Tibetan medicine first came to the Trans-Baikal Siberian Mongol region of Buryatia at the end of the seventeenth century. There were two main traditions, the Khorinsk and Selenga. The Khorinsk tradition came from the monastic medical college of Labrang Tashikyil in the northeastern Tibetan province of Amdo. It followed only Tibetan texts, and its main centers were Sholotu Datsan at Atsagat, and Egetuiski, Aginski and Tsugulski Datsans. The Selenga tradition came from Mongolia, followed both Mongolian and Tibetan texts and, like the Mongolian tradition, had a slight influence from Chinese medicine. Its main centers were Gusino-ozorski, Tsongulski, Sanaga and Yangarzhinski Datsans.
The Caspian Mongol region of Kalmykia, the
Siberian Buddhist Turkic area of Tuva, and Inner Mongolia, now incorporated into the People’s Republic of China, also had monastic colleges for Tibetan medicine in their Buddhist monasteries. In Kalmykia, one of the main such colleges was at Emchin Khurul, with many branches at the other monasteries.
In Tuva, the main monastic medical college was at Chadanski Khure. There was a well-developed local tradition of shamanistic herbal medicine in Tuva as well. This system was not mixed, however, with the Tibetan Buddhist one in the monasteries, but co-existed outside.
Tibetan medicine flourished in Imperial Russia in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Pyotr Badmaev, for instance, a Buryat doctor from Aginski Datsan, was the personal physician of the last Czar of Russia, Nikolai II, as well as of Rasputin. For this reason, Badmaev was officially out of favor until 1985. Czar Nikolai II was the czar who had the Leningrad Datsan, a Tibetan Buddhist monastery, built in St Petersburg.
These medical colleges in Buryatia, Kalmykia, Tuva, and Mongolia were destroyed, along with the Buddhist monasteries in general, during the Stalin era of the late 1930’s. In Inner Mongolia there was also great decline, especially during the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960’s.
In the early eighteenth century, a Tibetan monastic medical college was founded as part of the Yonghegong monastery in Beijing. The Tibetan medical tradition was also found among the Oirat Mongols of East Turkistan, but more research must be done about all of this.
