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This dissertation explores the medicinal use of poisons in China from the third to the tenth century, which is when the major outlines of Chinese toxicological thought took shape. Challenging a widespread view that contrasts the benign naturalness of Chinese herbal remedies with the dangerous side effects of Western synthetic drugs, my research highlights the centrality of poisons to the practice and theory of medicine in China. Chinese doctors regularly relied on a large number of substances that they recognized as toxic to combat sickness, and identified toxicity as the central pillar for the classification of drugs. I argue that the boundary between poisons and medicines was always hazy in medieval China; it was not the substance itself, but how it was used and experienced that mattered. To examine this crucial yet ignored feature of Chinese medicine, my dissertation develops the following themes. The first is that drugs in medieval China were not fixed entities with unique effects. The effect of a given substance—whether it healed as a medicine, or sickened or killed as a poison, or altered a person in myriad other ways—varied both with usage and with processing. Subsequently, Chinese doctors developed a variety of techniques (the dosage, the drug combination, and the drug preparation) to mitigate the toxicity of a poison while preserving its therapeutic potency. Secondly, I highlight the intimate relation between bodily experience and the understanding of poisons. By studying the alchemical practice of ingesting toxic minerals, I show that the violent bodily effects induced by these substances were often perceived as confirmations of efficacy rather than worrying signs of pathology. My third theme is the circulation of toxicological knowledge across geographical and social domains. I argue that standardized textual knowledge propagated by the state was fluidly transformed in practice, contingent upon the availability of pharmacological ingredients and the needs of local people. Finally, I turn to non-poisons, especially foods, in Chinese pharmacy, and identify a distinctive character of Chinese medicine—the ingestion of mild substances to nourish the body and prolong life. Chinese medicine thus developed through the interaction of two related, but distinct enterprises—the fight against sickness, and the quest for ever-enhanced vitality., History of Science

This dissertation explores the nexus between Buddhism and literature in Japan’s early medieval period. Specifically, it elucidates the process by which forms of court literature such as Chinese-language verse (kanshi), Japanese poetry (waka), and romance tales (monogatari) were incorporated into Buddhist rites and liturgies from the tenth through twelfth centuries and attempts to show how this process supported and was supported by Esoteric Buddhist discourse. I call special attention to a discourse on ritual performance that understands the chanting of a mantra, hymn, or poem as an act of giving the joy of the Dharma (hōraku) to the kami and buddhas. By attending to this discourse and the rituals through which it was articulated, this dissertation sheds light on the doctrinal reasons why and the practical paths by which even literary genres that were considered to be “worldly” such as nature poetry, love poetry, and romance tales were reconceived as vehicles for offering the joy of the Buddha’s teachings. The three body chapters examine a variety of rites and liturgies intended for a lay audience—often called “Dharma assemblies” (hōe) in Japanese-language scholarship—and endeavor to demonstrate how they contributed to key transformations in Japanese literature. Chapter 1 investigates the liturgy of the lecture assembly (kō-e) at Shinto shrines and elucidates how it shaped the formation of a key genre of medieval Japanese poetry called “Dharma joy” waka (hōraku waka). Chapter 2 analyzes repentance rites dedicated to Fugen (Sk. Samantabhadra) bodhisattva and considers their impact on the invention of Buddhist love poetry. Finally, Chapter 3 looks at sutra-offering ceremonies and clarifies their role in the consecration of the exemplary Heian-period romance tale, The Tale of Genji, and the imagination of its author, Murasaki Shikibu. In addition to situating a particular transformation of court literature in its ritual context, each chapter also locates a given example of ritual in its discursive locus. I show that at the center of this locus lies a system of Esoteric Buddhist doctrine and ritual concerned with demonstrating the identity of the esoteric teachings (mikkyō) with those of the Lotus Sūtra. Terming this system “Lotus-Esoteric discourse,” I show how it provided the epistemic framework for the practice of using a mantra, hymn, or poem as a medium for giving the joy of the Dharma to others, rather than receiving it for oneself (jiju hōraku), as was stressed in Japanese Esoteric Buddhism of the late ancient period. In short, through its attention to Lotus-Esoteric discourse on Dharma joy, this study offers a corrective to an over-emphasis on the liturgical formula of “wild words and fanciful phrases” (kyōgen kigo), which has been the focus of many previous studies on the relationship between Buddhism and medieval Japanese literature, and clarifies the concrete discursive strategies and ritual practices by which Buddhism in early medieval Japan consecrated new liturgical uses for three representative genres of court literature—kanshi verse, waka poetry, and monogatari tales. In this way, it endeavors to show how Buddhist discourse on Dharma joy—in both its doctrinal and ritual dimensions—may constitute a new paradigm for understanding the early medieval transformation of Japanese literature., East Asian Languages and Civilizations