Events

CHAIRPERSON

Assoc Prof Greg Clancey, Asia Research Institute, and Department of History, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

Within Vietnam, the fourteenth century Vietnamese Buddhist monk physician Tuệ Tĩnh 慧靖 is reasonably well known for having been sent, probably in 1885, as a living present to the Ming Dynasty from the Trần royal court. One translation of his dharma name, Tuệ Tĩnh, is tranquil wisdom and since he is also well known as having created a multitude of medical gardens I think of these as The Gardens of Tranquil Wisdom. Among health care professionals in Vietnam Tuệ Tĩnh is even more well known for having written two of the foundational texts of Vietnamese Traditional Medicine. The most famous of these, Nam Dược Thần Hiệu 南藥神效 (Miraculous Drugs of the South), is said to have been composed while Tuệ Tĩnh resided at the Ming court in Nanjing. In terms of popular memory, as evidenced by local festivals, street names, and other activities, Tuệ Tĩnh is most cherished, and commemorated, for something he did not do. He never returned from China, even though he wanted to so badly that he requested that the epitaph on his tomb consist of a request for his remains to be returned. It is almost unheard of for scholars to know anything about the personal feelings of a non-royal, non-aristocratic, fourteenth-century Vietnamese man. But, as surely as we can know anything about such a person, we know that Tuệ Tĩnh wanted to go home.

This presentation will explore the resonances of Tuệ Tĩnh as an archetype of a Vietnamese Thiền Trúc Lâm Buddhist monk and will also present the author’s thoughts on the twentieth and twenty-first century reverberations of his example for Buddhist communities, especially those involved in health care, in Vietnam today.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

C. Michele Thompson holds an MA in East Asian History and a PhD in Southeast Asian History, she specializes in history of medicine and science in Southeast Asia, she is Professor of Southeast Asian History at Southern Connecticut State University. She is the author of numerous articles on the History of Medicine, Science, and the Environment in Southeast Asia. She is the co-editor of several edited volumes and special editions including Translating the Body: Medical Education in Southeast Asia and is the author of Vietnamese Traditional Medicine: A Social History. She will be working on two projects while at ARI. One is a monograph on politics, medicine, and the environment of fourteenth century Trần Dynasty Vietnam tentatively titled “The Gardens of Tranquil Wisdom: Tuệ Tĩnh 慧靖, Vietnamese Buddhism, and Health Care in Trần Dynasty Vietnam”. This project is in the write-up phase. She will also be gathering primary data for the other project supported by a 2017-2020 National Library of Medicine Grant. This is a monograph on the history of vaccination for smallpox in Southeast Asia. Vaccination resistance and vaccination hesitancy have been declared one of the top ten threats to global health by the WHO. Thompson’s proposed monograph directly addresses the background to this contemporary issue.

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