Abstracts

Panel 1:

Cur(s)es, Dharanis and Medical Remedies. Thinking Through Magical Medicine in Heian Japan
Benedetta Lomi

The term ‘magical medicine’ has often been applied to ritualised practices and therapies contained in Buddhist scriptures such as  the uttering of incantations, the ingestion of talismans, and the performance of exorcistic rituals. While this may be a useful heuristic category, it posits a number of issues that requires contextual consideration. Although ‘magical medicine’ may seem to imply the synchronic existence of its opposite –  a non-magical form medicine – this is not always the case. Furthermore, the notion of magic itself needs to be assessed against time-specific, cultural, or native categories.
Drawing examples from the Japanese medieval period this paper will argue that curative strategies belonging to what we know consider discrete fields of knowledge, were jointly employed by various specialists. This will provide the opportunity not only to reconsider the boundaries between medical, ‘magical’ and religious practices in the context of Heian Japan, but also to question the existing of competing epistemologies.

Hippiatry and Ritual Healing: Considering Japanese Buddhist Illustrated Manuscripts on Equine Medicine
Katja Triplett

Ritual healing and medical treatment have often been combined in East Asian Buddhism. Ideas on the physical body, illness and health that developed in India reached China via Buddhist textual, aesthetic and ritual activities, and were then connected with indigenous perceptions of the body and socio-cosmological worldviews. These activities continued and migrated to other parts of East Asia where further combinations with local knowledge systems ensued. The ritual healing and medical therapies were not limited to humans but also included domestic animals such as the horse. This paper examines illustrated Buddhist manuscripts from early modern Japan on equine medicine by considering them as media connecting common and secret knowledge of healing.

Rhythms of Soul(s) in Shamanic Healing: case studies from Nepal (Tamu), Siberia (Sakha) and Korea
Keith Howard

Music is core to shamanic healing practices, but, as the most plastic of arts, music offers itself to various interpretations. While practitioners and scholars agree that music has affective impact, many would argue that this involves cultural understanding and association. In what ways, then, do shamans use music? This paper briefly looks at specific practices in three different places, but complicates the picture slightly since each example involves elements of revival and the politics of national/regional identity.

Panel 2:

A Social Geography of the Medico-Religious Market in Medieval China
Michael Stanley-Baker

This paper begins by problematising the use of categories such as "medicine" and "religion" when studying early medieval China, when the interplay between repertoires of salvation and of cure was commonplace.  It suggests this dichotomy can be resolved by adopting a Fleckian notion of socially located epistemologies.  This approach dispels a common trope in Chinese medical history that doctors were dominant throughout the early medieval period, by showing how this argument is based on textual genealogy, not institutional history.  Abandoning the notion of hard-sided boundaries between religion and medicine, we can more closely examine how social class and sectarian identity modulated access to therapeutic knowledge.  This is particularly clear through reading Daoist texts from the period.
This paper concludes by demonstrating a nascent mapping and database technology. This records GIS locations of drug use or production according to text, period, sectarian identity and genre of writing.  It suggests that with this solution, we can much more clearly visualise the distribution of drugs in the social landscapes of pre-modern China and proposes that this is scalable to include all of medieval Asia.  This portion of the paper invites members of the symposium to a collaborative effort to develop an Asia-wide database based on rigorous manuscript philology.

Tibetan Medicine from Dunhunag: Probing Borders between ‘Medicine’ and ‘Ritual’
Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim

This paper will focus on the Tibetan scroll IT J 756 from Dunhuang, which can be seen as placed between texts in which healing is mostly achieved through ritual (although not exclusively) – such as PT 1285 and ITJ 734 – and the Tibetan moxibustion texts PT127, PT 1044 and PT 1058 – which are medical. Having made these general categorisations, I would also attempt to problematise the division between ‘medicine’ and ‘ritual’.

Torch-bearers of Modernity? Western Missionaries, Demonism and Exorcism in Modern China (1860s-1930s)
Lars Laamann

Christian missionaries from Europe and America active in China around the turn of the twentieth century took great pride in presenting themselves as representatives of a more enlightened civilisation. Part and parcel of this self-perception was the rejection of the “superstitious” beliefs and “unscientific” practices they encountered, as imagined anti-essences of their combined message of religious and material redemption.  Missionaries and Christian community leaders thus proceeded to deal with the erosion of old certainties which the political upheavals of the early twentieth century had created.
Drawing on recent research, the present paper will shed light on phenomena relating to demon possession and exorcism between the end of the Taiping wars and the Japanese invasion. It will offer a typology of the popular concepts which offended Western missionaries and China’s modernising elites alike, analyse cases of demonism described by Chinese and foreign Christians and will, finally, contextualise the relationship between healing and spiritualism in the concrete setting of late imperial and republican China."

Panel 3:

Ritualised Pharmacology: Religious Empowerments of Mercurial Tibetan Medicines
Barbara Gerke

Tibetan medicine is known for its close links to Buddhism. During the reign of the Fifth Dalai Lama in the seventeenth century, medicine (along with other sciences) was increasingly centralised and institutionalised with the intention of propagating prevalent Buddhist ideas through various areas of knowledge while strengthening the theocratic Ganden government. These developments manifested in various ways.
This presentation takes the example of Tibetan pharmacological practices of ‘purifying’ mercury into mercury-sulphide ash, called tsotel ( btso thal )—a crucial ingredient of ‘precious pills’ ( rin chen ril bu )—and analyses the overlapping medical and religious aspects of this manufacturing process. This process takes over a month, a considerable amount of funds, and a large commitment of manpower, which makes it a special occasion in Tibetan pharmacies and surrounding communities. Dating back to the thirteenth century and probably of Indian tantric origin, the purification practice is now tightly linked to the Buddhist ritual practice known as ‘Yuthok Heart Essence’ ( g.yu thog synig thig ), to which Tibetan physicians are usually initiated at some point in their careers. How is the pharmacological manufacturing practice ritualised? What is the religious significance of the event for the pharmacists and the surrounding community? And how does medicine and ritual conflate in the making of tsotel as compared to other medicine preparations? Examples are taken from Tibetan pharmacology texts, historical descriptions of tsotel events, as well as interviews with contemporary Tibetan pharmacologists in India and Nepal. I show that through turning the pharmacy itself into a sacred space the purification or mercury is extended to the purification of the minds of the medical practitioners manufacturing tsotel , as well as the surrounding landscape and community. This is articulated in terms of auspiciousness and blessing, fertility of the land, and empowerment of the medicines.
I suggest an analytic approach that takes into account Tibetan ideas of poisons being not only the most harmful agents but—when transformed or purified—also the most powerful medicines. The transformation that takes place on a practical material level in the pharmacy—when mercury changes from a silvery, shiny toxic metal to a medicinal potent ash—also takes place on other levels. The extension of this transformation is made possible through rituals that are directed at the empowerment of the medicine, the enhancement of its efficacy, the spiritual purification of the people making it, and the healing benefits for the community at large.

The myth of the AIDS-goddess: Truth or Fabrication? Stories of ‘Bad Blood’ in Bengali Folklore
Fabrizio Ferrari

This paper critically reflects on the goddess Śītalā, formerly known as “the smallpox goddess,” and her alleged transformation into an AIDS-goddess. Moving from fieldwork originally conducted in West Bengal in 2003-2004, I examine my original findings and the bourgeoning circulation of stories of Śītalā as an AIDS-goddess vis-à-vis recent ethnographic research (2011-2012). Although I met devotees of the goddess that look at HIV-positiveness as a privileged condition signalling their closeness to Śītalā, my recent research on the field shows the sporadic nature of such instances. While the myth of the AIDS-goddess is discussed as proof of an enduring fascination with excesses that still features discourses on and around India, I explain why new pandemics (HIV/AIDS, SARS, Avian Flu, H1N1/09 virus) do not find a place in the mythology of deities traditionally specialised in disease-management and how local folk narratives explain and interpret physical and social imbalance.

Healing (and) the Body, Comparative Ontological and Cosmological Perspectives
Tullio Lobetti

The very word “healing” almost naturally involves the presence of the human body as an “organism”, namely a set of biologically constituted parts working together in virtue of a series of mechanical processes. A failure in one of these processes may result in disease or even death. Healing thus means nothing more than “fixing” such bodily failure, the same way a mechanic may fix a broken engine. As natural as it may appear, this idea of the body does not constitute the immediate apprehension of a “natural object”, but is rather an historical episteme which needs to be duly deconstructed before attempting any comparative analysis of the disease/healing aetiologies. The possibility of emancipating the body from its context is just one consequence of a longstanding tradition of ontological essentialisation developed within Western intellectual history, eventually affecting also the conception of disease and cure. If we take into account cultural contexts where such a clear-cut discrimination between beings is not so openly enforced - or even actively criticised - we must conclude that the disease/healing process needs to be understood under a different paradigm.
This paper will indeed analyse the conception of healing and disease within cosmological systems postulating weak ontological boundaries between the human body and the rest of the world, eventually reconsidering the disease/cure aetiology  in this light. Significantly, we shall find interesting points of contact between Asian conceptions of body and disease and Western pre-modern counterparts, which will lead us to individuate the formation of the current episteme only after the Enlightenment period - one of many consequences of the modern effort for emancipation that eventually also shaped our ontological pre-suppositions.