Combating Illness-Causing Demons in the Home: Fabing Treatises and Their Circulation from the Late Ming Through the Early Republican Period

In 1706, Pu Songling finished his manuscript, Book of Drugs and Demons (Yao sui shu), a collection of folk recipes. A prolific writer from Shandong who spent most of his lifetime serving as an advisor in local government or as a teacher in private homes in his native place, Pu is known today mostly for his collection of ghost stories. In his short preface to Book of Drugs and Demons, Pu pointed out the importance of medical recipe books in ordinary households: "People in rural areas not only cannot find any doctor to see them for illness, but also have no money to buy medicine. [I] thus collect folk recipes for the convenience of people in the neighborhood." At the end of the preface, he specifically advised his readers about illness-causing demons:

If [one] happens to suffer [from illness], [one can] open this book to look up [solutions], for example, [entries explaining that] if one falls ill on a certain day, which demon or which evil spirit [is causing the problem], and [whether] to use yellow or white paper money to send it away.¹

The entries that Pu mentioned here are divination treatises that deal specifically with the routine emergence of illness-causing demonic threats in domestic space. They appeared in vernacular texts such as daily-use encyclopedias and almanacs as well as manuscripts of ritual specialists' handbooks or commonplace books created by non-experts from the late Ming to the early Republican period. These treatises appeared under different titles and exhibited a high degree of textual variation. Yet, they all linked sites and objects in the domestic setting to illness-causing demons, thereby presenting domestic space as a central locale for both the cause and ritual treatment of illness. I propose using the Chinese term "fabing treatises" (fă bing shu) as a common category for these various treatises on illness-related divination. The term appeared in late Ming encyclopedias and in late Qing manuscripts, where it meant "divination texts on illnesses that require ritual treatment."²

Previous scholarship on popular religion, secret societies, and the history of medicine has revealed the rich social meanings of illness and its treatment, as well as the complexity of the underlying ideology of illness-related ideas. But many of these studies treat ritual healing as a field of knowledge held by specialists.³ The diversity of sources in which fabing treatises appear suggests that it is inadequate to consider them solely as examples of a specialist knowledge in the context of a single religious or medical tradition. The Ming and Qing fabing treatises reflect the vernacularization of specialized rituals, which finally appeared as common knowledge for household use. This process involved three interrelated phenomena: first, these texts popularized a domestic-centered interpretation of illness and represented related knowledge and rituals as suitable and essential for household use; second, these texts transcended the textual boundary between specialized religious or medical texts and vernacular texts intended for non-experts; and third, both medical and religious specialists and laypeople participated in producing and transmitting these texts. The formation of these texts drew on both textual and oral sources and was subject to local adaptation.

This study builds on earlier works that explore the complex dynamism between medical culture, religious culture, vernacular literature, and local history. Andrew Schonebaum has shown that fiction functioned as an important source for medical knowledge, and that texts containing knowledge of materia medica shared a literary logic with poetry and fictional stories, and thus became part of the vernacular reading knowledge generated by literati after the late Ming.⁴ Some scholars have also shown that Ming-Qing novels contain a considerable amount of knowledge about ritual and divination. For example, Mark Meulenbeld's study on the Ming novel Canonization of the Gods (Fengshen yanyi) reveals the important role of ritual for combating demons in one of the most popular novels in late imperial China, in dramas performed in local theatres, and in the activism of local militias...