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PhD Research Project in Social Anthropology, 2021-2025

Author: Patricia Mundelius

Sowa Rigpa in Kathmandu

Tibetan medicine’s official set up in the capital dates back to the year 1973 and was initiated by an amchi from Tibet. After Doctor Kunsang Phenthok, a student of the renowned Tibetan physician and director of the Chagpori Medical College in Lhasa Venerable Khyenrab Norbu, fled from Tibet and arrived in Kathmandu in 1950, he was ordered by Nepal’s late King Tribhuvan to cure the same who had fallen seriously ill. Following the successful recovery of the King in which the amchi physician played an essential role, King Tribhuvan acknowledged Dr. Kunsang’s work. From thereon, he became appointed as Tibetan Doctor to the King as well as the Royal Family. Later, the government of Nepal granted additional privileges to Dr. Kunsang’s Tibetan medical clinic in Chettrapati, the Kunphen Tibetan Medical Center (short Kunphen).

Kunphen Tibetan Medical Center in Chettrapati, Kathmandu.

First Kunphen received the status of “traditional health trainer” being charged with additional training courses and certification for other amchi in rural Nepal. Second, in 1973, the medical center itself was bestowed with the special status of “Aushadi Udhyog” (medical factory) and registered as the first of its kind in the Department of Drug and Administration under the Ministry of Health and Population. Since then, Kunphen operates a thriving clinic and pharmacy with several physicians and employees.

With time, more Tibetan medical physicians established clinics in Kathmandu, like amchi Tsering Chökyi, a former employee of Kunphen, who set up the first Men-Tsee-Khang branch clinic in Boudhanath, one of Kathmandu’s outer wards, in the 1970s. Nowadays, there are about 25 to 30 private Sowa Rigpa clinics in Kathmandu, clustering mainly around the important Buddhist and Hindu pilgrimage sites of Boudhanath and Swayambhunath. While none of these clinics is officially registered under the Department of Health and Population, they are operating full time and are often managed by up to three amchi and additional staff.

In overall, many of Kathmandu’s amchi do not have much in common except their medical practice and an affiliation to or embodiment of Tibetan cultures. A Tibetan medical practitioner is not bound to a specific cultural or even ethnic identity, although members of this profession learn to share certain identities within their training, such as a common literary language. They do not belong to a homogenous group but could be described as a kind of “interest group” shaped by certain commonalities and at the same time characterized by different religious traditions, lineages, and origins. They arrived in Kathmandu via entirely different routes and almost none of them was born in the city.

Moreover, although Sowa Rigpa has been practiced for centuries in Nepal’s mountainous regions and there are three distinct traditions of Tibetan medicine from, Dolpo, and Solukhumbu, a minority of practitioners nowadays working in Kathmandu’s clinics hails from these areas. Only a few individuals belong to one of Nepal’s ethnically Tibetan groups and grew up in the mountainous areas. Among these individuals, there are also some peculiarities, since the indigenous ethnic Tibetan people of Nepal maintain their distinct cultures and do not share the notion of constituting one distinguishable ethnic category. Their training profiles also vary as they received Tibetan medical education within different settings, may it be in local Sowa Rigpa institutions, within generational or master-apprentice lineage systems, or in Tibetan medical schools abroad.

An even smaller percentage of amchi, only a few individuals, originates from Bhutan or Sikkim. They were mainly trained in Indian Sowa Rigpa institutions and afterwards took up residence in Nepal. Other individuals took up residence in Kathmandu as they were already trained in Sowa Rigpa or decided to enroll in one of the city’s Tibetan medical schools.

Brief Introduction to Sowa Rigpa

Sowa Rigpa’s origins can be traced back into the 7th and 8th century to the reigns of the Tibetan kings Songtsen Gampo (617-650 AD) and Thrisong Detsen (718-785 AD). As part of their efforts to advance medical proficiency, physicians from India, Persia, and China, and later from Nepal, Kashmir, and Central Asia, were invited to Tibet to share their respective knowledge and presented medical texts that were then translated into Tibetan language. Thus, borrowing from diverse origins and sources, especially from Indian and Chinese medical teachings, and adapting that knowledge to the ecological environments of high plateau regions, Sowa Rigpa gained great complexity.

In contrast to Ayurveda’s or Chinese medicine’s spread throughout the world, which has been ongoing for several centuries, the practice of Tibetan medicine until recently has been mainly confined to certain regions in East, South, and Central Asia. Despite its long history as well as profound medical instructions, this medical tradition was barely heard of outside Tibetan cultural regions up to the second half of the 20th century. In the year of 1950, however, the invasion of the Tibetan Autonomous Region by the Republic of China began, culminating in the “Tibetan Uprising Day” on March 10, 1959, in Lhasa, which forced tens of thousands of Tibetans to leave the region. Migrating to South Asian countries like India and Nepal, or seeking refuge in Europe or the United States, the immigrants formed several exile communities. One such community is McLeod Ganj, a suburb of Dharamsala in India, which houses the headquarters of the Tibetan government in exile, the Central Tibetan Administration.

Picture of the 14th Dalai Lama, former political leader of the CTA and spiritual head of the Gelug School of Tibetan Buddhism, hanging above the medicine dispensary in a Sowa Rigpa clinic in Kathmandu, Nepal.

Following the annexation of the TAR, the diffusion of Tibetan refugees, their political cause, propagated by the charismatic personality of the 14th Dalai Lama, and the neat and steady creation of a homogenous, worthy-of-sympathy Tibetan exile identity, the refugees earned heightened interest in the West. In the 1960s, the first practitioners of Tibetan medicine, also called amchi, began to be invited to Western countries to present their medical traditions at academic conferences in Europe and North America. This led to an increase in academic publications and research on the subject.

During the last decades, Tibetan medicine has been subject to profound transformations due to a multitude of external impacts, such as a strengthening of market economies, the dispersion of biomedicine and the establishment of corresponding standards of medical practice, and the introduction of new concepts aimed at environmental protection. Facing new challenges and being aware of new possibilities, practitioners began to adapt and transform Sowa Rigpa, its various forms of practice, pharmaceuticals used, production processes, and range of practice while envisioning a global field of medical action.

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