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of cross-cultural teaching in many disciplines. So that, in the press release for this edited volume, Victor Mair rightly praises Buddhism and Medicine as ‘a most unusual project. . . unique and valuable’. Buddhism and Medicine is unique and powerful since it will undoubtedly stimulate new teaching programmes, and research projects will benefit from the insights that reading the different texts will inspire in fields of transcultural, transnational and transregional history. The contribution that Buddhism and Medicine makes to new initiatives in area studies is also significant. For those specialists in discrete national areas, such as Indian, Chinese and Tibetan studies, there is much to learn from the breadth of scholarship that this volume represents. Around the world the very notion of area studies has come under increasing scrutiny for how its topics and approaches have reinforced old and fixed distributions of economic and political power. Yet, many of the authors of this volume owe their linguistic skills to the very area studies departments that are currently under threat. Such are the dilemmas we face as the very notion of academic areas is re-configured from simple geographical designations, that teach easily identifiable and manageable sets of languages, to more flexible thematic domains. Charting the geographic flows and counter-flows of Buddhism, with its formation of economic and cultural estates within and across ancient empires and kingdoms, and into modern states, requires fluid approaches to transcultural phenomena in order to observe and ascertain continuities and ruptures in patterns of belief and practice. In this world of more flexible regional boundaries and thematic domains, Buddhism and Medicine will not only push forward our appreciation of the role of Buddhist institutions and practice in the real conditions of healthcare, but also stimulate new studies of value to our knowledge of the embodiment of ritual and religion as healing practice – still too often a taboo subject in the teleological environment that still unfortunately characterises the history of medicine in the English speaking world.