Healing Elements by Craig Sienna R

Author:Craig, Sienna R.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2012-11-15T16:00:00+00:00

HOLY WATER AND POLLUTING FLOWERS

My watch says 8:30 A.M., though cool early morning light has just overtaken Lhasa’s night sky. Thousands of miles from Beijing, we are still on Beijing time. It is late spring 2004 and I’m standing outside, waiting for Mingkyi to pick me up. She arrives, out of breath, cheeks apple red, hands tucked into her jacket, and registers a look of concern.

“Why are you not wearing a hat?” she scolds, by way of saying good morning. The driver we’ve hired for the day leans back against his SUV, blowing on his hands, smoking a cigarette. We hop into the car and head toward the Shongpalhachu Tibetan Medicine Factory.12 Located not far from Lhasa, the factory is named for a sacred spring that flows nearby.

“These days it is difficult to find really good quality medicine, made by people of ability [yönten], with proper blessings and the right way to prepare ingredients,” says Mingkyi. Although she is a skilled Tibetan doctor, she lives an urban life and rarely makes her own medicines. “Nowadays there is a lama from eastern Tibet who lives in the small temple just up there,” she points, “near to the spring. He is very accomplished. It brings benefit to the factory.” This comment not only points to Shongpalhachu’s history as a place marked by the Guru Rinpoche, the famous eighth-century figure credited with the introduction of Buddhism in Tibet, but also illustrates the notion that efficacy is produced within specific social ecologies. In English, the place is called Holy Water Tibetan Medicine Factory. This references the story of Guru Rinpoche ramming his walking stick into the ground and creating a spring on this spot, and that Yuthog Yonten Gompo (the Elder) was born in the region. To Mingkyi and others, including the senior doctor who founded the factory, it is commonsensical that the specificities of this place and the spiritual power associated with it could directly impact medicines produced here. A sense of sacred geography and medical lineage remains central to Shongpalhachu’s history and its brand, even as the valley a dozen miles outside Lhasa is filling up with other industries, from greenhouses and cement factories to freight yards.

The factory sits at the foot of a tawny mountain ridge. Ripening barley fields and whitewashed adobe homes line the dirt road leading to the gate. Shongpalhachu is what, in business parlance, one would call a public-private partnership, in this case connected to the Nagchu Mentsikhang and some private investment. It illustrates a larger trend, evidenced throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, of for-profit pharmaceutical factories emerging from state-run hospitals of Tibetan medicine. Shongpalhachu does not benefit from the large state contracts of the Mentsikhang, but it has a good reputation.

It is not yet 10 A.M. when we arrive, but several boom boxes are already blasting Chinese and Tibetan pop tunes and Budweiser cans have been stacked in a pyramid in the courtyard. I wonder if I have forgotten a Tibetan holiday, until I ask the first factory worker I meet what is going on.

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