The Healing Buddha

Raoul Birnbaum's The Healing Buddha, published by Shambhala Publications in 1979, is the standard English language scholarly study of Bhaishajyaguru, tracing the sutra devoted to him, its several Chinese translations, the twelve vows attributed to him and the healing cult that developed around his worship across East Asia. Its strength is that it remains the primary English reference on the subject decades after publication, still cited in more recent scholarship on Buddhist healing cults. Its limit is that it is a single author's synthesis from the late 1970s, so a claim resting on more recent textual or art-historical findings about Bhaishajyaguru worship should be checked against newer scholarship as well.