Tibetan Medicine
(A 2-part series)

The Journey of the Blue Buddha     [series info]

47 minutes • 2006
Also available on DVD

Twelve hundred years ago, the people of Tibet developed a comprehensive medical system whose practitioners understood how powerfully the mind affects the body. They made medicines from plants and minerals blessed in lengthy rituals. They encoded this knowledge in a series of elaborate paintings known as The Atlas of Tibetan Medicine.

At a time in Europe when doctors dissected corpses in secret and herbalists were being burned at the stake, Tibetan medicine flourished. Its monk doctors traveled throughout Central Asia taking both their spiritual and health practices with them. With the British invasion in 1904 and the Chinese invasion in 1959, vital texts and paintings—and with them, the primary means of teaching Tibetan medicine—survived only because they'd been smuggled into Russia. Unbeknownst to Stalin, the cloth panels of The Atlas had been secreted into museum archives in Siberia and quietly spared from his purges.

The Journey of the Blue Buddha surveys the evolving practice of Tibetan medicine in today's Chinese-controlled Tibet, as well as in the exile community of Dharamsala, India, the Russian republic of Buryatia and North America. With its message of natural healing, human connection and right living, Tibetan medicine is all the more precious for having nearly been lost.

Subject(s): Asian studies, Health, History, World cultures

The Blue Buddha in Russia     [series info]

47 minutes • 2006
Available on DVD and VHS

Tuvan Dorzhi Radnayevich is a doctor of Tibetan medicine in Ulan Ude, the capital city of Buryatia, a Russian republic in southern Siberia. Like other practitioners of this age-old system of medicine, Tuvan Dorzhi can now work freely in Russia. When he first started his practice, however, there were no young Tibetan physicians. Under Stalin, almost all high-ranking monks and monk doctors (emchi lamas) were killed and thousands of lower-ranking ones sent to labour camps. Today Tuvan Lama, as he is also known, is determined to revive Tibetan medicine in Buryatia.

The Blue Buddha in Russia follows Tuvan Lama as he makes house calls, receives visitors to his clinic, presides at a funeral, teaches at-risk youth the medicinal properties of plants, treks across the steppes in search of licorice root, and visits the Atsagatsky monastery where he hopes one day to open a medical centre. An examination of the history of Tibetan medicine in Russia, this documentary is also an illuminating look at one of its most devoted practitioners today.

Subject(s): Asian studies, Health, World cultures