Sivin, Nathan

East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine (EASTM - Universität Tübingen)

143 Reviews 
Michel Strickmann, Chinese Magical Medicine, ed. Bernard Faure. Stanford: 
Stanford University Press (Asian Religions and Cultures), 2002. xii, 418 
pp., 14 ill. 
 
Nathan Sivin 
 
[Nathan Sivin is Professor of Chinese Culture and of the History of Science 
Emeritus, University of Pennsylvania. He recently completed Granting the Sea-
sons, a translation and study of the Shou shi li 授 時 曆 (1280).] 
 
 
Why it should be desirable to review a book on magical medicine in this journal 
may not be intuitively obvious.  
Joseph Needham and Lu Gwei-djen once asserted that, although at times the 
imperial court valued “magico-religious techniques”, such phenomena remained 
marginal, for “from the beginning Chinese medicine was rational through and 
through.”1 They and their contemporaries defined early medicine as any precur-
sor to the professional, science-based knowledge of today. But that definition, 
and the faith that early practitioners were striving toward medicine as we know it, 
expired a generation ago.  
Since then, historians have turned their attention away from medicine in this 
narrow teleological sense and toward health care. That rubric includes all the 
means a culture offers to maintain health, cure illness, and help the body to re-
cover from injury, from self-care to faith healing to the work of theoreticians. 
This widening of focus has led scholars to recognize the constant interaction in 
imperial China between therapists high and low, as well as the ubiquity of sym-
bolic therapy and social ritual in all healing. Even today, physicians—no matter 
how rusty their biochemistry—take on the mantle of the laboratory scientist by 
manipulating technical symbols, and wear that of the ritualist in their highly 
structured encounters with patients.  
Equally to the point, Strickmann’s book is not about magical medicine. Its 
editor tells me that the title was the author’s choice, but it is an odd one. “Magic” 
commonly refers to non-religious rites meant to change events or affect the 
course of nature using occult or secret knowledge. Since truly secular ritual for 
that purpose is rare in pre-modern societies, cultural anthropologists have largely 
stopped using the term.2  
The book is actually about an unambiguously religious subject, the great in-
fluence of Tantric Buddhism from the third to the eleventh century on healing in 
                                                 
1
 Needham and Lu (1970), p. 268.  
2
 This was natural after S. J. Tambiah’s (1968) demonstration that Bronislaw Mali-
nowski’s classic study of magic (1925) ignored the religious beliefs implicit but unmis-
takable in Malinowski’s own field notes. The information about Strickmann’s title comes 
from an email from B. Faure, 2005.10.19. 
144 EASTM 26 (2007) 
Chinese and Japanese popular religion, in certain Taoist movements, and in the 
high tradition of Chinese medicine. In previous publications Strickmann has 
taken up the first and second varieties of influence and has encouraged contribu-
tions on them by others.3 This volume puts the third kind squarely into the pic-
ture. In combination with other recent publications, it implies that the time has 
come to revise our understanding of classical Chinese medicine. Acknowledging 
its rich occult, spiritual, and popular content will make for better history.  
All of Strickmann’s scholarship was distinguished by his ability to boot the 
conventional wisdom aside and make fresh sense of old conundrums, frequently 
with sarcasm and always with wit. This book fits the pattern. The merit accrues 
not only to the author, but to Bernard Faure. Well known for the fresh light he 
has cast on Japanese Buddhism, Faure has turned two of the three manuscripts 
Strickmann left on his sudden and untimely death in 1994 into important books: 
this one and one on Chinese written oracles. In both he has preserved the author’s 
voice.4  
It is odd that Faure lists the author as a professor at Berkeley; Strickmann 
died as Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Bordeaux. Originally a 
pioneer of modern Taoist studies, in his last decade or so he particularly studied 
the Buddhist scriptures cast in Indian sutra form but written in China. Strickmann 
realized that they make it possible to reconstruct the practice and oral traditions 
of Chinese Buddhists, and ultimately to illuminate the social history of Chinese 
religion.  
From very early times, Chinese were convinced that a society of gods lived in 
close proximity to that of humans. As the Han order fell apart from c. AD 100 on, 
people increasingly interpreted the prevalence of suffering as the work of spirits 
resentful because they had been mistreated in life or had not been ritually laid to 
rest. Medicine provided a language for discourse about this danger, in which the 
world was “inhabited by perilous beings personifying breath and semen—
phantom panting, demonized gasps, spectral sighs, lurking halitosis, walking 
nightmares, marauding wet-dreams, galloping nocturnal omissions.” The “corpse-
demons (shi 尸)” that Ge Hong’s 葛 洪 formulary of c. 340 described were “in-
ternal embodiments of potential evil”, to be controlled by a “full-scale pharmaco-
                                                 
3
 In addition to the Festschrift he (1981-1985) assembled for Rolf Stein, Strickmann 
inspired a number of Berkeley Ph.D.’s who have made important contributions in this 
area. When I speak of the high medical tradition, I refer to yi 醫, therapeutic doctrine and 
practice cumulatively recorded by literate authors. As this review indicates, there was 
ample room in it for thought and therapy that was neither secular nor a regular part of 
elite practice.  
4
 The third of the three is Chinese Poetry and Prophecy (2005); the first was Mantras 
et mandarins (1996, English translation forthcoming), edited by Brigitte Steinmann.  
145 Reviews 
chemical battle”.5 Ge knew nothing but scuttlebutt about the Taoist organizations 
of his time. He rummaged in popular religious beliefs for his arcane knowledge, 
and recast their curative rites into secular form.6  
An outcome of the Han order’s collapse was diverse religious movements—
from the original Celestial Masters on—that modern historians lump together as 
Taoism. Every one of them took their impetus from the conviction that the world 
would soon end. One of the signs of this final phase was the spread of illness. For 
the Celestial Masters, all disease was really sin, and could be cured only by con-
fession. In the late fourth-century revelations that grounded what became the 
Supreme Purity movement, illness could result from the immoral behavior of 
one’s ancestors, and the spectral resentment of those they had grievously harmed. 
Sufferers could not know the origin of this pathology, much less confess it. They 
depended on Taoist masters. The latter, who had authority in the world of spirits, 
could trace the origin of their clients’ suffering and settle lawsuits in the courts of 
the dead to end the mischief.  
Mahayana sutras, which often made illness the result of demonic attacks, went 
even further to absolve the sick from blame. Eventually believers in the Tao 
could use drugs and other conventional therapies for disease that was not due to 
moral failing or the resentment of shades. That explains why the Supreme Purity 
patriarch, Tao Hongjing 陶 弘 景 (c. 500), became the leading author of his time 
on materia medica. In his career, religion and classical medicine were intimately 
conjoined.  
A crucial round of changes in occult therapy, from the second to the twelfth 
century, resulted from evolving forms of Tantric Buddhism. They reached a high 
point in the early eighth century through feats of translation and writing in which 
the esoteric master Yixing 一 行 (whom historians of science know only as a 
great astronomer) took a prominent part. The scriptures of this tradition offered 
great spiritual power to their practitioners, power that attracted Taoist and popu-
lar masters. The outcome was a new kind of curing that depended on dramatic, 
“militaristic” exorcisms in which the operator confronted, interrogated, and ban-
ished possessing demons.7 Curers learned a range of Tantric weapons against the 
malevolence of spirits: spells chanted or “roared out” (p. 113), pictorial seals 
impressed on the patient’s body, seal patterns formed by hand gestures, and so on. 
There remain “only texts and echoes” of most such practices in China, but Tantra 
lives on, with “vast archives”, in Japan (p. 200).  
How about the high tradition of medicine? Did physicians reject these reli-
gious phenomena? Strickmann is sufficiently familiar with the medical literature 
to show that they did nothing of the kind. Donald Harper and others have shown 
                                                 
5
 Zhouhou bei ji fang 肘 後 備 急 方 is the title of most modern editions, based on a 
version greatly expanded c. 500 and again in 1144. See the attempt at reconstruction in 
Shang Zhijun 尚 志 鈞 (1983), pp. 20-22. 
6
 See p. 24 in the volume under review, and Sivin (1978/1995), pp. 323-327.  
7
 Such exorcisms are the subject of Edward Davis’s (2001) important recent book.  
146 EASTM 26 (2007) 
that the oldest medical manuscripts are rich in occult methods. It has also been 
clear for a long time that the pathology of ghosts, possession, and demonic qi 
remained very much at home in medical classics after Ge and Tao. Spiritual pa-
thology is quite visible in Zhu bing yuan hou lun 諸 病 源 候 論 (p. 610), which 
set the standard for etiology and symptomatology up to the twelfth century. From 
then on, elite medicine, as it played an increasing part in literati culture, distanced 
itself from popular and unorthodox religion. Nevertheless, their centrality in 
health care—still largely unstudied—persisted even in the Qing era.8 Healing by 
priests and monks, by the end of the empire, remained the only sophisticated 
therapy available to the great majority. Strickmann closes with a challenge (p. 
281):  
 
The historian of medicine, for his part, will find proof (if 
proof is needed) of the intrinsic theatricality of patient-
healer relations. Whether drawn from fourth-century Taoists, 
eighth-century Tantric Buddhists, or twentieth-century ver-
nacular exorcists, the East Asian data simply reinforce a vi-
sion that will soon be accepted as obvious: Ancient or mod-
ern, Eastern or Western, secular or sacred, all healing pivots 
on a vital axis of ritual. 
 
Scandalous though that prediction would have seemed in 1970, historians famil-
iar with medical anthropology already recognize that this is as true of today’s 
European primary care physician in her clinic as it was of the Chinese popular 
priest in his temple and of the classical physician in the sickroom.  
Faure deserves great credit for making this volume available with full docu-
mentation, which the manuscript lacked. The complete omission of Chinese char-
acters will make the book much less convenient for those who wish to carry on 
this pioneering work, but one can only be grateful for its high quality in every 
other respect. 
 
 
References 
 
Cho, Philip S. (2005). “Ritual and the Occult in Chinese Medicine and Religious 
Healing: The Development of Zhuyou Exorcism.” Ph. D. dissertation, His-
tory and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania. 
Davis, Edward L. (2001). Society and the Supernatural in Song China. Hono-
lulu: University of Hawai’i Press.  
                                                 
8
 For the relations of medicine and religious ritual in the Ming and Qing periods, see 
the dissertation of Philip S. Cho, just completed.  
147 Reviews 
Malinowski, Bronislaw (1925). “Magic, Science, and Religion,” in Rodney 
Needham (ed.), Science, Religion and Reality. London: The Sheldon Press, 
pp. 19-84. 
Needham, Joseph, and Lu Gwei-djen (1970). “Medicine in Chinese Culture,” in 
Clerks and Craftsmen in China and the West. Lectures and Addresses on 
the History of Science and Technology. Cambridge: Cambridge University 
Press, pp. 263-293.  
Shang Zhijun 尚 志 鈞 (1983). Bu ji zhou hou fang 補 輯 肘 後 方 (Reconsti-
tuted and supplemented handy formulas). Hefei: Anhui kexue jishu chuban-
she. 
Sivin, Nathan (1978/1995). “On the Word Taoism as a Source of Perplexity. 
With Special Reference to the Relations of Science and Religion in Tradi-
tional China.” History of Religions 17: 303-330, reprinted in Sivin (1995).  
———. (1995). Medicine, Philosophy and Religion in Ancient China. Re-
searches and Reflections. Aldershot, Hants: Variorum (Variorum Collected 
Studies Series).  
Strickmann, Michel (1981-1985). Tantric and Taoist Studies in Honor of R. A. 
Stein. Bruxelles: Institut belge des hautes études chinoises, 3 vols. 
———. (1996). Mantras et mandarins. Le bouddhisme tantrique en Chine. Bri-
gitte Steinmann (ed.). Paris: Gallimard (Bibliothèque des sciences humai-
nes). 
———. (2002). Chinese Magical Medicine. Bernard Faure (ed.). Stanford: Stan-
ford University Press (Asian Religions and Cultures). 
———. (2005). Chinese Poetry and Prophecy. The Written Oracle in East Asia. 
Asian Religions and Cultures. Bernard Faure (ed.). Stanford: Stanford Uni-
versity Press (Asian Religions and Cultures). 
Tambiah, Stanley J. (1968). “The Magical Power of Words.” Man, NS, 3.2: 175-
208. 
 
 


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