The Medicine Buddha is where Buddhism stops pretending its adherents only want liberation. His twelve vows are unusually concrete — that the sick be healed, the deformed made whole, the hungry fed, the imprisoned released — and his practice is straightforwardly petitionary. Tibetan medicine treats him as its source, and the lapis-blue colour is doctrinal rather than decorative: it is the colour of the healing itself. Modern practitioners chant his mantra at hospital beds, and teachers generally decline to over-explain whether the mechanism is supernatural or psychological.