Cadaverous: Postmortem Contagion and Ritual Immunity in Medieval Japanese Buddhism

(forthcoming with the University of Hawai'i Press)

This book tracks shifting concerns about disease, the body, and ritual healing through the ruinous final decades of the classical Heian period (794–1185). It was at this time when aristocrats, physicians, and Buddhist monks witnessed with great trepidation the appearance of strange and unfamiliar diseases spread by corpses. I examine the ways that Buddhist priests of esoteric lineages — for centuries the leading healers in elite society — wrestled with these anomalous afflictions, and the worms and demons who caused them, on both epistemological and ritual fronts. My study shows how these priestly engagements with defiled disease, far from transient or epiphenomenal reactions, went on to profoundly shape notions of illness, the body, and healing efficacy for centuries to come. In so doing, I offer a new account of medieval Japanese Buddhism as a history of immunology. Conceived in ritual rather than biological terms, this history traces the constellation of therapeutic responses (symbolic, moral, and performative) Buddhist clergy waged against the undead pathological agencies that had come to proliferate in their lifeworld, a cosmos lost to decay.

Bubbles in the Trichiliocosm: Aromatics and Buddhist Air Conditioning in Premodern Japan

My second project explores how Buddhists in premodern Japan used aromatics from distant regions throughout the world to reimagine the Japanese archipelago as a sacred land within Buddhist cosmology. In the wake of Bertold Laufer, Edward Schafer, and Yamada Kentarō, scholars have long seen aromatics primarily as valuable items of trade in the maritime and continental exchange routes that stretched throughout Eurasia. Much less has been said of their centrality in myth and ritual. In this project, I examine how Buddhists incorporated aromatics into their stories and ceremonies to show how these materials supported local religious efforts to put Japan on the Buddhist map. I argue that aromatics enabled Japanese Buddhists to take their senses — especially their noses, ideally purified through ritual repentance — as entry points for participating in a Buddhist world of local, global, and cosmic scales.

An early essay from this project was published as “Kōyaku no yoi—Heian kōki no bukkyō-kei honzōsho wo chūshin ni” 香薬の酔い─平安後期の仏教系本草書を中心に [The Intoxication of Aromatics—A Study of Late-Heian Buddhist Materia Medica]. In Itō Nobuhiro, ed. Yoi no bunkashi: girei kara yamai made 酔いの文化史─儀礼から病まで [A Cultural History of Intoxication: From Ritual to Illness]. Tokyo: Bensei Shuppan, 2020: 72–92. (In Japanese)