The Idolization of Enlightenment: On the Mummification of Ch'an Masters in Medieval China

Asian Perspectives, 2016

Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2013

This article argues against the strong "holist" position that the early Chinese lacked any concept of mind-body dualism, and more broadly against a "neo-Orientalist" trend that portrays Chinese thought as radically different from Western thought. In the first half, it makes the case against strong mind-body holism by drawing upon traditional archeological and textual evidence. In the second, it turns to resources from the sciences, arguing that large-scale quantitative-qualitative analyses of early Chinese texts suggest that they embrace a quite vigorous form of mind-body dualism, and further that a huge body of evidence coming out of the cognitive sciences suggests that this is not at all surprising. In this section, the role that deep humanistic knowledge can, and should, play in scientific approaches to culture is also explored. The article concludes by suggesting that a mutually informed, humanities-scientific approach to religious studies is the best way for our field to move forward.

Journal of Chinese Religions, 2006

It is well known that Han fear the metaphysical pollution they associate with death and especially corpses. Traditionally they believe family members of the recently deceased are temporarily polluted and those who work handling corpses are permanently polluted; people try to avoid such polluted others for fear that sickness or other unfortunate events may follow contact. Yet strewn across the countryside of both China and Taiwan, and scattered throughout accounts in Buddhist historical texts, are mummified corpses venerated as deities: granting requests, sending dreams, enshrined, worshipped, often gilded, sometimes installed inside or below a religious statue or decorated to look indistinguishable or nearly so from a statue. What happens to most bodily remains? How is it that most corpses are feared, whereas certain others are worshipped? Are these divergent evaluations of corpses due to conflicting religious systems, or does it depend mainly on the identity of the corpse? The following article focuses on these questions as they apply to contemporary Taiwan. First, I describe in detail corpses that are worshipped, since their existence is less recognized or is mistakenly assumed to be nothing but a Buddhist aberration within an otherwise universal pattern of corpse avoidance. Next, I describe corpses that are feared and show changing attitudes toward bodily remains. Finally, I suggest how divergent attitudes toward bodily remains can be placed into the broader context of Han religious beliefs. [Actual year of publication: 2006. Date on journal: 2005].

Chinese Medicine and Culture 6.3, 2023

Shifting focus from the patient's body to the healer's body, this essay focuses on how Chinese physicians instrumentalized their bodies to heal (ie, body-as-technology) and their hands to think with (ie, hand-memory techniques or simply, hand mnemonics). When physicians used their hands to memorize concepts related to clinical practice, calculate with time variables, and carry out ritual gestures intended to reduce risk, improve fortune, and even cure, their hands became extensions of their minds. This essay has three parts that follow the discovery process of the author's research on handmemory techniques found in Chinese medical texts. The first part "Divination and Revelation" explains the significance of how the author first learned about Chinese divination practices that used hand mnemonics. The second part "Original Frame" introduces the scholarship on arts of memory in Europe that informed interpretations of the earliest hand mnemonics found in Chinese medical texts. The third part "Expanded Frame" deploys some concepts from cognitive science to help situate Chinese medical hand mnemonics more broadly as an example of extended cognition. The essay concludes with an important distinction: sometimes Chinese healers' hands were used separately from their bodies to think through things and sometimes hand and body had to be integrated in order for the healer's body-as-technology to act as a therapeutically effective instrument.

RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 2009

The main purpose of this article consists of examining the crucial significance of mutilation, as a punishment following a crime committed against the prevailing legal and moral order, in the study of early Chinese intellectual history. It aims to show that focusing on this hitherto disregarded topic is highly beneficial in order to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of some of the most relevant problems in this period since legally mutilated persons seem to embody better than any other category the currently accepted logic about the correlation between body and ethics or, to put it more negatively, between physical deformity and moral deviance. Indeed, as it will be demonstrated, amputees were excluded in early China not only from any kind of politically significant role but also from any important ritual and social functions. This article discusses then the philosophical, political, social, legal and religious implications of those individuals who lost limbs as a result of penal dismemberment. * Financial support for this article was provided by a generous postdoctoral grant from the Department of Education, Universities and Research of the Basque Country Government. I profited immeasurably from consultations with J. Levi, P. Goldin, Y. Pines, O. Milburn, R. Gassmann, and J. F. Billeter. I would like to thank these scholars for the opportunity to share my work with them and for providing me insightful suggestions for improvement. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Emma Graham-Harrison and Julie Wark for polishing my English. In spite of this invaluable help, the inadequacies and errors that remain are of course entirely mine.

and Keywords Gender is an underexplored issue in the study of ancient China, often understood to be one and same as biological sex. Using biological remains and material offerings excavated from major cemetery sites in China, this chapter examines the social construction of gender from the Neolithic to the period of state emergence under the Shang Dynasty. By comparing the different ways biologically sexed female individuals were treated at death, this discussion shows the variable ways gender could be understood depending on an individual's social rank, kinship relations, and even ethnic affiliation. Reappraisals of these cemetery sites also reveal how gender—as a shifting aspect of personhood and individual life histories—was instrumental in configuring the social relationships of early village communities as well as dynastic courts. These observations redress interpretations influenced by classical Chinese thought and Marxian paradigms.

Asian Medicine, 2014