What Is Bhaiṣajyaguru (Yakushi Nyorai)

Yakushi Nyorai's full name is Yakushi Rurikō Nyorai, the Medicine Master Tathāgata of Lapis Lazuli Radiance. His Sanskrit name, Bhaiṣajyaguru-vaiḍūryaprabha, joins "Master of Medicine" and "Lapis Lazuli Light." He is also called Iō Zenzei (Medicine King, Well-Gone One) and the Great Medicine King Buddha. As the king of medicine he heals illness, and he lights the world with a radiance as clear as lapis lazuli.

According to the sutras, he presides over the Pure Lapis Lazuli World (Jōruri sekai), far away in the east. The sutra states that this eastern pure land is equal in merit and adornment to Amida Buddha's Western Pure Land of Ultimate Bliss.

Devotion to the Medicine Buddha centers on the Twelve Great Vows, the twelve vows he made while practicing as a bodhisattva to remove the sufferings of living beings. Healing illness is one of them. In the others, he vows to save people whose eyes, ears, or limbs do not serve them, people suffering hunger and thirst, people who have nothing to wear and freeze in the cold, and people who are seized and punished.

Since the Asuka and Nara periods, he has been enshrined in Japan as the buddha who saves people from the sufferings of this world. Temples were built to pray for an emperor's recovery from illness, and ordinary people have long come to pray for the healing of their eyes, legs, and hips. Among the eighty-eight temples of the Shikoku Pilgrimage, more have Yakushi Nyorai as their principal image than any other buddha, and he is also the principal image of the Main Hall at Byodoji, Temple 22.

Treating illness and praying to the Buddha have gone hand in hand since ancient times. If you are ill, please continue your treatment and pray with peace of mind.

A great vow is the fundamental vow a buddha made while still a bodhisattva: when I attain awakening, I will without fail bring about a world like this.

The first vow is to make every living being a buddha equal to himself.

Ruri, lapis lazuli, is vaiḍūrya in Sanskrit, a blue, translucent gem. As the second great vow promises, the Medicine Buddha's body is transparent inside and out like lapis lazuli, and its light surpasses even the sun and moon.

The Medicine Buddha's land is the Pure Lapis Lazuli World, far away in the east. Xuanzang's translation describes it and then states plainly that it does not differ in the slightest, in merit or adornment, from Amida Buddha's Pure Land of Ultimate Bliss.

Standing on either side of the Yakushi triad are the bodhisattvas Suryaprabha (Nikkō, Sunlight) and Candraprabha (Gakkō, Moonlight). In Xuanzang's translation they are called Nikkō Henjō and Gakkō Henjō, bodhisattvas who spread the light of the sun and moon everywhere. The sutra describes the two as the foremost (jōshu, the head) of the countless bodhisattvas of the Pure Lapis Lazuli World, who uphold the Medicine Buddha's treasury of the true Dharma.

The Twelve Heavenly Generals (jūni shinshō), who guard the Medicine Buddha in the hall, appear in the sutra as twelve generals of the yakṣas. The Sanskrit text calls them mahāyakṣasenāpati, generals of the great yakṣa armies.

The vow of the Twelve Generals ends by teaching the following rite.

The Shingon ritual handbook (jisōsho, a text recording the procedures and oral teachings of rites) Hishō kuketsu records both explanations side by side. In the exoteric account, this buddha was born into a physician's family in his causal stage (in'ni, his past lives of practice as a bodhisattva) and became a buddha through the merit of giving medicine, and so he is called the Medicine Master. In the esoteric sense, it teaches that the Medicine Buddha is Mahāvairocana of the Womb Realm entering the samādhi of removing illness and lengthening life, making the Twelve Great Vows, and ending the illnesses of all beings.

This esoteric reading is also used to explain the form of statues. A statue of the Medicine Buddha with the medicine jar resting on the hōkai-jōin (the meditation mudrā of Mahāvairocana, with one hand laid over the other) is read as a sign that Mahāvairocana's meditation has appeared as the power to heal illness.

The same idea explains why the Medicine Buddha's name does not appear in the mandalas of the Two Realms (ryōkai mandara). The buddha seated in the east of the mandala is Akṣobhya (Ashuku Nyorai). Where, then, is the Medicine Buddha? The ritual handbooks answer that when all the buddhas are placed in the mandalas of the Two Realms, they are placed within Mahāvairocana at the center, so the Medicine Buddha should be understood as included at the center as well. Whether the Medicine Buddha and Akṣobhya are the same deity or different deities has been debated in Shingon since early times, and oral teachings survive for both views. The Shoki Bonjōroku, a ritual compendium included in the Zoku Shingonshū Zensho, likewise records that both views have textual grounds: "From of old, on the basis of these passages, Akṣobhya and the Medicine Buddha have been taken as the same body. There are grounds both for regarding them as the same buddha and for regarding them as different buddhas."

On how the rite was handed down, the Shoki Bonjōroku relates the following. Because the Medicine Buddha originally had no ritual manual (giki), the Tang master Yixing (Ichigyō Ajari), known as the recorder of the Commentary on the Mahāvairocana Sūtra, compiled one. After this manual was brought to Japan, every lineage used it as the base text for the Yakushi rite. The same work also notes that the lists of texts brought back by the eight Japanese masters who studied in Tang China (Kōbō Daishi Kūkai, Dengyō Daishi Saichō, and others) include no Yakushi ritual manual.

Shingon texts consistently describe the rite of the Seven Buddhas of Healing, in which all seven are worshiped together, as a Tendai rite. Shingon has performed the Yakushi rite with the single buddha.

The word "Medicine King" also appears in the writings of Kōbō Daishi. In the preface to his Hannya Shingyō Hiken (Secret Key to the Heart Sutra), grieving for people sunk in the sleep of delusion, the Daishi wrote: "If one never seeks the Medicine King's medicine, when will one ever see the light of Mahāvairocana?" Unless one seeks the Medicine King's medicine, that is, the Buddha's teaching, the day will never come when one sees the light of Mahāvairocana. The same work contains the following passage as well.

The officiant reads the hyōhaku aloud at the start of a rite or service. It declares before the buddha why the rite is being performed, what kind of buddha the principal image is, and who is being prayed for and for what.

The Shoson Hyōhakushō, compiled by Inyū, a Shingon scholar-monk who studied in the Kantō region in the Muromachi period, preserves the hyōhaku for the Yakushi rite.

The Kondō is the largest hall in the Danjō Garan, the sacred precinct that Kōbō Daishi founded on Mount Kōya. The Kōyasan section of the Kii Zoku Fudoki, a gazetteer of the late Edo period, records its principal image as Yakushi Nyorai. It goes on: "Most main halls of temples enshrine an image of the Medicine Buddha; that the present hall enshrines Yakushi Nyorai must be for this same reason." In other words, the Kondō enshrines Yakushi Nyorai in the same spirit as the many temple main halls that enshrine his image.

The same work also records how the daily rites (chōnichi gyōhō), performed every day without a break in the Kondō, were arranged.

Devotion to the Medicine Buddha in Japan is thought to have begun almost as soon as Buddhism arrived. The Nihon Shoki entry for the sixth year of Emperor Bidatsu (577) records that a jugonshi (a specialist who treated illness with incantations) came from Baekje together with scriptures and treatises. Scholars infer that devotion to the Medicine Buddha arrived together with Buddhist healing techniques. Medicine, then, came before doctrine as the way in.

From then on, the Medicine Buddha was widely worshiped, both in the prayers of the state and in the lives of ordinary people.

The principal image of the Main Hall of Byodoji, the twenty-second temple of the Shikoku Eighty-Eight Sacred Sites, is Yakushi Nyorai. The temple's name, Byodoji, is said to derive from this buddha's vow.

According to temple tradition, in the fifth year of Kōnin (814), as Kōbō Daishi was performing rites at this place, a Sanskrit syllable the color of lapis lazuli appeared before him out of light in the air, took the form of the Medicine Buddha, and sent forth five-colored light. The Daishi received this sign as the vow "I heal and remove the sufferings of all beings equally, without distinction." He carved the Medicine Buddha together with Suryaprabha and Candraprabha (Nikkō and Gakkō) and the Twelve Heavenly Generals in the manner of ittō sanrai (bowing three times with each stroke of the blade), and named the temple Byodoji, "the temple of equality."

The present principal image is a seated statue of joined-woodblock construction, finished in lacquer and gold leaf. It is the second image, modeled on the first statue, which Kōbō Daishi is said to have carved, and the temple regards it as a work of the Muromachi period. Only the medicine jar in the left hand is made of metal. It is said to be more than a thousand years old and is thought to have been handed down from the first statue.

The temple has two temple titles (ingō): Iō-in and Nikkō-in. Iō-in comes from Iō Zenzei, another name of the Medicine Buddha. Nikkō-in comes from a tradition that on the morning of the founding, the sunlight reflected on the surface of the consecrated water was received as the form of the Eleven-Faced Kannon; its origin is separate from the bodhisattva Nikkō of the Yakushi triad. The mountain name Hakusui-zan, "Mountain of White Water," comes from the tradition that when the Daishi struck the rock with his single-pronged vajra, water as white as milk sprang forth. That water still rises within the temple grounds as the "sacred water of Kōbō Daishi."

Three hakoguruma (box carts) have been offered to the Main Hall. According to tradition, in the Taishō era a pilgrim who could not walk recovered in this hall, left behind the cart he had come in, and walked away with a pilgrim's staff.

On the night of the 8th of every month we perform the Yakushi goma, and we also perform goma every Sunday afternoon, praying for the healing of body and mind, including sound legs and hips, recovery from eye disease, and protection from cancer. The links below explain how to attend and how to apply. You can also take part online.