Taming the Poisonous

Front matter

Gan è TAMING THE POISONOUS

Mercury, Toxicity, and Safety in Tibetan Medical Practice

Barbara Gerke

Table of Contents

A Note on Tibetan and Sanskrit Terms

In this book, Tibetan terms are introduced with a phonetic transcription (if used more than once), followed by the transliteration in Wylie (1959) according to “THLs Extended Wylie Transliteration Scheme” (Chandler et al. 2004) at first use. Thereafter, only the phoneticized term is used. The phonetic transcription follows the “THL Simplified Phonetic Transcription of Standard Tibetan” by David Germano and Nicolas Tournadre (2003) as closely as possible. However, the phonetic transcription for proper Tibetan names, which have previously been published in secondary literature, does not follow THL. Thus: Lobsang not Lozang, Tenzin Chédrak, not Tendzin Chédrak, Tashi Tenzin, and not Trashi Tendzin, Ngawang and not Ngakwang (and in Ladakh: Nawang). The names of contemporary physicians are transcribed according to their own usage, for example: Tenzin Thaye, Tashi Tsering. Phonetics of previously published place names also do not follow the THL system, for example: Powo Tramo, not Pobo Tramok (Spo bo kra mog); Kyirong, not Kyidrong (Skyid grong); Phagri, not Pakri (Phag ri). Tibetan names, places, names of formulas, and general terms that occur more than once are listed alphabetically with their Wylie transliterations and explanations in the glossaries. Well-known Tibetan terms, such as lama or amchi, are used in their anglicized forms, without a plural -s. Sanskrit terms are transliterated following the “International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration” (IAST) scheme (Wikipedia 2019). All Sanskrit terms are explained in the glossary.

Translations from the Tibetan are my own unless otherwise indicated.

Chapter 1 Introduction: “It takes time to tame a wild horse”

One day I asked Dr.' Tenzin Thaye, one of the visiting physicians of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama and a senior Tibetan physician at the Men-Tsee- Khang? in Dharamsala, northwestern India, about the Tibetan medical meaning of dülwa (dul ba), or “taming.” His simple examples summarize the central theme of this book:

Dülwa actually means taming. When we get a wild animal and slowly train it, we call it dülwa. In the same way we also calm down the roughness of a plant and the poisons of mercury. It takes time to tame a wild horse. [...] Taming mercury takes many steps. Taming takes time. Likewise, you cannot tame the mind instantly; it takes time to tame negativities.*

Tenzin Thaye here speaks of Tibetan medical ideas of taming that involve subduing and controlling a substance and utilizing the poisonous as a vitalizing agent, and shaping its special potency, in Tibetan called nüpa (nus pa).* Tenzin Thaye alludes to several contexts in the Tibetan world where the term dulwa is used, not only in relation to taming mercury. The historical period of the introduction of Buddhism into Tibet is filled with stories of

1 In India, Tibetan physicians often call themselves doctor and use Dr. as their title for their traditional menpa kachupa (sman pa dka’ bcu pa) degree, which they are legally allowed to do when registered under the Central Council of Indian Medicine. However, menpa kachupa is not equivalent to a biomedical Doctor of Medicine (MD) degree. For various reasons, some Tibetan medical practitioners prefer to be called doctor, others use menpa (sman pa), the Tibetan term for physician, or amchi (am chi), the Mongolian-derived word for a Tibetan medical practitioner. Due to its common usage, and convention in Tibetan language, amchi is not italicized and is only used in the singular. In this book, I address physicians with their preferred title, usually Dr., or with their full names. I use doctor, physician, and amchi interchangeably.

2 The Men-Tsee-Khang is the largest Tibetan medical institute in India. See the Fieldsite section below for details.

4 Nüpa generally refers to the capacity of a substance to have an effect. Several different definitions and types of nüpa are mentioned in Tibetan medical texts. See Chapter 2 and Gerke (2019b) for more details.

Published in: Gerke, Barbara, 2021. Taming the Poisonous. Mercury, Toxicity, 15 and Safety in Tibetan Medical Practice. Heidelberg Studies on Transculturality 7. Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Publishing. DOI: https://doi.org/10.17885/heiup.746

INTRODUCTION: “IT TAKES TIME TO TAME A WILD HORSE”

how the construction of monasteries was aimed at “taming” local demons into protectors during a religious and political movement of Buddhist dominance over “wild” Tibetan landscapes and local beliefs (Gyatso 1987). The term dülwa also means discipline and refers to monastic regulations of fully ordained monks. In Buddhist mindfulness practices the five mental poisons (sems dug Inga)—desire, hatred, ignorance, pride, and envy—are also “tamed,” i.e. transformed into compassion.

In this book, I follow the story of mercury ethnographically, textually, and metaphorically through several centuries of Tibetan medical histories. I also trace its sources of contemporary trade in the Khari Baoli market in Old Delhi to its use in processed forms by Sowa Rigpa medical practitioners in India and Nepal. I present various positions of Tibetan physicians to highlight the story of mercury and its transformation into an elixir used in their medical traditions, widely known under the name of Tibetan medicine or Sowa Rigpa (gso ba rig pa, the science of healing).®

Recently, debates regarding the toxicity and safety of mercury as a strong neurotoxin and environmental pollutant have received greater attention globally, especially after the initiation of the global mercury ban by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP, founded in 1972) which was signed by many countries, including India in 2014. In turn, these debates have intensified the existing discussions within Asian medical systems (e.g. Sowa Rigpa, Ayurveda, Unani, Siddha, Traditional Chinese Medicine, etc.), which use processed mercury composite compounds (largely in the form of mercury sulfide) in some of their medicines. It is important to note that most Tibetan medical formulas are plant and mineral based and contain no mercury or other metal ingredients.

This book does not answer the question of whether the use of certain mercury compounds in Tibetan medicines is safe. Rather, it analyzes what is at stake in asking such a question. I explore what questioning mercury's safety in Sowa Rigpa medicines entails in terms of the politics of toxicity, the social construction of safety, and the ways in which medical epistemologies are translated cross-culturally, adopted, resisted, and used for different purposes by different stakeholders.

To situate the positionality of Tibetan medical practitioners within these contemporary contexts, I first trace the history of mercury practices in Tibet, beginning in the thirteenth century. I then sketch the larger picture of Sowa Rigpa mercurial medicines beyond Tibet's cultural borders and into the diaspora in India and Nepal into the twenty-first century. The material presented is diverse and complex, drawing on both textual research and ethnographic encounters, addressing issues of historical narrative, lineage, gender, embodied practices, poison myths, and pharmacological

5 Sowa Rigpa was recognized by the Indian government under the ministry of AYUSH in 2010, representing Ayurveda, Yoga and Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha, Sowa Rigpa, and Homeopathy. See Craig and Gerke (2016) on a critical discussion of the naming of Sowa Rigpa; see also Blaikie (2016) and Kloos (2016) on the recognition process in India.

INTRODUCTION: “IT TAKES TIME TO TAME A WILD HORSE”

techniques of taming mercury, as well as the use of science. All of these are linked by the overarching question of what is involved in the social construction of toxicity and safety, and what this tells us about the heuristic concept of transculturality as a form of cultural translation and medical knowledge production.

This book is also about contested definitions of toxicity in general and how notions of toxicity vary across cultural contexts and are contingent on different interpretations of science.® It questions how global regulations based on biomedical frameworks often disregard emic medical understandings of toxicity in the pursuit of public health. In Sowa Rigpa theory mercury is recognized as a toxic substance when left unprocessed. Since it continues to be used in Tibetan practices of transforming poisons into elixirs (therapeutically considered highly potent), the global condemnation of elemental mercury and its various derivatives as a neurotoxin and environmental pollutant has stirred critical debates on its safety. Following how notions of mercury as a toxic substance shift both globally and locally within these geopolitical debates raises important questions beyond the field of Asian medicine: what happens if a poisonous substance can also be considered therapeutic once medical practitioners refine and process it? How do such notions of toxicity change (even among Sowa Rigpa practitioners) as global health regulations come to the forefront? The case of Sowa Rigpa mercury practices illustrates this complex and contested interface between biomedical and indigenous epistemologies of toxicity, thus offering a timely contribution to studies in transculturality.

Over eight chapters, Taming the Poisonous follows mercury through these larger global forms of governance, legislation, and control, and investigates how they affect Tibetan medical practice on the ground. For centuries, Tibetan physicians have recognized the toxicity of this enigmatic silvery heavy metal, which is volatile and liquid at room temperature and is visibly transformed in its color, mobility, and form when processed with other metals and precious substances, herbs, and minerals. I analyze Tibetan medical approaches to toxicity, potency, and safety and what happens when these approaches are translated, negotiated, and evaluated in local and global contexts, which are influenced by definitions of toxicity and safety steered by scientific hegemonies. I also describe how—in this increasingly globalized world—those who politically, legally, and economically control definitions of “toxicity” also hold power over the perceived potency of poisonous substances (see Cordner 2016). Toxicity thus becomes more than a medical concept; it is also a platform for hegemonic powers to impact acts of cultural translation (see below). By following the poison, so to speak, this book explores how the noxiousness of mercury

6 For definitions of science and what constitutes modern science in Tibetan medical contexts, see Adams, Dongzhu, and Le (2010), Adams, Schrempf, and Craig (2011b, 1-3), Craig (2012), and Kloos (2011). For different interpretations of toxicity and purity in pharmaceutical science and Sowa Rigpa, see Tidwell and Nettles (2019).

INTRODUCTION: “IT TAKES TIME TO TAME A WILD HORSE”

Figure 1: Various precious pills from India and Nepal wrapped in different colored silk cloth. Many of them contain processed mercury in the form of an organometallic mercury sulfide compound. Photo: Brigitta Gerke-Jork (Gerke-Jork 2013/CC-BY-SA 4.0).

has been perceived and negotiated by different players both historically and in the present period of globalization of Sowa Rigpa.

As we shall see, the transformation of a base substance into something potent is a theme that Tibetans made their own, not only in the development of tantric Buddhist ideas of taming but also in their medical traditions of making precious medicines with refined mercury as one of the key ingredients. While unpacking ideas of taming, or dülwa, I argue that poisons become powerful agents not only in the making of rejuvenating and precious medicines, but also in the purification and control of social and physical environments as well as in the cultural construction of toxicity and safety. This involves notions of ritual and environmental pollution and poisoning fears and practices, as well as negotiating the power of potent poisons during encounters with modern science. This book thus also explores the ways in which mercury processing practices parallel social, historical, and religious ideas of taming in Tibetan societies. Today, as in the past, mercury processing practices have created prestige and power for those securing, patenting, and preserving the pharmaceutical skills of taming elemental mercury and preparing what are considered and valued as the most precious medicines—precious pills or rinchen rilbu (rin chen ril bu) (Fig. 1).

Precious pills, also called jewel pills because of their precious and semi-precious gemstone content, are among the most well-known Tibetan

INTRODUCTION: “IT TAKES TIME TO TAME A WILD HORSE”

Figure 2: Precious pills were wrapped in silk cloth and sealed with wax by hand at the Men-Tsee-Khang in Dharamsala, India, before the introduction of machine-made blister packs in 2009.

Photo: Men-Tsee-Khang (Men-Tsee-Khang 1990s/ CC-BY-SA 4.0).

medicines today. They are multi-compounds, each of which contains from twenty-five to about 160 plants and minerals as well as pre-processed precious ingredients, for example gold, silver, rubies, diamonds, corals, turquoise, pearls, and sapphires. For centuries, they have held a special place in Tibetan societies. They have been used for treating poisoning, fevers, malignant tumors, infections, neural disorders, strokes, and epilepsy (Sonam Dolma 2013), and have also been regarded as providing protection from epidemics, such as SARS (Craig and Adams 2008). Before the advent of Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) and machine-made pill sachets in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 2001 (Saxer 2013), their preciousness used to be—and in some cases still is—culturally marked by the pills’ individual silk wrapping (Fig. 1 and Fig. 2).”

The most precious composite added to many precious pills as a catalyst is called tsotel (btso thal, meaning cooked or refined ash).® Tsote/ is a com-

7 TheMen-Tsee-Khang in Dharamsala replaced traditional wrapping with machine-made blister packs in 2009. See MTK (2010).

8 Tsotel is also translated as “cooked powder,” since it contains not only several metals that have been calcined into ash but also many other ingredients that were cooked or triturated. After processing, the tsotel compound appears more like a black powder. Dr. Pasang Yonten, personal communication through Jan van der Valk, October 2017.

INTRODUCTION: “IT TAKES TIME TO TAME A WILD HORSE”

plex organometallic mercury sulfide compound, containing eight metals and eight minerals that are all processed over several weeks with numerous plants and other ingredients. The process of making tsote/ is known as ngulchu tsodru chenmo (dngul chu btso bkru chen mo), or “Great Mercury Refinement,” briefly referred to as tsodru chenmo.

Its complex manufacturing process is the pride of Tibetan medical experts. While there are shared resemblances to Indian and Chinese alchemical techniques of transforming poisonous mercury through trituration with sulphur and using metals in the form of ash (Skt. bhasma), the complex ways of making tsote/ appear to be a uniquely Tibetan practice. This book sketches some of the historical trajectories of the tsodru chenmo practice, its transmission via medical lineages, and some of the contestations of its knowledge transmission and safety concerns in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Making tsote/, however, is not the only way that mercury has been processed in Tibet’s past. Medical texts list numerous ways of taming mercury, but preparing tsote/ is the most elaborate, prestigious, and popular method in today’s Tibetan medical manufacturing units, and is considered the safest.

During my ethnographic encounters with Tibetan medical practitioners in India and Nepal, I explored how practitioners who currently use processed mercury in their medicines have been affected by the global mercury ban recently initiated by the UNEP. How do they translate global environmental and public health concerns, which have been intensified by the ban, into their local worlds of medicine making, called menjor (sman sbyor)? How do they explain the safety that their medical texts have ascribed to the use of processed mercury—largely as mercury sulfide—in a variety of medicines for hundreds of years and which is currently being questioned through the policies developed by environmental protection agencies?

This book does not question that liquid metallic (or elemental) mercury is highly toxic, especially when heated and inhaled. Tibetan authors do not contest its toxicity either and have described this “silver fluid’—which translates into Tibetan as ngülchu (dngul chu)—as highly poisonous in medical texts dating back to the twelfth century. However, in this book I raise issues Surrounding the social construction and perceptions of toxicity and safety as well as the transculturality of notions of what constitutes and lends power to a poison.

TRANSCULTURALITY IN ACTS OF TRANSLATION

Transculturality in acts of translation

We also studied science, I understand what they [Western scientists] feel about research, but they also need to understand us, to know our ways of thinking, so we have an integration, so we have a bridge between us.

I feel that only one way is not good (Sonam Yangdon, research assistant and translator on the Tibetan-Israeli research team during the second mercury toxicity study at the Men-Tsee-Khang in Dharamsala).°

The act of translation is itself very much involved in the creation of knowledge” (Tymoczko and Gentzler 2002, xxi).

This book offers a contribution to the cross-disciplinary scholarship on transculturality, or transculturation, attesting to the growing trend in the social sciences and humanities to view and approach cultures as dynamic, heterogeneous, fluid processes with porous borders, rather than as stable entities marked by demarcated lines of practice. To date, multiple definitions of the transcultural paradigm exist across many disciplines, demanding interdisciplinary approaches, but serving “different needs in different fields of research” (König and Rakow 2016, 93-95). From a historical perspective, transculturality “renounces comparatism and focuses on contact zones, adaptation and exchange processes, modes of translation, and moments of crossing borders in a global context” (Herren, Rüesch, and Sibille 2012, 6). Thus, methodologically, transculturality becomes “an analytical tool to overcome an essentialist understanding of cultures, which is, if nothing else, helpful for a globalised twenty-first century” (2012, 70). For anthropologists, transculturality is a form of practice, which is continually produced and marked by plurality, entanglements, and discontent. As a heuristic concept, it is “good to think with” when trying to make sense of the ways in which knowledge is produced in cross-cultural encounters and in vibrant social spaces, or “contact zones,” frequently marked by disparate power structures (Pratt 2008). These multiple approaches to transculturality all share an emphasis on better understanding transcultural encounters in the globalized worlds we live in.

Taming the Poisonous contributes a specific example from the Tibetan world to studies in transculturality with a focus on how ideas of toxicity are translated, negotiated, and applied in different epistemological contexts. Anthropological studies on Sowa Rigpa increasingly view “translation of scientific epistemologies as practices between and across cultures” (Adams, Schrempf, and Craig 2011b, 1). In this book, Tibetan medical mercury refinement practices meet modern science in various ways. The terms modern or Western science are in themselves difficult to define. They are deeply embedded in the politics of knowledge shaped by the Enlightenment and colonialism (e.g. Prakash 1999, in Adams, Schrempf, and Craig 2011b, 2).

9 Interview, Dharamsala, November 27, 2009. The two mercury studies are discussed in Chapter 7.

INTRODUCTION: “IT TAKES TIME TO TAME A WILD HORSE”

The widespread accepted dominance of science as the main framework in which to understand the world has its limitations when it comes to complex healing encounters in indigenous medical contexts.

Young Tibetans in India, like Sonam Yangdon in her opening quote above, who live in a pluralistic society in which they constantly bridge and translate between different epistemologies, wish for an exchange between Sowa Rigpa and science that is not one way, but is like “a bridge,” leading to some form of “integration.” As we shall see, the encounters between Tibetan medical and scientific paradigms of mercury toxicity offer ample examples of transculturality in practice: they are dynamic, political, and scatter in multiple directions, just like liquid mercury. They are continuously (re)shaped by religious ideas, well-established social networks, pharmacological practice, and varying expectations of what science could or should achieve for Sowa Rigpa.

The research presented here draws on more than two decades of personal involvement and studies with practitioners of Sowa Rigpa in India, the DFG-funded research on Tibetan pharmacological detoxification practices (2011-2015), a Lise-Meitner FWF-funded project on Tibetan precious pills (2015-2018), and my current FWF project on potent substances (2018-2022). My research focus has been specifically on the use of mercury in Tibetan medical traditions, its social history, its contemporary application in menjor practices, and the contested views of its safety. I followed these issues through twenty-one months of fieldwork between 2011 and 2017, during which time I conducted approximately 200 interviews as well as translated and analyzed relevant classical and contemporary Tibetan medical texts. My research traces the story of mercury back to the thirteenth century CE, when complex mercury processing techniques came to Tibet, largely from the Swat Valley regions of what today is Pakistan and northwestern India. I will analyze some of these texts with the following questions in mind: Which issues of toxicity are raised in Tibetan medical works? How did Tibetan authors describe the processing of mercury? How were mercury processing events embedded in political, economic, and religious life in Tibet? How has this changed since 1959, in exile in India and Nepal, and—more recently—with the global UNEP mercury ban to be implemented in India in 2020?

My approach has been to integrate Tibetan medical texts (translated and untranslated) into the ethnographic encounter, understanding cultures as constituting “themselves in translation and as translation,” being the components as well as part of the results of translation processes (Bachmann-Medick 2006, 37). When it comes to translating medical meanings across different medical epistemologies and in anthropological contexts, theoretical analysis needs to be placed in a framework that grounds “interpretations in people’s own forms of discourse and the concepts they use in their daily lives” (Wikan 1992, 464). Thus, an examination and analysis of contemporary uses of Tibetan medical texts and their translations and transmissions of meanings have been an integral part of my

TRANSCULTURALITY IN ACTS OF TRANSLATION ethnographic fieldwork, to arrive at a deeper understanding of Tibetan practitioners' discourses surrounding mercury toxicity.

Anthropologists have used texts and translated ideas across societies from the early days of the discipline, and “cultural translation” has frequently been included in the definition of their work descriptions, although often in controversial colonial contexts (see Rubel and Rosman 2003). While thinking through and working with translations of texts and meanings, I have been especially inspired by critical anthropological debates on cultural translations (Asad 1986) as well as new approaches in translation studies that have come to the forefront since the “translational turn” (Bachmann-Medick 2009). This has placed more emphasis on transculturality and shifting power relations between texts and ideas in their translation across cultures; in other words, it has shifted the focus to the politics of translation (e.g. Gal 2015; Hermans 2003; Tymoczko and Gentzler 2002). The trajectories, interfaces, and politics surrounding translation and power have been explored by Maria Tymoczko and Edwin Gentzler in their edited volume Translation and Power (2002):

Translation is not simply a process of faithful reproduction but invariably involves deliberate acts of selection, construction, and omission. It is inextricably linked to issues of cultural dominance, assertion, and resistance—in short, to power (Tymoczko and Gentzler 2002, cover).

How does power play a role in the translation and politics of toxicity? To give an example: the translations of toxicity, risk, and science have recently been explored in Toxic Safety (Cordner 2016), a study on the safety of flame retardants in the US. It shows how interpretations of science and risk assessments of toxic substances can vary among different stakeholders in pursuit of different goals. Sociologist Alissa Cordner introduces the notion of “strategic science translation,” which she defines as “the process of interpreting and communicating scientific evidence to an intended audience in order to advance certain goals and interests” (2016, 915). Her approach explains how risk can either be downplayed or highlighted, depending on the group's interest and how they consequently translate scientific materials and data.

Linguistic anthropologist Susan Gal (2015) points to the need for reflexivity when writing about translational processes. Gal cautions: “It is useful to remember that translations [...] rely on ideological framings of comparison. And comparison—as many thinkers have noted—is always positioned, never politically neutral, never innocent” (2015, 236). At several places in this book, I reflect on my positionality as the ethnographer and my own embodied sense of toxicity, which, I am aware, has impacted my ways of translating between different epistemologies of poisons.

I also elucidate, across several chapters with numerous ethnographic examples, how acts of translation are embedded in transcultural practices

INTRODUCTION: “IT TAKES TIME TO TAME A WILD HORSE”

that reassert power and involve a certain cultural hegemony when dealing with mercury toxicity. This sometimes involves Tibetan medical practitioners explaining their views of toxicity and safety to international audiences (including myself), which are strongly influenced by biomedical science and prominent ideas of toxicity embedded in it. In some cases, Tibetan physicians and their institutes have employed science to valorize the safety of tsote/-containing precious pills, e.g. through controlled pilot studies (Sallon et al. 2006, 2017; see Chapter 7). We also find acts of translation in the ways in which Tibetan medical authors have described and authenticated medical lineages of mercury processing in their writings and across their complex socio-economic, religious, and political networks in which the tsodru chenmo practice has and continues to take place (Chapters 3 and 4).

Today, almost all forms of mercury seem universally considered poisonous, although to varying degrees (see Appendix A); therefore any analysis of a possibly cultural construction of mercury’s poisonousness at first sight might appear ridiculous and could immediately be critiqued as relativist or charitable anthropology. This book takes a different angle, building upon and extending beyond what Talal Asad expresses well in his essay on “The Concepts of Cultural Translation.” He writes:

My point is only that the process of “cultural translation” is inevitably enmeshed in conditions of power—professional, national, international. And among these conditions is the authority of ethnographers to uncover the implicit meanings of [‘Isubordinate societies.[] Given that that is so, the interesting question for enquiry is not whether, and if so to what extent, anthropologists should be relativists or rationalists, critical or charitable, toward other cultures, but how power enters into the process of “cultural translation” (Asad 1986, 163).

A major objective of this book is to show how power enters practices of transculturality through specific forms of the translation of toxicity in numerous contexts, and how toxicity and safety are expressed, negotiated, and defined by the various players (e.g. Tibetan doctors, medical institutions, international regulators, the ethnographer, biomedical researchers, chemists, etc.). I am interested in investigating how acts of translation are (re)created in ethnographic and other encounters and how they influence the ways in which Tibetan physicians, who have been exposed to biomedical ideas of toxicity, explain their usage and detoxification processes of mercury to different audiences. In light of a global ban on mercury and an influx of scientific studies that attempt to prove that Tibetan medicines are safe, Tibetan physicians have to negotiate a variety of toxicity epistemologies. How are the powers and dangers of poisons and the skills to tame them translated in this complex, contemporary situation? My argument here is that this translation process is largely about “taming.” Not only do Tibetan physicians need to tame the toxic substance of mercury into

CHAPTER OUTLINE something beneficial, they also need to tame the biomedical understanding of toxicity and the global politics surrounding it to make sense of and to justify their continuous use of mercury in their medicines.

Moreover, I link acts of translation to forms of embodiment of toxicity and to power. How is the positioning of the various players (including the anthropologist) affected by the ways in which each actor has embodied individual perceptions of toxicity, and how are economic and power structures involved in their efforts to translate different cultural perceptions of toxicity and safety between them? My situatedness as a researcher, purposely staying upwind of the mercury fumes while observing certain processing techniques, configured a particular positionality during participant observation. I often asked myself how my judgment of safety would affect my presentation of the material and my translation of medical practitioners' ideas of toxicity. Would my own embodied sense of toxicity distort my translation of theirs? How would I turn these experiences into text?

What weaves each chapter of this book into a coherent narrative is an exploration of what is at stake in translating toxicity transculturally. With clear relevance beyond the Tibetan world, the book teaches us something about how, in a world facing global health and environmental concerns, we must address questions of toxicity and the safety of traditional pharmaceuticals in new and innovative ways. Such questions refer not only to well-established processing techniques of poisonous substances and their use in traditional medicines, but also to an increasing concern with the contamination of non-toxic raw medicinal substances through environmental pollution. It is my contention that a careful analysis of indigenous medical practice can add significantly to our understanding of how ideas of the poisonous are deeply embedded in religious and medical notions of toxicity, our own distinctive “poison culture” (Arnold 2016), and pharmacological practices over time.

After the chapter outline below, I introduce the fieldsite and methodological and ethnographic challenges in the field, which led me to reflect on my own embodied sense of toxicity.

Chapter outline

Following this Introduction, Chapter 2 sets the scene with a Tibetan origin myth of poisons, which appears in several instances and with variations in Tibetan medical textbook chapters on poisons and mercury processing. This myth illustrates that in a religious and cultural environment where evil is not cast out or banished but actively engaged with and transformed, poisons are more easily considered living agents that have a social life of their own. How does a poison become an elixir? Why is tsote/ considered the “king of elixirs” in Sowa Rigpa?

After introducing the sources of mercury, I take the reader through an ethnographic journey into the narrow market alleys of Old Delhi where elemental mercury is sold and traded in liquid form (including to Tibetan and

INTRODUCTION: “IT TAKES TIME TO TAME A WILD HORSE”

Ayurvedic physicians). I then analyze mercury-related technical terms and what is at stake when translating the meanings of terms such as safety, toxicity, poison, purification, essence, detoxification, processing, and taming in Sowa Rigpa socio-cultural contexts. The second part of the chapter thematically introduces the politics of mercury toxicity, including the cultural story of mercury’s chemistry, mercury’s different chemical forms and their varied toxicity, and global policies and regulations such as the UNEP mercury ban, which are based on the atomic model (see Schwabl 2013). I then present several existing toxicity studies of mercury in Tibetan and Ayurvedic medicines and discuss them in terms of the politics of toxicity.