Fó zhìshēn jīng 佛治身經
The Sūtra of the Buddha’s Cure for the Body translator unknown (失譯, 譯)
About the work
T795 in one fascicle is an anonymous Chinese rendering placed by the Taishō editors in the broad Han to Six Dynasties period. The title 治身 (zhìshēn, “regulating / curing the body”) evokes the well-known Buddhist medical-cum-religious topos of the Buddha as physician (bhaiṣajya-rāja) — the same metaphorical framework that organises [[KR6i0497|Fóyī jīng 佛醫經]].
Abstract
The text presents the Buddha as physician of body and mind: it distinguishes between the “external regimen” (bāhya-vihāra) of the body — proper diet, sleep, exercise, hygiene — and the “internal regimen” (adhyātmika-vihāra) of the mind — the eradication of greed, hatred, and ignorance through the cultivation of śīla, samādhi, and prajñā. The Buddha addresses the audience on the parallels between bodily and spiritual disease: just as the body sickens from imbalance of the humours and excess of the passions, so the mind sickens from the kleśas; just as the body is cured by proper regimen and medicine, so the mind is cured by proper dharma-practice. The text rehearses the parallel under several specific topics — the three poisons, the four humours, the five aggregates, the eightfold path — and exhorts the audience to apply the Buddha’s medical teaching to both planes simultaneously.
The genre is the Buddhist medical-doctrinal short sūtra, a category that includes [[KR6i0497|Fóyī jīng]], the [[KR6i0451|Jìngyì wèn jīng]] (insofar as it touches on bodily karmic-fruit), and several other texts. The anonymous Han-Six-Dynasties placement, combined with the doctrinal-medical content, suggests an early to middle Six Dynasties date when Chinese Buddhist communities were actively integrating Indian Buddhist medical knowledge with the indigenous Chinese medical tradition.
Translations and research
- Salguero, C. Pierce. Translating Buddhist Medicine in Medieval China. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. (Comprehensive study of the early Chinese Buddhist medical corpus.)
- Salguero, C. Pierce, ed. Buddhism and Medicine: An Anthology of Premodern Sources. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017.
- Demiéville, Paul. Buddhism and Healing: Demiéville’s Article ‘Byō’ from Hōbōgirin, trans. Mark Tatz. Lanham: University Press of America, 1985.