Bhaishajyaguru is the Medicine Buddha, one of the most widely venerated buddhas of East Asian and Tibetan Buddhism, whose colour is a deep lapis-lazuli blue and who is shown holding a bowl of medicine and, often, a stalk of the myrobalan plant, a fruit prized in Indian and Tibetan medicine. He presides over a pure land in the east, described as being made of radiant blue lapis. His importance rests on a set of vows recorded in the Sutra of the Medicine Buddha: as a bodhisattva, before his awakening, he made twelve great vows for the benefit of beings, which include curing the sick, healing the deformed and the disabled, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, freeing the imprisoned, and bringing all who call on his name to health of body and mind and to the conditions for awakening. His worship is therefore deeply practical, addressed to suffering in its most concrete forms, illness, poverty, fear, as well as to the deeper sickness of the deluded mind.
In many parts of the Buddhist world his name and his mantra are recited for the recovery of the ill and the dying, and his image is set up in times of epidemic and hardship; in Tibetan medicine, which understands physical and spiritual healing as bound together, he holds a central place as the source of the medical teachings themselves. Bhaishajyaguru expresses the conviction, running through the Mahayana, that the compassion of the awakened extends to the body as well as the soul, and that the removal of ordinary suffering is itself part of the path.