The Father Doctor Shivago (Jivaka Komarabhacca)

Tradition holds that the founder of Buddhist medicine is Jivaka Komarabhacca, the personal doctor of the historical Buddha. The earliest Buddhist texts, the Pali canon, mention Jivaka in several places as a wealthy lay-physician and the donor of a mango grove called Jivakarama, which he gave for the use of the Buddha's order of monks as a retreat for the pansa, or rainy season.

A detailed biography of Jivaka is provided in the Mahavagga section of the Vinaya Pitaka, the monastic basket of discipline composed in the fourth century BC. In this rather lengthy passage, it is said that Jivaka was an orphan who was raised by a certain Prince Abhaya. When he came of age, he studied medicine with a well-known master in northwestern India, apprenticing with this teacher for a period of seven years before returning back home. The biography then tells of six instances where Jivaka healed different individuals, including two instances of major surgery. Among Jivaka's patients were several merchants, the king, and even the Buddha himself, who came to him for a purgative of powdered lotus flowers. More details are given in other Vinaya texts, such as those currently used in China and Tibet, but since these are not considered authentic by the Theravada Buddhist tradition followed in Southeast Asia, they are not mentioned here.

Although the Pali text provides some detail on the practice of medicine in ancient India, historians' knowledge of this period is very sketchy. India at the time of the Buddha was in transition from a strict Vedic system of wrathful war-like gods to more the rational systems of philosophy found in Buddhism and the Upanishads. This also was a period of transition from magical religious medicine based on demonology to the more empirical Ayurvedic medicine.

This transition period lasted many centuries. Ayurveda came into being with the writing of the Caraka and Susruta Samhitas, two encyclopedic texts which catalogued the medical knowledge of the day. These works were not composed all at once, but both reached their current form by the fifth century AD. When the hatha yoga system was developed in the tenth to thirteenth centuries AD, yoga postures, energy lines (nadis), and pressure points (marma) also became part of the medical landscape. These traditions were very influential across South and Southeast Asia, and also form the basis of much of Thai medicine.

Thus, much of the practice of Thai massage and herbal medicine comes from techniques developed in an era 1000 to 1500 years after Jivaka's time. However, there are some similarities with Indian medicine as far back as his era. Therefore, while Thai tradition was by no means fully formed 2500 years ago, Jivaka is revered in Thailand as the founder of Thai medicine.

Many Thais believe that Jivaka developed herbal medicine, Thai massage, and other healing practices himself, and taught these to future generations. The course of history tells us that the transmission cannot be this direct, but it is clear that the roots of much of Thai medicine do lie in the ancient past, and that Jivaka is an important forefather of this lineage.