doctor | Yuduosama.Yuandangongbu |
dynasty | Southern Song, lived in 1126 - 1202 AD |
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bubble_chart Description Yutok Sarma, also known as New Yutok, Later Yutok, or Little Yutok (1126–1202), was an outstanding Tibetan medical practitioner. He was born in the Fire Horse year of the second Rabjung cycle, which corresponds to the year 1126 CE, in his hometown of Nyangdö Goshi-Retang. He was the thirteenth descendant of Yutok Nyingma (Old Yutok) from the Tibetan Empire period.
It is said that he was exceptionally intelligent from a young age and began studying medical texts at the age of eight, soon starting to practice medicine. At the age of fourteen, he cured a scholar named Rongton Könchok Gyalpo of elephant hide disease. This scholar later also studied medicine and received further treatment from Wépa Darza in the Ü-Tsang region, who granted him a copy of the Sibu Yidian. To repay Yutok Sarma for curing his illness, the scholar gifted this classic text to Yutok, along with his own annotations on the work. Yutok treasured it and studied it diligently. From the age of eighteen, he traveled six times to India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and other places to study, learning from many local sages and acquiring numerous ancient Indian medical texts, greatly enriching his knowledge.
Yutok Sarma's medical works are extensive, with some of the more important ones being The Compendium of the Eight Branches (Great and Small), The General Commentary on Aśvaghoṣa's Medical Collection: The Precious Mirror of Observation, Five Chapters on Pulse Diagnosis, Practical Small Volume, The Essence of the Small Continuation of Nectar, Three Scrolls of Secret Formulas, and Small Volume of Proven Formulas. However, his primary contribution lies in the revision of the Sibu Yidian. Before this, the Sibu Yidian written by Old Yutok had not been widely circulated but was kept secret by the royal family before being discovered and passed into the hands of the public. After it was presented to Little Yutok by Könchok Gyalpo, it returned to the Yutok family. Yutok Sarma thoroughly revised the text by combining his own experience with the original work, supplementing incomplete parts, and adding content related to pulse diagnosis, urine diagnosis, the five elements' interactions, and tea bowl analysis from the Lunar King's Medical Treatment. He corrected both the annotations and the main text, dividing the entire book into eighteen branches. This final revision allowed the Sibu Yidian to take its definitive form and be passed down to future generations.