The Devil Made Me Do it...Demons, Spirits, and Tibetan Medicine

Recently I assisted one of my principal teachers, Lama Migmar Tseten, in the performance of a two day Healing Chö ceremony at Kripalu, in Lennox, Ma.


The fundamental method in the Healing Chö is that a patient comes and lies down in front of the Chöpa, who recites the Chö liturgy in addition to using some autochthonic rites grouped under the term gto. The use of the these rites can be complicated or simple, depending on the choice of the ritual master and requirements of the situation. During the recitation of the liturgy, the Chöpa performs the visualization of Chö on behalf of the participants in the rite.

My first contact with Healing Chö came on the occasion of meeting my precious root guru, the late Mantradhara Yeshe Dorje for the first time in 1992. The first evening he was there, he performed a Healing Chö in order to remove obstacles of the people present. I had no idea what he was doing, and he did not explain anything. But we all lay down, and he performed the ceremony of Chö on our behalf.

One can easily read more about Chö. Since it is easy to receive instructions on the practice Chö these days, I won't go into any more detail about Chö here, apart from saying that a critical part of Chö is about paying back karmic debts one has incurred to negative spirits who act as obstacles and cause illness.

Of the four hundred and four illnesses classified in Tibetan Medicine, one hundred and one of them are caused explicitly by demonic entities called gdon. The term gdon, according to Chogyal Namkhai Norbu, also carries the meaning of doubt as in the common phrase gdon mi za ba "without doubt". In general, these diseases cannot be cured with medicine alone, though there are many herbal preparations which can assist controlling their negative effects, for example, the famous Vimala preparation was originally created by Master Vimalamitra to control the effects of Gyalpo spirits (pictured being trampled by Dorje Drollo's mount, to the right). Also, the incense known as gugul is burnt in order to repel negative spirits from one's space.

Now then, why all this bother about demons? I read an interesting article on delirium in the NY Times yesterday and saw this statement:

No one who knows Justin Kaplan would ever have expected this. A Pulitzer Prize-winning historian with a razor intellect, Mr. Kaplan, 84, became profoundly delirious while hospitalized for pneumonia last year. For hours in the hospital, he said, he imagined despotic aliens, and he struck a nurse and threatened to kill his wife and daughter.


"Thousands of tiny little creatures,” he said, “some on horseback, waving arms, carrying weapons like some grand Renaissance battle,” were trying to turn people “into zombies.” Their leader was a woman “with no mouth but a very precisely cut hole in her throat(link).

It is well known in the Ayurveda and Tibetan Medicine that fevers, especially contagious fevers, are caused by the actions of spirits. The general fever chapter of the Upadesha Tantra discusses gdon as one of the four causal conditions of fevers:

Spirits: [fevers] are caused by arising from the central eye of Shiva and from the cursing and fighting between matrikas and ḍākinīs (two types of female spirits).

There are many other gdon which are indicated in a whole range of illnesses. From the perspective of Tibetan Medicine many people are afflicted by gdon and are never treated for it properly, nor are they protected against it. In the article above, it states that many folks who are struck by the kind of delirium described above, never completely recover.

In most instances, from our perspective, many of these conditions could be alleviated with proper rituals done correctly. At our Healing Chö, people reported amazing results, such as the vanishing of long-term persistent physical pains from injuries, lifting of depression, enhanced feelings of well-being and so on. It is said that while such rites seem like child's play, they are extremely effective. My intent here is not to advertise our Healing Chö ceremonies, but to point out to people that ritual plays an extremely important role in Tibetan Medicine, and should be used to address and remedy that part of illness that is often left unattended i.e. the role of spirits in causing or prolonging illnesses. It is tempting to write off the hallucinations of delirious persons as purely being caused by the heat of fever. But from our perspective, such experiences as those reported above in the news article, prove the vital need for people to look at deeper spiritual causes for their states of disease.

The Role of Elemental Calculation ('byung rtsi) in Tibetan Medicine

This post is the first of two posts. As I was writing the original post from which the following two posts derive, I realized that you, the readers, would be better served by two separate posts. 

Often referred to by the misnomer "Tibetan Astrology", "Prognostic" Calculation (rtsi) pervades every aspect of Tibetan social and religious culture. Calculation is used for rendering yearly calendars, matchmaking, for funerary arrangements, determination of what sort of rituals one should use on a yearly basis for removing obstacles and so on.


Calculation is generally divided into two categories: "dkar rtsi", deriving from the Kalacakra Tantra and its commentary, the Vimalaprabha; and "nag rtsi", "black" calculation, also known as "'byung rtsi", which is traditionally held to derive from China, but contains what appear to be many Tibetan innovations. There are other systems of rtsi besides these two, such as the system of martial calculation called dbyang 'char, which derives from a non-Buddhist tantra, the Yuddhajayārnava Tantrarāja Svarodayanāma first translated into Tibetan in the 13th century by Lowo Lotsawa, Sherab Rinchen, but they exceed the range of these posts.

The magnum opus of calculation is undoubtedly Desid Sangye Gyatso's Bai dur ya dkar po. The Lhasa block prints, made available in book form in 1972, consists of two volumes amounting to 350 folios, primarily written in dense 7 and 9-syllable verses. Beykar, as it is known amongst Tibetans, is an encyclopedia of information related to the science of calculation, covering diverse topics from the origins of the Kalacakra tantra and the location of Shambhala to a detailed exposition of various types of bhumipatis, sa bdags or landlords. 

Other important authors concerning the broad range of calculation topics are Tagtsang Lotsawa, Kongtrul, Mipham, Lochen Dharmashri, just to name a few of the most well-known Tibetan polymaths who devoted themselves to aspects of the subject.

The presence of elemental calculation in the sequel or uttaratantra of the four tantras has long been a source of controversy among Tibetans, causing authors such as Zurkar Lodo Gyalpo and Thukwan to cast doubt on the Indian origins of the Four Tantras as a whole. Irrespective of the ultimate origins of elemental calculation, (also a controversial topic about which there are numerous Tibetan opinions) it plays a key role in the diagnosis of illness within the rGyud bZhi tradition, respectively, in the pulse and urine diagnosis chapters.

In Tibetan Medicine, there is slippage around the use of the term "khams": used both for the Chinese system of five "elements" and the Indian Buddhist term dhātu which can lead to confusion. In Buddhist texts there is the notion of the catvāri mahābhūtāni ('byung ba chen po bzhi), the four primary elements i.e. earth, water, fire and air. To this a further scheme is added, the pañcadhātu (khams lnga) earth, water, fire, air and space. Finally, we have the scheme of the saḍadhātu (khams drug) with the addition of consciousness. 

Calculation and Diagnosis:

In the pulse chapter, we find that the sites of the pulse of the functional organs, such as the liver, heart, lungs, kidneys and spleen are governed respectively by the wood, fire, metal, water and earth elements familiar to us from Chinese traditional medicine, and depend upon it. As such, this grouping of five elements, or phases (Ch. wu hsing) as the historian of Chinese Medicine, Paul Unschuld (Medicine In China: A History of Ideas; Berkeley, 1985), terms them, have ancient roots in Chinese culture dating from well before the beginning of the common era.

The five elements are used in pulse diagnosis primarily to differentiate the dominant organ in a given season. For example, for the first 72 days of spring, it is held that the liver pulse will be the most active, and that the healthy pulse in general will be thin and tight. 

Another use of the five elements is the calculation of the mother/son enemy/friend cycle which is used in the so called "seven amazing pulses". These seven pulses are a type of prognostication which is performed on a healthy person, used to discover the health of a distant person, where a traveller related to a person is on their journey, and so on. Needless to say, these amazing pulses are the domain only of the most skilled physicians. 

The second main place where the system of elemental calculation appears is in the urine chapter. In this chapter, the principle element of elemental calculation used is that of the cosmic tortoise [srid pa'i rus sbal] used as a basis for the divination of spirit attacks. 

The tortoise is divided into nine sections. The head of the tortoise faces to the south, the tail to the north. The column to the right (the west) represents the location of gods, humans, and spirits from top to bottom (south to north), the column on the left (the east) represents the location of the cemetery, house and fields. The central column represents one's parents and grandparents, oneself, and one's children and grandchildren. 

Using this schematic, one divides the porcelain bowl into nine sections accordingly. Then one observes various omens from the urine such as sudden color change in a given region, no change, the formation of shapes in the film of the urine, and so on, to divine what type of provocation the patient, his family or his property might be suffering from. 

One thing of interest is that there is no mention of the seven amazing pulses in the rgyud chung bdud rtsi snying po (found in cha lag bco brgyad), undoubtedly the source the uttaratantra and the upadesha tantra of the four tantras. Spirit divination with urine is present in this text. However, a similar type of prognostication with pulse, as well as spirit divination with urine can be found in the earlier sman dpyad zla ba'i rgyal po.

Calculation, Illness and Ritual:

A further role that elemental calculation plays in Tibetan medicine is the direct diagnosis of illness. Desid states in the introduction to the section on diagnostics through calculation:

The straight tree of calculation for understanding the production of

the four hundred and four diseases formed from the five elements (bhūta),

in the illusory bodies of migrating beings, the nature of the five elements,

through power of the elemental spirits (bhūtas) and past conditions will be explained.

This type of calculation is a very serious business. To begin with, Desid advises the calculator to avoid alcohol and immoderate conduct. In the virtuous hour of the early morning (meaning around 7:00 am), in an unpolluted place, with a clean (lit. white) floor, on a comfortable seat, with a compassionate mind, take refuge. Also one must resolve to speak very truthfully about the years, months, days, hours, the trigrams, magic squares, planets, stars, bhūmipatis and local spirits (gzhi bdag). Otherwise, he says that one's mind will be "robbed" by the god that governs the hour, and one's prognostication will go awry. Therefore one must perform the calculations in a completely undistracted manner. 

However, it should be pointed out that all of the remedies provided in this chapter are ritual remedies, rituals to supplement the actual medical remedies which one can find in the four tantras. Thus, the primary focus of elemental calculation here is on the usage of gto rites and others kinds of rituals to eliminate illnesses, prolong longevity and so on. 


Apart from of which pulse corresponds with which season,  and the corresponding elemental attribution to the internal organs, we can see from the above that the principle role of calculation in Tibetan Medicine is the diagnosis of the so called kun btags gdon i.e. imputed, invisible, formless spirits, which play in integral roles in the causation of disease. 

Yogi Tea Update

Hi Folks:

Just a quick update: I happened to come across a local source of true cinnamon (Cinnamomum verum), also known as Ceylonese Cinnamon, and used to this to make Yogi Tea instead of cassia (Cinnamomum aromaticum).

A qualitative difference exists between these two kinds of Cinnamon. Tea made from the latter is more warming, as well as possessing an oilier, more pungent and more aromatic quality -- its aroma fills the whole room. Tea made with the former is more delicate, lighter, not as warming, not as aromatic and less pungent.

While either can be used, I find that I tend to favor cassia as an ingredient for this tea over true cinnamon because of cassia's more robust flavor and aroma.

An advantage of true cinnamon however is that it is soft and crumbly, and has an undeniably more delicate and sweeter flavor, so perhaps I will reserve my small supply of true cinnamon for my various culinary adventures, and keep the cassia for the tea.