Books

Cadaverous: Postmortem Contagion and Ritual Immunity in Medieval Japanese Buddhism


(forthcoming with the University of Hawai'i Press, May 2026)

From the tenth to the thirteenth centuries, Japanese aristocrats attributed their afflictions to vengeful spirits of the deceased. But in the late twelfth century, a new and anomalous ailment, caused not by spirits but the material dead, crept into their consciousness. “Corpse-vector disease,” as it was called, emerged as a new form of “postmortem contagion”—diseases tethered to death that reanimated in pathogenic forms such as ghosts, noxious qi, corpse-worms, and disease-causing demons. In response, Tendai Buddhist monks of the Jimon branch at Onjōji temple engaged creatively with esoteric rites, medical texts, and Daoist scriptures to craft a healing ritual for their patients. Cadaverous is the first book-length work to examine this ritual and its extant manuscripts. Bridging religious studies and medical history, it analyzes Buddhist ritual healing in Japan through the lens of “ritual immunity”—the complex, experimental processes through which monks identified disease agents, demarcated boundaries between self and pathogen, and designed therapeutic interventions.

By exploring the social, moral, material, and ritual dynamics that shaped new disease concepts, Cadaverous reveals how corpse-vector disease reflected growing anxieties surrounding death and pollution in a capital increasingly crowded with corpses. The book offers an unprecedented tour of the therapeutic and ritual culture of early medieval Japan, illuminating how that culture was haunted by darker preoccupations with disease, death, and defilement.

Shōmen Kongō. Shinkōji temple, Matsumoto, Nagano. Personal collection.

Buddhist Healing in Medieval China and Japan

Edited by C. Pierce Salguero and Andrew Macomber
University of Hawai'i Press, 2020

From its inception in northeastern India in the first millennium BCE, the Buddhist tradition has advocated a range of ideas and practices that were said to ensure health and well-being. As the religion developed and spread to other parts of Asia, healing deities were added to its pantheon, monastic institutions became centers of medical learning, and healer-monks gained renown for their mastery of ritual and medicinal therapeutics. In China, imported Buddhist knowledge contended with a sophisticated, state-supported system of medicine that was able to retain its influence among the elite. Further afield in Japan, where Chinese Buddhism and Chinese medicine were introduced simultaneously as part of the country’s adoption of civilization from the “Middle Kingdom,” the two were reconciled by individuals who deemed them compatible. In East Asia, Buddhist healing would remain a site of intercultural tension and negotiation. While participating in transregional networks of circulation and exchange, Buddhist clerics practiced locally specific blends of Indian and indigenous therapies and occupied locally defined social positions as religious and medical specialists.

In this diverse and compelling collection, an international group of scholars analyzes the historical connections between Buddhism and healing in medieval China and Japan. Contributors focus on the transnationally conveyed aspects of Buddhist healing traditions as they moved across geographic, cultural, and linguistic boundaries. Simultaneously, the chapters also investigate the local instantiations of these ideas and practices as they were reinvented, altered, and re-embedded in specific social and institutional contexts. Investigating the interplay between the macro and micro, the global and the local, this book demonstrates the richness of Buddhist healing as a way to explore the history of cross-cultural exchange.

Articles / Book Chapters

"Corpses as Pathogenic Agents in Early Medieval Japan." In Materialities of Disease Across the Medieval World: Images, Objects, and Remains, edited by Lori Jones. ARC Humanities Press.

2025

2025

“Disease, Defilement, and the Dead: Buddhist Medicine and the Emergence of Corpse-Vector Disease.” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 49 (2): 231-281.

2022

“Milking the Bodhi Tree: Mulberry for Disease-Demons in Yōsai’s Record of Nourishing Life by Drinking Tea.” Special Issue, “Aspects of Medieval Japanese Religion, edited by Bernard Faure and Andrea Castiglioni. Religions 13, 525: 1–23.

2020

“Ritualizing Moxibustion in the Early Medieval Tendai-Jimon Lineage.” In Buddhist Healing in Medieval China and Japan, edited by C. Pierce Salguero and Andrew Macomber, 194–242. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

2020

“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)

2017

“Moxibustion for Demons: Oral Transmission on Corpse-Vector Disease.” In Buddhism and Medicine: An Anthology of Premodern Sources, edited by C. Pierce Salguero, 514–530. New York: Columbia University Press.

Encyclopedia Entry

2020

“Buddhism and Medicine in Premodern Japan.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion. Oxford University Press, 2014—. Article published April 20, 2022.

Book Reviews

2021

2021

2017

“Mikkyō to okyū” 密教とお灸 [Esoteric Buddhism and Moxibustion]. Shinkyū ŌSAKA [Acupuncture and Moxibustion Osaka], 2017: 32 (4): 101–105. (in Japanese)

Translations

“The Cultural Meaning of Setsuwa: Ono no Takamura’s Journey to Hell and Back,” by Matsuyama Yūko 松山由布子. Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 49 (2): 187-198.

2025

2015

“The Kingdom of Books: A History of Archives and Documents in Aichi Prefecture, Japan,” by Abe Yasurō 阿部泰郎 (unpublished work for circulation at conferences, 43 pages)