What Is Bhaiṣajyaguru (Yakushi Nyorai)

Yakushi Nyorai's full title is Yakushi Rurikō Nyorai, the Medicine Master Tathāgata of Lapis Lazuli Radiance. His Sanskrit name is Bhaiṣajyaguru-vaiḍūryaprabha. The name joins two ideas, "Master of Medicine" and "Lapis Lazuli Light," and he is also called Iō Zenzei (the Medicine King Well-Gone One) and the Great Medicine King Buddha. He is the Tathāgata who heals illness as the sovereign of medicine and illuminates the world with a light as translucent as lapis lazuli.

His abode is the Pure Lapis Lazuli World (Jōruri sekai) in the far east. The sutras present him as the teaching lord of an eastern pure land, forming a counterpart to Amida's Western Pure Land of Ultimate Bliss.

At the heart of this buddha stand the Twelve Great Vows he made while still a bodhisattva. The healing of illness is only one of them. Impairments of the senses, hunger and thirst, the cold of having no clothing, the injustice of imprisonment and punishment: the twelve vows take up the sufferings of body, mind, and daily life in their entirety.

In Japan, from the Asuka and Nara periods onward, Yakushi Nyorai has been enshrined as the principal deity to whom the sufferings of this present world are entrusted, from prayers for the recovery of emperors to the prayers of ordinary people for their eyes, legs, and hips. Among the Shikoku Eighty-Eight Sacred Sites, more temples have Yakushi Nyorai as their principal image than any other buddha, and the principal image of the Main Hall of Byodoji, the twenty-second temple, is this buddha.

One note: doing everything that medicine offers and praying to the Buddha have stood side by side since ancient times. If you are living with illness, please continue your treatment and pray with an untroubled heart.

A great vow is the fundamental promise a buddha made while still a bodhisattva: "When I attain awakening, I will without fail bring about a world like this." One can read these as vows in which, before anyone asked anything of the buddha, the buddha himself took up human suffering and put it into words.

The first vow begins with a promise to make every person a buddha equal to himself.

The word at the center of his name, ruri, is Sanskrit vaiḍūrya, a blue, translucent precious stone. What the sutra entrusts to this gem is not the luxury of jewels but a metaphor for purity, transparent inside and out, without a single cloud. The second vow promises "a body like lapis lazuli, luminous and transparent within and without," and teaches that its light surpasses even the sun and moon.

Four Chinese translations have come down to us.

It may come as a surprise, but the Bhaiṣajyaguru Sūtra does not define the Medicine Buddha's appearance. Even regarding image-making, Xuanzang's translation only urges, "one should first make an image of that buddha," and says nothing about what he holds in his hands.

What the sutra speaks of is not the shape of the body but its substance. The second great vow likens that body to lapis lazuli.

The Medicine Buddha's land is the Pure Lapis Lazuli World in the far east. Xuanzang's translation describes its adornment as follows.

Standing at either side of the Yakushi triad are the bodhisattvas Suryaprabha (Nikkō, Sunlight) and Candraprabha (Gakkō, Moonlight). In Xuanzang's translation their names are Nikkō Henjō and Gakkō Henjō, names that mean spreading the light of the sun-disc and the moon-disc everywhere. The sutra never calls these two "attendants." It presents them as the foremost (jōshu, the head) of the innumerable bodhisattvas of the Pure Lapis Lazuli World and as successors who uphold the Medicine Buddha's treasury of the true Dharma. In the oldest translation their names differ, and the two bodhisattvas, there called Sun-Radiance and Moon-Purity, are said to be "next in line to the buddha's place." The triad arrangement in sculpture was settled in later times on the basis of this scriptural teaching.

And guarding the perimeter of the hall are the Twelve Heavenly Generals (jūni shinshō). In the sutra they are twelve generals of the yakṣas. The Sanskrit text calls them mahāyakṣasenāpati, generals of the great yakṣa armies.

The vow of the Twelve Generals closes with one concrete instruction.

Why is he named the Medicine Master? The Shingon ritual handbook Hishō kuketsu sets two readings side by side. In the exoteric account, this buddha was born into a physician's family in the causal stage (in'ni, his past lives of practice as a bodhisattva) and attained buddhahood through the merit of dispensing medicine; hence the name. In the esoteric understanding, by contrast, it transmits that Mahāvairocana of the Womb Realm enters the samādhi (sanmaji, a state of profound meditation) of dispelling illness and extending life, gives rise to the Twelve Great Vows, and extinguishes the illnesses of all beings, and that this very figure is the Medicine Buddha (an oral transmission of Hōon-in).

This reading is visible in the form of the statues themselves. Upon the meditation mudrā that the Medicine Buddha forms, the hokkai jō-in, the gesture of Mahāvairocana's meditation with both hands overlapped, rests the medicine jar. It is read as the sign that Mahāvairocana's meditation has ripened into the activity of healing.

The absence of the Medicine Buddha's name from the mandalas of the Two Realms is explained by the same logic. Seated in the east of the mandala is Akṣobhya (Ashuku Nyorai). Where, then, is the Medicine Buddha? The ritual handbooks answer: when all deities are gathered into the Two Realms, they are gathered into Mahāvairocana at the center, and the Medicine Buddha too should be understood as contained in the central court. Whether the Medicine Buddha and Akṣobhya are the same deity or distinct ones has been debated within Shingon since early times, and oral transmissions survive on both sides, some holding them distinct and some identical. Esoteric Buddhism is a world of oral transmission, and it is not folded into a single answer. The Shoki Bonjōroku (a ritual compendium preserved in the Zoku Shingonshū Zensho, the Continued Complete Works of the Shingon School) likewise records that "from of old, on the basis of these passages, Akṣobhya and the Medicine Buddha are taken as the same body; there are grounds both for taking them as the same buddha and for taking them as different buddhas."

The transmission of the ritual manual itself holds a surprise. The Shoki Bonjōroku relates that the Medicine Buddha originally had no ritual manual (giki) of his own, so the Tang master Yixing, known as the recorder of the Commentary on the Mahāvairocana Sūtra, compiled one; once this manual was brought to Japan, every lineage used it as the base text for the Yakushi rite. And yet the eight Japanese masters who studied in Tang China (Kūkai, Saichō, and others) list no Yakushi ritual manual among the texts they brought back. While no sutra was recited more widely than this one, the construction of its rite was carefully cultivated on the Japanese side.

It may be added that the rite of the Seven Buddhas of Healing, in which the seven buddhas are enshrined together, is consistently described in Shingon literature as a rite of the Tendai (Taimitsu) tradition; Shingon has performed the Yakushi rite with the single buddha.

And the word "Medicine King" also appears from Kūkai's own brush. In the preface to his Hannya Shingyō Hiken (Secret Key to the Heart Sutra), grieving over people asleep in delusion, he wrote: "If one never seeks the Medicine King's medicine, when will one ever see the light of Mahāvairocana?" The same work holds one more famous passage.

A hyōbyaku is the proclamation that a rite's officiant reads aloud at its opening, addressed to the principal image. Why this rite is performed, what kind of buddha the principal image is, for whose sake and for what it is prayed: these are declared before the buddha, a kind of spoken preface to the prayer.

The Shoson Hyōbyakushō, compiled by Inyū, a Shingon scholar-monk who pursued his studies in the Kantō region during the Muromachi period, preserves the proclamation for the Yakushi rite. It reads as if the teaching of the Bhaiṣajyaguru Sūtra had been recast, whole, into the language of prayer.

The largest hall in the Danjō Garan, the sacred precinct that Kōbō Daishi opened on Mount Kōya, is the Kondō. The Kii Zoku Fudoki, a gazetteer of the late Edo period, records its principal image as Yakushi Nyorai, noting: "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," placing the Kondō of Mount Kōya within the general custom of Japanese main halls enshrining Yakushi.

The same work also records the arrangement of the daily rites (chōnichi gyōhō) performed without fail every day at the Kondō.

Devotion to the Medicine Buddha in Japan is thought to have begun almost simultaneously with the arrival of Buddhism itself. Its gateway was not doctrine first, but medicine. The Nihon Shoki entry for the sixth year of Emperor Bidatsu (577) records that a jugonshi (a specialist who treated illness by incantation) arrived from Baekje together with scriptures and treatises. Scholarship infers that devotion to the Medicine Buddha crossed the sea as one body with the healing techniques of Buddhism.

From then on, from the prayers of the state to the daily life of the common people, the Medicine Buddha remained on the main stage of Japanese Buddhism.

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 very name was born 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 out of light in the air before him, took the form of the Medicine Buddha, and radiated five-colored light. The Daishi received this sign as the vow "I heal and remove the sufferings of all beings equally, without distinction," 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 principal image and his family of light were carved as one set from the very beginning.

The present principal image, a seated statue in joined-woodblock construction with lacquered gold leaf, is considered a second-generation image modeled on that first statue and completed in the Muromachi period. The medicine jar in the left hand alone, however, is made of metal; it is said to be more than a thousand years old and is surmised to have been inherited from the first image. The jar that the sutra never prescribed, and that esoteric Buddhism read as "the jar of the Twelve Great Vows," this statue has kept upon its hand, in actual fact, for a thousand years.

The temple bears two in-names: Iō-in and Nikkō-in. Iō-in derives from Iō Zenzei, an epithet 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, an origin distinct from the bodhisattva Nikkō of the Yakushi triad. The mountain name Hakusui-zan, "Mountain of White Water," derives 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 today as the "sacred water of Kōbō Daishi."

Three hakoguruma carts are enshrined in the main hall. They are said to have been left by a pilgrim of the Taishō era who could not walk, recovered in this hall, and departed on his own feet with a pilgrim's staff. Together with the five-colored hand-cord that stretches from the hand of the principal image to the temple gate, they are the faith of healing made visible in this hall.

On the night of the 8th of every month the Yakushi goma is performed, and goma is also performed every Sunday afternoon, continuing the prayers for the healing of body and mind, for sound legs and hips, for recovery from eye disease, and for protection against cancer. The links below explain how to attend and how to apply. You may also participate online.