Religion, Suffering, and Healing: Therapeutic Authority and Ritual Efficacy in Comparative Perspective

Illness poses questions about more than whether a treatment works: it also raises problems of responsibility, religious authorization, and the interpretation of improvement or continuing suffering. This article compares selected Śvetāmbara Jain monastic materials, the Buddhist Vinaya’s account of care for a sick monk, and the Carakasaṃhitā’s classification of treatment, with supplementary attention to healing narratives and documented contemporary practice. It argues that obligations to provide care, judgments about appropriate therapeutic means, and claims about efficacy constitute related but nonidentical forms of authority. The comparison challenges a simple opposition between religious and medical healing while refusing to infer clinical outcomes from prescriptive or narrative texts. Its contribution is a source-bounded account of what different kinds of healing evidence can establish.