Zhongguo zhonggu shiqi de zongjiao yu yiliao 中國中古時期的醫療與宗教 [Medicine and Religion in Medieval China] (review)

It has long been noted that religious practitioners in China specialized in varied forms of healing. However, only a handful of book-length studies give exclusive, extended attention to this aspect of Chinese therapeutic culture (Maspero 1981; Gai 2001; Strickmann 2002; Sakade 2007),¹ making Lin Fushi’s recent collection of essays a welcome addition. Developing from his previous work on Han Dynasty and Six Dynasties shamans ( Lin 1994, 2004), the collection provides a systematic overview of the medical activities of religious figures and sects in the late Han Dynasty and Six Dynasties.² Covering a broad variety of indigenous religious practitioners and sects, the essays are both insightful and entertaining, filled with anecdotal narratives from hagiographic, historical, and zhiguai 志怪 (tales of the strange) literature. The contribution is the application of the medical gaze to religion; Daoist studies specialists may find that while Lin draws on much of the major scholarship on his sources, his use of it is flat and does not engage the primary issues of dating or identification in Six Dynasties Daoism. The volume will be of particular interest to specialists in Daoist studies, the history of medicine, and Six Dynasties history, but others in the history of the body and the history of qi will also find it useful.

The book contains seventeen essays, all previously published, organized into thematic sections: “Epidemics and Responses to Them”; “Ultimate Concerns of Daoism”; “Daoist Medicine and Proselytizing through Healing”; “Activities of Wu 巫 and Beliefs in Plague Demons”; and “Body, Illness, and Culture.” Appendices to chapters include a historical table showing the date and type of epidemic from the Eastern Han through the period of northern and southern dynasties (26–28, 274–76); a bibliography of studies of the Taiping jing 太平經 (Scripture of Great Peace) (122–25); and a table of remedies based on hair from various medical sources (603–14).

The essays form an overarching survey of the medical activities of religious practitioners, who formed, arguably, the great majority of healers in early medieval China. They describe the relationships between different sects, differing attitudes to various forms of healing, and the ways particular belief sets and cosmologies shaped those attitudes. The essays discuss which types of practices each sect used or rejected and why, as well as how ideas of disease, contagion, and corresponding best practice were related to faiths within each sect. Together they provide an overall survey of religious healing methods and rationales through the period.

Anyone who has attempted to collect all of Lin Fushi’s works on religious healing, as I have, will agree that having them together in a single volume is a considerable convenience. The majority of the essays were previously published in the Zhongyang yanjiu yuan lishi yuyan yanjiu suo qikan 中央研究院歷史語言研究所集刊 (Bulletin for the Institute of History and Philology of Academia Sinica) and are thus not (yet) accessible through digital archives.

Each chapter is clearly presented with subheadings that make the information easily accessible and the argument structure clear: primary data and philological material is generally collected toward the front and middle of each chapter, with general summaries and topical analyses kept to concluding sections. Primary data frequently appears in numbered lists of narrative vignettes from original sources, accompanied by Lin’s philological comments and summary analysis of each tale. The somewhat pedantic presentation in lists does not detract from the reading, as the examples are entertaining and varied. Analyses at the end of each essay provide, among other things, statistical overviews of the material, showing, for example, the proportion of men and women who were treated, their social class, or the variety of treatment types.

In combination, the essays speak to each other in ways not clear when the essays are separate. The initial section on Han epidemics and government responses to them takes on a different significance when combined with essays on the rise of wu 巫 shrines, wronged spirits, and varieties of Daoist healing. Lin...