Join us for the next IAAS Lecture at 1:15 pm in CGIS South Building, Room S250, 1730 Cambridge Street.
Historian Stacey Van Vleet, Assistant Professor at Indiana University and visiting Fellow at Harvard EALC (2018-19) will speak about her current book project, "Precious Pills and the Politics of Tibetan Learning in Qing China."
“Precious pills” (rin chen ril bu) – a class of alchemical medicines made from refined mercury, precious gems and metals, and other rare and exotic materia medica – constitute the most prestigious technology of Tibetan medicine, and a key ingredient in its remarkable popularity outside Tibet from the seventeenth century forward. In this talk I will argue that the renown of precious pills is due to their significance not just as technologies of medicine, but also as technologies of governance. Adopted by the Fifth Dalai Lama (r. 1642-1682) and subsequently within the network of monastic medical colleges (sman pa grwa tshang) that proliferated across Inner Asia during the era of Qing Empire (1644-1911), the technology of precious pills served as a crucial aspect of Buddhist statecraft, including the negotiation of effective and beneficial strategies for governing the social and natural worlds.