounters with modernity and globalization and their merging with scientific and biomedical paradigms. Zen meditation, mantra chanting, Tibetan Buddhist ritual performances, popular mindfulness practices, qigong, reiki, and tantric sexual healing practices—all are encapsulated under the umbrella of the relatively new term Buddhist medicine, which captures the broad array of therapeutic techniques that have developed over centuries within Buddhist contexts across the globe. Utilizing religious and Buddhist studies, anthropology, history, and transdisciplinary medical humanities, the authors cover a diverse set of sometimes controversial but undeniably influential topics, effectively broadening our understanding of what Buddhist medicine comprises.

Buddhism and Healing in the Modern World, edited by C. Pierce Salguero, Kin Cheung, and Susannah Deane. University of Hawaii Press, 2024, 216 pp., $75.00, hardcover

The book stands out for its readability and engaging stories showing how Buddhist healing traditions have been reimagined. The authors did not shy away from confronting critical issues regarding mindfulness, mental health, and tantric sex. The book also includes detailed case studies on Buddhist healing practices in the US and a historical look at Sinhalese esoteric and magical healing rituals written on palm-leaf manuscripts. 

With its growing popularity in the West, the mind-body complex of mindfulness practices and meditation has garnered substantial attention from scholars and the public media, and the book addresses this in several chapters. Remaining mindful to tackle issues of authority and legitimacy in representing these traditions, the authors look closely at the limitations and dangers of traditional Buddhist healing practices and their integration into modern scientific paradigms. 

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ach chapter of Buddhism and Healing introduces Buddhist healing modalities that locate mindfulness in a much broader and colorful landscape of practices, highlighting “diverse Buddhist responses to competing visions of medicalized modernity in contemporary Asia.” Matthew King presents one of these competing visions through a thought-provoking examination of Tibetan Buddhism’s relationship with modern science. He explores the legacy of the Tibetan monk Lobsang Gyatso (1928–1997), an influential intellectual from Dharamsala, India. Gyatso critiqued the Western view of the mind-body relationship and argued that Tibetan views were incompatible with their materialist assumptions. King contrasts Gyatso’s resistance with the more cooperative approach of the Dalai Lama, who has been working toward dialogue with Western science through initiatives like the Mind & Life Dialogues. 

Another example of these competing visions can be found in Ira Helderman’s discussion of the United States media’s portrayals of the effects of meditation. Once seen as a universally beneficial practice, meditation is now scrutinized for its potential adverse side effects, such as “meditation sickness.” A psychotherapist himself, Helderman identifies two distinct narratives emerging in the media—meditation can be dangerous, and meditation has always produced disturbing experiences—suggesting that meditators are “misusing practices that are fundamentally culture-bound.” Helderman warns about the power of such widespread media reports and raises questions about who defines what constitutes safe or authentic meditation practices.

Likewise, a focus on mental illness reappears in several chapters. Melissa Anne-Marie Curley’s chapter on Japanese writer Kurata Hyakuzo (1891–1943) looks at how Zen teachings were employed to treat psychological and physical health issues, offering a fascinating glimpse into Buddhist ideas of mind and body and their influence on Japanese treatment of psychosomatic illnesses in the 19th century. Susannah Deane writes about the treatment of what Tibetans call madness (Tib.: smyo nad). She turns to the Tibetan Amdo region to look at Buddhist healers navigating between religious, biomedical, and Tibetan medical practices under Chinese state regulations. Hospitals offer biomedical and Tibetan traditional medicine, combining spiritual and medical expertise to treat mental illness.

Taking on a frequently misunderstood Buddhist practice, Amy Langenberg explores how tantric sexual healing was adapted to fit North American culture. Through Dr. Nida Chenagtsang’s teachings on the “Yoga of Bliss” and “Karmamudra for Dummies,” she reveals the teachings’ dynamic, if sometimes controversial, nature as they move across cultures. Langenberg, who herself attended two of Nida’s Karmamudra workshops, compares them with secular mindfulness-based sexual practices like orgasmic meditation. She explains that: “If properly applied, tantric sex practices are said to alchemically transform the poison of attachment through skillful engagement with desires and pleasures. In other words, they cure desire with desire.” Langenberg tries to unravel the controversial place these “erotic mindfulness” practices hold within current debates on widespread sexual abuse in Tibetan Buddhism, secret tantric transmissions, and the teaching of meditative sexual practices to the uninitiated.

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he personal and intimate stories of healers also add richness to the book. Kin Cheung narrates the story of a Chinese American healer in New York City to show how immigrant communities maintain and adapt Buddhist healing traditions while living in the diaspora. The healer, Cheung Seng Kan, blends acupuncture, qigong, reiki, and Buddhist chants to offer healing within his community, fusing different healing traditions that travel in and beyond Buddhist frameworks.

C. Pierce Salguero’s concluding chapter explores how Buddhist healing practices continue to evolve as they spread globally. He introduces us to Dr. Kang, who merges Korean traditional medicine with mindfulness practices, which he learned from Korean Won Buddhists in the United States. Salguero reveals the fractal-like nature of globalized Buddhist medicine, with practices maintaining their core principles while being continually reshaped by “modernization, translation practices, the politics of material culture, questions of race, ethnicity, and immigration, and a host of other topics.”

Buddhism and Healing is an illuminating read, not just for academics but also for meditation teachers and practitioners in health and wellness whose work incorporates aspects of traditional medicine. Challenging us to rise above simplified thinking, this book makes us contemplate the fluidity and fuzziness between religion and science, showing how people experience and negotiate health, illness, and Buddhist beliefs in an increasingly interconnected world.

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