Healing

The Medicine Buddha holds a sprig of myrobalan — Terminalia chebula, arura in Tibetan — in the right hand, and a bowl of nectar in the left. The plant is not symbolic decoration. It is a working ingredient in Tibetan medicine and still appears in compounded formulas, which makes it the one object in this iconography a Tibetan doctor would recognise from their own shelf.

He is painted the deep blue of lapis lazuli, and the sutra names him for it. Ground lapis was among the most expensive pigments a workshop could buy. Where the register records mineral pigment rather than synthetic, the grain shows in raking light. The colour is doing two things at once: naming the figure, and marking the painting as one nobody economised on.

The customary occasion is an illness: the mantra is said over medicine before it is taken, and the painting is hung where someone unwell can see it from the bed. The custom also covers giving it to the person doing the caring rather than to the patient. That half of it is the less widely known one.