Abstract or Keywords
Although the Buddha is praised as the great physician of human suffering, the monastic life he is credited with chartering is ambivalent with respect to the medical arts. Monks and nuns are explicitly required to nurse one another through illness, a directive found in Vinaya texts (the disciplinary codes of Buddhist monks and nuns) that reportedly came about when the Buddha happened upon a sick monk left lying in his own waste, abandoned by his fellow monks (see chapter 1§3).¹ At the same time, scriptures understood to record the Buddha’s teachings (calledsuttas or āgamas) and other Vinaya directives indicate