Illness and Enlightenment

"Tibetan conception of nyonâe - 'madness'- encompasses a broad range of ideas about mind and body and an individual's place in the world. Here, Tantric and medical understandings of mind-body structure and (dys)functioning, and engagements with non-human entities, inform complex notions of the prevention, causation, and treatment of madness as an illness, as well as understandings of 'madness' as an indicator of Buddhist or Bon enlightenment. This work brings together interview material from ethnographic fieldwork in the Tibetan region of Amdo in northwest China, with an examination of Tibetan medical and religious texts, to explore the multi-faceted concept of nyonâe through key Tibetan concepts of wind, heart, and mind, as well as human-spirit relationships"--