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c h a p t e r 5 Popularizing Buddhist Medicine This chapter explores one of the primary avenues for the popularization of Buddhist medicine in medieval China: narratives. Through the refashioning, resituating , and recirculating of stories about healing, many aspects of Buddhist medicine discussed in previous chapters were freed from the confines of abstruse scriptural language and narrow doctrinal contexts and were integrated into the vernacular culture. Out of the many cultural-linguistic elements of Chinese and Indian provenance available to them, authors of narratives pieced together appealing combinations of the familiar and the novel to express their visions of the utility of Buddhist healing for their contemporary society. Of course, this is not simply a case of syncretism: these narratives were also carefully crafted for speci fic strategic purposes. More than any other type of literature discussed elsewhere in this book, healing narratives provide a vantage point from which we can see the spread of Indian ideas about illness and healing throughout all layers of Chinese society, while also witnessing the adaptation and domestication of foreign knowledge in order to appeal to domestic audiences and forward the sangha’s position in the Chinese religiomedical marketplace. Buddhist Healing Narratives In Buddhist literature from virtually all times and places (extending back to parables supposedly told by the Buddha himself, if we believe he was a historical figure) the narrativization of complex themes and ideas has always been one of the chief ways that the Dharma has been introduced to and explained by ordinary people. Such was also the case in medieval China. Buddhist notions of compassion and selflessness, for example, were often expressed 122 chapter 5 through stories of bodhisattvas or monks sacrificing their bodies in the name of the Dharma or for the sake of suffering beings. The beneficence and accessibility of buddhas and bodhisattvas were frequently illustrated with narratives about devotees being saved at the eleventh hour from death, disaster, and misfortune by apparitions of the deities, or by relics, icons, or other proxies . Ideals of asceticism, scholarship, and magical potency were captured in tales about the exploits of exceptional monks. Stories of nuns, on the other hand, modeled piety, chastity, and faith. Though the topic has not been studied as extensively as these other examples, Buddhist ideas about illness and healing also ranked high among the most important themes that inspired the composition of narratives in medieval China. This chapter focuses on this latter category of narratives. There probably was a virtually infinite supply of such tales circulating orally in medieval China. Many of the earliest translators and missionaries in China are traditionally said to have been involved in healing activities, and it is highly probable that stories about their exploits were being told from the very earliest phase of the arrival of Buddhism in China. Unlike in parts of South Asia where oral transmission was preferred, however, Chinese cultural expectations demanded that knowledge be written down if it was to be considered legitimate and authoritative by the elite. It is perhaps predictable, then, that when Buddhism began making inroads into higher social circles, narratives about Buddhist healing began to appear in the written record in significant quantities. By the fifth century, a number of collections of written narratives were being produced. Though recorded in the literary language, these short and entertaining stories were fashioned from material culled from a variety of oral and textual sources. Once written down, such stories had enormous appeal and circulated widely as sources of enjoyment, wonder, education, and moral suasion. A large proportion of the authors and rewriters of these tales were Buddhist clerics or lay devotees, who wrote or rewrote them as acts of piety and proselytism, but they were just as avidly authored, copied, and circulated by scholars, officials, and other literate segments of medieval society. While they originally may have appeared in collections of religious hagiographies or secular wonder tales, or circulated as independent texts of whatever genre, a significant number of these healing narratives subsequently were canonized—that is to say, incorporated individually or in bulk into the of- ficially sponsored Buddhist Tripitakas and catalogs. Over the course of the medieval period, these very narratives became some of the most important tools in Buddhism’s proselytizing efforts in China. Popularizing Buddhist Medicine 123 How are Buddhist healing and healers represented in such tales? Analysis of the choice of language and the presentation of content reveals a persistent...

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