Twelve Vows, and a Religion That Treats Illness as Its Business

The sutra is short and its centre is a list. As a bodhisattva, Bhaishajyaguru made twelve great vows, and they are strikingly concrete: that the sick shall be healed and the deformed made whole; that the hungry shall be fed and the naked clothed; that the poor shall have what they need; that those wrongly imprisoned or condemned shall be released; that women who wish it shall not be reborn as women; that his own body shall shine like lapis lazuli, inside and out. Most Mahayana vow-lists are cosmological. This one reads like a list of what goes wrong with bodies and with societies.

That practicality is the sutra's importance. Buddhism has a large medical dimension (monasteries ran infirmaries, monks transmitted pharmacology across Asia, and the Buddha is described from the earliest texts as a physician), and this sutra is the scriptural charter for the devotional half of it. It supplies the dharani recited over the sick, and the rite of lamps and banners to be performed for them. Its pure land, Lapis Lazuli Radiance in the east, is deliberately the counterpart of Amitabha's Sukhavati in the west, and the two Buddhas divided the devotional labour between them: Amitabha for the hour of death, Bhaishajyaguru for the trouble of being alive.