The transmission of Buddhism from India to China in the first millennium of the Common Era ranks among the most significant and most well documented examples of cross-cultural exchange in the premodern world. Although the study of the global spread of Buddhism is most commonly undertaken by scholars of religion, this cross-cultural encounter involved much more than simply the transmission of religious or philosophical knowledge. Buddhism influenced many other aspects of Chinese life, including contributing to the economy, inspiring changes in the sociopolitical order, and spurring the adoption of foreign material culture. This book is a study of one, often-overlooked...

With the preliminaries behind us, we can begin our analysis by exploring the transmission and influence of Buddhist medicine. The arrival of Buddhist medicine in China represents the moment in world history that two relatively distinct Indo-European and Chinese medical models were brought into direct, sustained contact for the first time. This chapter begins by outlining the religiomedical vocabularies and ideas (i.e., the indigenous cultural-linguistic system) that prevailed in China prior to the arrival of Buddhism. These had an essential role to play in the reception of Buddhist medicine in China, as they provided both the linguistic backdrop against which...

Though it is often convenient to discuss cross-cultural exchange from the perspective of transmission and influence, cultures are not historical actors and they do not impact one another directly.¹ The crucial catalyst is always the translational activity of individual people. This chapter thus shifts from discussing the elements of Buddhist medical knowledge introduced into China to analyzing how, why, and by whom these were translated. We will identify the individuals involved with the translation project, examine their strategic goals, and illuminate the sociopolitical contexts for their translation decisions. In the process, we will also investigate how medical ideas could become...

This chapter explores in the aggregate the large number of medieval Chinese Buddhist scriptures containing medical knowledge in order to provide a corpus-level analysis of translation norms. As mentioned previously, the translation of Buddhist medical doctrine was never thoroughly standardized at the level of vocabulary. Individual translators rendered medical terms in a variety of ways throughout the many centuries of their activity. At the same time that their lexical choices were highly variable, however, the basic strategic approaches Buddhist translators took to the translation of the medical material in their source texts followed some surprisingly consistent patterns over the long...

This chapter shifts gears from the broad analysis of norms to look more closely at how a handful of individual authors tailored their presentation of various aspects of Buddhist medicine in specific compositions. The texts under consideration in this chapter include commentaries, manuals, reference materials, and other writings that can be thought of as “Buddhist secondary sources” in the sense that they describe, reconcile, systematize, and codify the scriptural knowledge discussed in the previous chapter. Although they were not necessarily engaged in translation proper, these commentators, anthologizers, and other rewriters of Buddhist medicine were intimately involved in intralingual translation. Like...

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,...

The first half of the Tang dynasty represents the peak of the Indo-Sinitic cross-cultural encounter. By that time, numerous Buddhist scriptures focusing on all aspects of medicine had been translated into Chinese. Disparate ideas from across the range of Buddhist literature available in China had been augmented, collated, and commented upon by generations of pseudotranslators, compilers, and exegetes. Sectarian authors were busily systematizing this body of knowledge, defending it against unorthodox intrusions, and encoding it in increasingly foreignizing language. Efforts to sell Indian medicine to the public had also proved highly successful: elite physicians, members of high society, and even...