 Now, it's my great pleasure to introduce tonight's speaker, Professor Stephen Tizer of Princeton University. Professor Tizer hardly needs an introduction, and the size of this room tells us that. But I will nonetheless say something about this wonderful work. Professor Tizer is DT Suzuki, Professor in Buddhist Studies and Professor of Religion in the Department of Religion at Princeton University. He's very well known for his approach to Buddhism, which has paid attention to interactions and intersections, interactions between Buddhism in India, China, Korea, and Japan, interactions of Buddhism with other religious traditions of China, first of all, Taoist, interaction between expressions of Buddhism in the elite context and in the popular context. His methodology makes use of a wide-ranging of sources, doctrinal sources, historical documents, as well as artistic and material sources. And his insights theoretically draw on history, anthropology, literary theory, and religious studies. The wealth of this scholarship is very well illustrated by his three monographs to date. All awarded major prizes. The first one, the Ghost Festival in Medieval China, was awarded a Prize in History of Religion by the American Council of Learned Society and looked at the meaning of this very important festival in Medieval China and the influences that Buddhist patterns had on Taoist practice. His second book, The Scripture on the Ten Kings and the Making of Purgatory in Medieval Chinese Buddhism, also awarded the Joseph Levinson Book Prize in Chinese Studies. And the third monographs, Reinventing the Wheel, Paintings of Rebirth in Medieval Buddhist Temples, that won the Stanislaus Julien Prize of the Académie des Inscricions et Beltêtre of the Institut de France. Both look at, again, a very important representation in documents and in artistic productions of the hell and the purgatory and the question of rebirth. Prostheticism is also co-edited to very important books for students, books that we always use in classes. So I think we should also mention those readings on the Lotus Sutras and readings on the Platform Sutra that introduce these fundamental scriptures for the station context to a broader audience. His current research project, Curing with Karma, that's a title, is what is going to talk to us tonight. Examine healing liturgies, particularly in documents from the one that express the interaction between Buddhism and indigenous Chinese tradition and the wealth of sutric and non-canonical texts unhurted on the silk route. So without further ado, please join me to welcome Professor Taisenstrasse. Thank you very much, Lucia. I express my thanks to Professor Dolce, Chair of the Center of Buddhist Studies and to the other members of the Buddhist Studies Committee, Professor Palumbo, Professor Lukes Anitz, and Professor Pago. I also want to take this opportunity because a representative COO of the Foundation is herself here to thank the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation for sponsoring this series, as well as for their work in sponsoring Buddhist studies broadly, in sponsoring projects on art, and on sponsoring projects on the Hong Kong. So thanks to all of you for very much. For about 2,000 years, people from all walks of life in China took recourse to different therapies when they fell sick. Depending on individual fortune and the possibility of local care facilities, they might seek help from a doctor practicing acupuncture, monk Sebastian, or prescribing herbal cures. They might go to an exorcist, a Taoist priest, or a Buddhist monk. Sometimes they went to all four such practitioners in succession. My lecture today is an attempt to survey the range of healing methods offered by Buddhist monks, in particular, between roughly the fourth and 10th centuries. Hence my subject today draws more narrowly from my current research on liturgies for healing contained in the Dunhuang manuscripts. But I'd like to place that evidence, especially in today's lecture, in a broader context. So I want to arrange more broadly than simply materials from Dunhuang. I'd like to draw on evidence from paintings, sutras, talismans, manuscripts, including liturgies, and other archaeological remains, and explore the technologies that are employed in Buddhist forms of healing. The techniques ranged from relatively humble acts of donation to more extensive projects involving copying of scriptures, chanting spells, and confessing one's faults to more complicated ones, such as commissioning the magicking of images, sponsoring a lamp lighting ceremony, making seals, or ingesting talismans, or engaging the services of an exorcist. My lecture highlights the logics of these various practices, and in the end, in the conclusion, reflects on the process of healing in Chinese Buddhism. As you can see, my lecture is divided into four parts. I want to address firstly how we think about sickness and curing. Secondly, I want to look at what I categorize as relatively simple acts of healing, giving, copying, chanting, and confessing. Then look at forms of healing that are slightly more involved. They involve more people. They involve greater resources. They involve more specialized technologies, such as lighting of lamps, sealing, and ingesting talismans, and exorcism. Finally, I'll reflect on what this says about the broader process of healing as reflected in Chinese Buddhism. So I think it's good at the beginning of a talk about healing to think about how we conceive of healing and how the different realms of what we might consider to be sickness, good health, salvation, medical science, herbal practice, religious healing, and so forth, how they all fit together. My very basic point I hope most of you will agree with from the very start is that sickness and wellness and the different techniques of healing have been conceived and organized as spheres or as overlapping areas of practice rather differently in different times and places. I'm taking basically a historical approach to healing. So if I were in England, I would first try and make sense of how the system for providing health services works here. And I would be confronted, first of all, with a number of acronyms which are completely new to me. And if I looked at the history of them, I find that they change every couple years as well. I would have to understand what the clinical commissioning group is, what a GP is. I'd have to understand where to go or what is actually considered a secondary care service, such as planned hospitalization, rehabilitation, et cetera. And I can assure you that the system in the country where I come from is far more complicated, less well organized, and more poorly funded. If we were going to jump from the modern Western world to a traditional Buddhist viewpoint, how would we could think about sickness in that context? We might use the analysis of the four truths, and in particular, the first of the four noble truths, to come up with a potentially Buddhist way of thinking about wellness and healing. As you all know, the four noble truths, I don't need to run through them at length here. Suffering, the arising, its cessation, and the path to the cessation are all well known. So also well known are an analysis of different forms of suffering. Many in both Indian, in both Indic and East Asian sources talk about either four or eight forms of suffering. The first four well known throughout the Buddhist world, Shangla, being the suffering of birth, suffering of old age, suffering of sickness, and the suffering of death. All of these things are unpleasant and involve suffering. There are essentially added to that emotional and mental forms of distress caused by separation from that which we love, association with that which we hate, the inability to fulfill even our simplest of desires, and all forms of suffering that are due to our endowment with the five skandhas, the continuum of mental and bodily elements. If that's a relatively widespread Buddhist conception, let's look at some conceptions from specifically medieval China. And I'd like to use an example here from a early 6th century statesman, Guozhu Shun, because it encapsulates what I think is a longtime attitude in China and in many cultures towards multiple therapeutic techniques. Guo himself was not a medical practitioner, nor was he a very religious person. He was a fairly straight Confucian official. And in the piece of writing I'm quoting here, he's actually his main subject is not healing at all. His main subject is the traditional Confucian subject of giving advice to a ruler and encouraging the ruler, his emperor, to select wise officials and wise counselors. So to make his point that it's not a point about medicine, but rather a point about governing, he uses contemporary medical practice in order to instruct the emperor. What does he say? He says, when people are sick, they do four different things. They go to Taoist priests who specialize in the sending of a written memorial and petition to the gods, or they go to Buddhist monks and nuns who call for feasts and sutra lectures, sutra chanting, or they go to profane masters, exorcists who insist on release from demonic catastrophe, or people go to doctors and acupuncturists who administer soup and prescribed medicine, all of them claiming to be the most capable. Of course, many of these are tried in succession without any firm distinction between them, except for the people doing the practice, the technology involved, and most important, the results obtained. Some of the implications then to draw this discussion of the broader conceptualization of sickness to a close. Sickness and wellness are relative to each other. That is, even if one can escape sickness at one point, one is still subject to suffering. Sickness and wellness follow each other over many lifetimes. In addition, even when we do achieve good health in this lifetime, that state of good health is not final. Sickness then becomes the point of departure for talking about something that is more final, and that is some kind of final liberation. So sickness is a point of departure for initiating or talking about a more continuing process that will eventually in something ultimate. I'll show you examples of that in my talk. Buddhist healing, furthermore, is not an exclusive practice. Neither Buddhists nor other practitioners ever excluded their, if you want to use a market model, they never excluded their competitors. There was always room for another specialist, either in the village or in the city. And finally, how do we conceive of all of the various supernatural agents engaged in the process of healing? From the Buddhist side, Buddhists and Bodhisattvas in effect function like specialists, or in the US when my primary care physician needs to send me to someone's specialist. He sends me to a specialist. I need special permission, both from my doctor and from my insurance company. And then I can go to see the specialist. I can go to see a dhitang, a chtigarbha bodhisattva, who might specialize in helping us if we are stuck in hell. I can go to see avalokiteshvara if I need particular help with childbirth and so on. So let me start near the beginning with relatively simple acts of healing. The photo you see is courtesy of the British Library, is a text I've worked on, and will play a significant role in the book I'm working on right now. As you can see, it's entitled, I haven't translated a Chinese title, but it's a healing liturgies for monks, or a monk. And in fact, this text contains healing liturgies for a monk, a nun, an adult male, and an acarya, a monk with a special title. We'll be reading parts of this in the seminar tomorrow. So liturgical manuals are quite interesting. They're the current subject of my research. They survive at Dunhuang. We have things like them from other parts of the Buddhist world, especially in Japan. We have ganmon and prayer texts from Japan. But the ones from Dunhuang survive in great numbers. This is an anthology. It was used by a monk who served in a priestly capacity, performing many different kinds of rituals. So this is the textual and world and the world of religious practice from which this material comes. It survives, especially at Dunhuang, but because its material was so practical and so much involved with the life of folks at the lower levels of society, these materials have not survived in great number in the canon nor in printed editions. So this makes the material from Dunhuang particularly valuable. So the standard healing ritual in these texts, a standard huan wan, or healing liturgy, includes seven steps. I'll run through them very briefly right now. First, the speaker, the priest, praises the Buddha's virtue, then talks about the purpose of the ritual to heal such and such a person using the transfer of merit. The patient or sufferer is described in generic terms and first lauded and then essentially told, you're sick. It's probably because of a deed you committed either in your previous lifetime or more recently. The acts that are performed in the ritual are discussed next under step four, offering of flowers, offering of incense, hanging of banners. Next comes what I consider to be the crux of the ritual, which is the transfer of merit. The text itself uses a fancier word. It uses the word ornamentation for that. But what's basically involved is a transfer of merit known throughout the Buddhist world. One, a good deed has been performed. A donation has been made by the donor or sponsor of the ritual. That good deed creates goodness, creates merit. That merit in this step of the right is taken and then transferred to the beneficiary. That's the crucial part. That's the crucial step in the ritual. Then a prayer is uttered describing how the beneficiary should benefit from the donation and some closing words are said. We'll run through these seven steps in more detail. As I said in our text reading seminar tomorrow, the language used in these seven sections differs. And it's quite interesting from a linguistic and literary and performative. So some actual examples. Dunhuang also preserves written on the backs of other sheets of paper, very simple, very humble records of donations given for acts of healing, for the commissioning of rituals of healing. Pelio 2583 in particular is now put together as a long scroll consisting of 14 sheets of paper. But each of those 14 sheets of paper started off as a simple record taking up only part of the piece of paper, recording in detail, I'll show you one, recording in detail first what the donation is, the goods that are given, second liturgical words, words that are close to those being spoken because they refer to things that are done in the ritual, third, a date, and fourth, an authentication by the receiving official. So the first part, as you can see, describes the relatively humble offerings made by a nun. We know her name. We know the date on which the donation was made. Secondly, the liturgical portion of this record says the aforementioned are for the nun, Ming Chen's illness. Her illness is described in generic terms. She has long been in bed on her pillow waiting slowly without a cure. Now comes the ritual part. We undertake to donate these possessions in a ritual, and then there are directions to perform the chanting. Please chant on our behalf. The date is given, apparently written by the nun herself. I have my doubts about that, as most nuns at Dunhuang were not very literate. And finally, the authentication by a named monk. And as you can see, it's at least in a different brush. I think it's by a different hand as well. His authentication is given probably at a different place and date, different time from the writing up of the record of donation itself. So all of this is under relatively simple acts of healing, in this case, undertaking a donation. Other relatively simple acts of healing, ritual forms of healing, involve the copying of manuscripts. This is a benefit promised not only in texts that are focused on healing, but throughout Mahayana Buddhist literature, we find exhortations to copy Buddhist texts and enjoy the karmic benefits thereof. This can take place in relation to healing. This can take place in relation to an individual practice. This can take place in relation to propagating a particular text. This can take place in relation to ensuring the well-being of one's ancestors. So there are a variety of uses to which this can be put. But the mechanism and the technology is the same. Either one copies oneself part of a text or a text or one pays to have one copied. The results are the same, largely the same, in terms of karmic benefits, they're largely the same. So we have such an example from a Maitreya text illustrated in a mid-tongue cave at Yulin, near Dunhuang. The man copying at bottom right is depicted and presumably in his next life, he will follow the path to be reborn in Tush Dehevan. Something similar, harder to see, but also quite interesting from the perspective of medieval technologies of copying and the actual process of textual reproduction we see here. This is an illustration of a different text, the Baoyu Ting, and we see one person reading aloud, holding the scroll in front of him and the person doing the actual copying, doing the performance of the writing beside him, writing it down after the first recitation. So giving or donation, copying, and next we want to consider chanting. This illustration, I'll show you the larger painting it's taken from in a moment. This is but one scene, one small panel in a longer, much larger painting. This painting shows how chanting was thought to be done or how chanting was supposed to be done. In this case, let's first talk about the painting and then we can run through the accompanying cartouche which you see here. The painting shows an old man supported by a family member with two children, two young boys, reading along and facing the viewer, letting us see who the real players are in this performance. The main performers are the two monks who are facing us directly and whose sutra scrolls are really pretty big. I think it's a little bigger than most sutra scrolls were, really most sutra scrolls, most tong paper was about, a sheet of paper was about one foot tall by about two feet wide. These are even bigger in order to accentuate the importance of them having a text that they can recite on behalf of a lay person. As the text says, as the cartouche says and the cartouche is itself a paraphrase of a canonical text on the healing Buddha, Medicine Master by Shajit Guru. If there are any sentient beings who get sick and have trouble getting better, those who lack medicine are doctors or those who have no success in here we get a list of the other practices that the text expects you to have already performed, petitioning the gods, asking a profane master to do so, calling on shadowy phantoms with Wang Liang, seeking fortunate blessings, desiring their years to be extended. If the sick wish to cast off the suffering of illnesses, what should they do? They should call the monks to perform rituals of chanting or they should themselves engage in confession rituals dedicated to the Medicine Master by Shajit Guru Tatagata. This is the broader, this is the full painting from which this scene is taken, the scene is at top right. As Professor Whitfield has shown in his study of this entire piece and the associated symbolism and design, Medicine Master by Shajit Guru is in the center, Sun and Moon Bodhisattvas on each side. On the left, a panel narrating the by Shajit Guru's 12 vows, enunciated in a couple versions of the text and the nine forms of unfortunate death, all the different ways that people could and did die and from which you can be rescued if you invoke, if you invite monks to chant sutras in the proper way. So one more important point about chanting, we usually think of it as hiring other people to chant for oneself. That's what impression you would get if you think about the transfer of merit. But in fact, there are many sources that explain chanting can not only be done on behalf of somebody else but I can do it on behalf of myself and I can not simply create merit. I can transform myself through chanting into an agent of healing. This crops up in stories about healing contained in different forms of literature. We find it in miracle tales about the diamond sutra. We find it in biographies of monks and in plenty of other literature from the medieval period. This is important because it confirms what we, it confirms and fills out what we know from Dunhuang and shows that the phenomenon involved are not simply coming from Northwest China but rather Northwest China connected as it was strongly to central China but equally strongly and significantly different periods to kingdoms further west and south. It shows us that there's a much broader continuum in which these practices were pursued. So in this case, there's a fabulous story. I think it's the most illuminating one from the Ming Balji, the record of unseen retribution. This is a collection of miracle tales from the middle of the seventh century. Let me summarize the story. It's too long to read. I've just included the, not the punchline, but the conclusion, the salvific or the healing, the efficient conclusion of this text. There's a monk named Sangcha who lived in the sixth, seventh century. Sangcha lived in the mountains. He eschewed city life and had a very small temple built in a secluded area in the mountains. He loved the mountains. One day he was out walking. He ran across a pitiable man suffering from leprosy who had made a home for himself by digging a hole and making a kind of a whole, a hovel for himself in the forest. Obviously the man had been abandoned by family and friend and was quite moving. The monk persuaded the man, after some back and forth, to come with him back to the temple where he, the monk, said, I will take care of you. So his first act back at the temple was to make the man suffering from leprosy feel at home. So he dug another pit for him on the grounds of the temple where he would feel secure and safe and in the same kind of therapeutic environment that he had built for himself in isolation. And then the monk said about trying to heal him and his method was to teach him to chant. In this case it's chanting the lotus sutra. But there's a wrinkle, of course. The man is portrayed as being very, first of all, it's pretty clear he can't read so he's taught how to chant the lotus sutra verbally from memory as many folks did learn the lotus sutra. But it's really slow going and so the monk grows very frustrated. But finally a deity appears to the patient in a dream and the deity takes over teaching the man how to recite the lotus sutra. So he gets him to the very end of the lotus sutra. It's usually it's eight scrolls, literally eight tran and 28 chapters in medieval China. And that works. It works so well that the man as he's nearing the end he begins to recover. His skin begins to return, he puts on weight and then we go to the next stage. So he not only cures himself through the intoning of the text but then he himself becomes a curative agent. He is sent by the monk, his teacher and curer to go heal other people. So the conclusion here as you can see reached by the time that the man reached the fifth and sixth scrolls out of eight he gradually felt his sewers getting better and when he could complete the chanting the whole text his hair and eyebrows had grown back and he was corpulent again like normal. Moreover, he could cure illness on behalf of others. Like many miracle tales this one ends with the authors or collectors guarantee that he himself has seen with his own eyes the results of this and not only that in this case it wasn't some authors curing. Once when I, Tang Lien suffered from a tumor the monk assigned this man and his exorcistic spells resulted in a cure so I myself can say that this is true. One further largely oral form of simple form of religious healing from the medieval period I wanna talk about is confessing. Confessing is the ritualized confession as an action of course is central to Buddhism has always been in most places. Think back to the Pratimoksha and the fortnightly recitation of the hundreds of infractions by monks and nuns. That basic setup very early made its way into lay practice as well in many different Buddhist cultures. The Dunhuang materials also contain not only liturgies for donation and turning that donation through the transfer of merit towards healing. They also contain liturgies that lay out a confession ritual. So curing with confession rather than curing with karma. The seven steps in those healing rituals are similar to the ones we just looked at but two of them are different and I wanna just remark on them. The first part is the invocation of deities. So after praising the Buddha, deities are invoked that is they are invited to come down to the ritual space not to perform the healing per se but to serve as witnesses, as divine witnesses to the acts of confession that are about to be undertaken. The purpose of the ritual is a similar format. The patient is described in similar ways and then enters the confession. And I've given the beginning of, I've excerpted just the beginning of one particular text which goes now in front of the pure assembly. That's the pure assembly is either the monks if they're monks assembled or it's the deities who have been invoked to attend. I confess and ask forgiveness for my past mistakes. There follows a generic listing of misdeeds and it's generic in the sense that monks have a standard list they're supposed to go through. Nones have a standard list they're supposed to go through. Lay men, lay women and so forth. To each social and religious station there is a corresponding set of very generic standardized misdeeds. So those are the words you speak not what you in fact did yesterday or last year but rather the deeds that cover all such acts that a person such as me might commit. And then that closes with may all the valuables that I offer be accepted for making merit. So there's also a donation and a transfer of merit combined with this confession. Those are relatively simple forms of healing in my estimation. More complex forms I'd like to talk about now. These are more complex in the sense that the technology is more involved, the actions often take longer and there are specialists and often esoteric forms of knowledge. That is knowledge that is not publicly accessible but is contained in secret manuals or in secret words. So complex healing, the lighting of lamps. There were lamp lighting ceremonies all across China both before Buddhism and after Buddhism. This is, what you see here is a depiction of perhaps one of the most fantastic imaginations of how that lamp lighting ceremony was performed. This is Mogo Cave 220, redone by the Jai family in the year 642. This is the eastern wall. This is the eastern wall and this is the opposite wall. This is the connecting wall. This is another connecting wall. So we're standing with our backs to the west looking east and this is what we see from floor to ceiling. It's a scene of the seven Buddhas outlined in the Baishajaguru Sutras. They each have canopies over them. They're accompanied by Yaksha's and various followers. So this is the eastern Pure Land on the western side behind us is a mirror Pure Land and that's the western Pure Land of Amitayas. I wanna draw your attention to what's going on down here with what these Bodhisattvas are doing. There is a tree here, a tree here. These are trees, lamp trees, trees that hold candles, probably oil lamps in them. And this thing in the middle, I'll show you a close up in a second is a multi-tiered lamp tower. So let's take these two Bodhisattvas working so carefully on this lamp tree. Many individual pots of oil, probably with wicks that are burning and to keep this many lamps going at one time, it's not easy. It takes two people, right? You have one Bodhisattva pouring oil into cups to be handed up and we have the other Bodhisattva attending to each individual flame as it needs to be sustained. So it's a complex process. The Bhashogiguru Sutra as well as many earlier sutras such as the Consecration Sutra, Indigenous Chinese Buddhist creation, all associate practices of healing with lighting lamps in seven tiers and keeping them lit for seven times seven days for 49 days. Other relatively complex forms of healing involve sealing or the wearing of talismans. So the basic idea here in both of these practices, both sealing and writing of talismans is that one takes the power that originally derives from a Buddha or Bodhisattva and transfers that power first into some kind of meaning bearing form like writing or sound and then uses that to attach to the person, to affect the person through the senses in some way. So for, let's take the example here. This is a long manual containing many talismans from Dunhuang, Stein 2498. It contains the original talisman. It contains a more standardized interpretation of these talismans in a form that looks like a Chinese character. This character pre-exists Buddhism. If you look at Han Dynasty talismans that have been unearthed in archeological remains outside of Buddhism, we find this exact character and there are reasons having to do with the semantic pieces of the character for why it's used for childbirth. But it's consistent. Daoist manuals for talismanic making used for childbirth have this same talisman. But this is put to Buddhist use. It's contained in a Buddhist text. It's contained in a text that has daoanese and that has other kinds of rituals in it. But here it's for talismans. I've translated just the first two columns, first two sections of texts here and here. I'm not gonna read it in detail. It's there. Let me simply summarize them. In the first case, one writes out the talisman and this is not everybody who can write it out. These are handbooks kept by ritual specialists. So the specialist writes out the talisman and then probably burns it. That was the common practice. And then gives it to the patient to swallow. Probably sometimes this is done in a simple tea, in a simple broth. Sometimes it's done in a more complex substance involving vinegar and peach seeds, which also have healing properties. So we find a mix of both talismanic practice and herbal practice in the same practice. Second example, similarly one swallows it, but then one can also chant over water to enchant the water and then administer the water to the person. That's yet another way to transfer the power that originally derives from a Buddha to a patient. It has to cross media and it has to do so through some kind of meaningful representation, whether it's a dot on E in the form of sound or a written dot on E or even these squiggles, which are fairly comprehensible and there are ones that are much less comprehensible, but which are supposed to have their own semantic, their own semiotic meaning. Another way to transfer the power once taken, translated accurately from the healing power, Buddha to a written representation, is to roll up that written representation and place it next to the body. And that is a way to transfer through contact or through proximity the patient. And in this case, there's a beautiful example I saw it, I studied it in 2011, the last time I was in the British Library. This is a piece of paper, it's about three feet long and it's about one inch tall. And what's the content? The content is a healing liturgy. Right now it's folded up, but I suspect it was done in this format so that it could be rolled up and either put in a satchel and kept close to the body. And we know from archeological remains, this one uncovered pretty recently from a tomb in the early Tang dynasty, that corpses were buried, people were buried with a coppered boxes that held Dharani or similar talismans. So that's another way to transfer the power. Finally, perhaps the most complicated, let's just say another complicated technique is exorcism. This gets back to an idea well known across the Buddhist world, extending back into Indian religion of all types and known across the world, ultimately. But let's look at the particular Buddhist examples. The basic idea is that there are good gods and bad gods and they can all be brought to the service of the Buddha and they can all be brought into the service for the protection and apotropeic protection of followers of the Buddha. In particular, there is a class of demons that afflict children. These, given that childbirth and death of children, childbirth of the mother and death of young children were probably the most frequent forms of death, the mortality, it's not surprising that this kind of practice would be so widespread. The originals I have not seen in person yet in the British Museum, but they're really, really interesting set. Originally there were a set of 16, I think three slips survive with one deity on each side, so a total of six survive. The basic idea is that there are demons who can afflict children. They do so by stealing their soul or possessing them and then that manifests in various forms of sickness. The way to figure this out is to perform a divination with the mother, in this case it's a dream divination. You run through the dreams that the mother has had until you get to one of the animals mentioned in the 16, and if so then we know the name of the demon, knowing the name of the demon, we can then control the demon and offer sacrifice to the demon. All of this requires first divination. Second, talking to the specialist who knows the system that associates the dream symbol with the appropriate demon and then can administer the proper form for sacrifice and ultimately that is a way of exorcising, of drawing the spirit, the evil spirit out of the child and making the child well. This occurs also for deer. The other six that survive in the British Museum or the six are an ox, a stag, a cat, a bird, a rooster, an owl. So let's look at the whole process now. How is the process of healing conducted? How is it thought to work? Well, first of all, unlike modern biomedicine, there was always admitted that there could be a variety of causes of illness. So you see here in a painting of the 10 Kings from the 10th century, painting of the 10 Kings and Shtigarbha, Bodhisattva, Ditzong and the 10 Kings. We see a scene in the painting which shows this wonderful contraption on the right, which is the mirror of karma. We see a deceased person who is passing through the 10 courts of purgatory being judged in each one en route to rebirth for the next lifetime, held in medieval Chinese handcuffs. The kang deriving that word, I think comes from the Portuguese. There are different words for it in Chinese. So a poor sufferer not in a very powerful position being dragged before the judges of purgatory en route to his next rebirth. And if he should attempt to lie and to say it wasn't me or I didn't do that, he is taken in front of the karma mirror. And here he's shown, in fact, doing the bad deed, slaying an ox in his previous lifetime. So there's no way to escape the rigors of the underworld bureaucracy. So that may be one reason why I'm sick today. Deeds from a previous lifetime, but the liturgical materials and a wide range of Chinese Buddhist materials on healing also allow for other causalities. They allow for the disequilibrium of yin and yang on the one side from China, on the other side, they allow for the imbalance of the four elements, a traditional idea of Indian physiology. They allow for my sickness now is caused by my enemy who may have put a curse on me or who may have used magic to make me sick. Or I'm being possessed by demons either from my own my own difficulties right now make me susceptible to demons or because they have been sent by someone else. So all of these causes of illness are possible and they all are open to multiple forms of cure. How about calling on divine assistance? I was really intrigued when I started this project because many of the deities, most of the deities invoked in Buddhist healing liturgies are not the major, the primary care bodhisattva by Shajiguru Bodhisattva or the healing Buddha whose name is Master of Medicine. He is involved in some, but he's more often not involved. So who is involved? A whole range of deities and they range from high Buddhas to medium bodhisattvas and lower gods to including gods who have only a tenuous commitment to Buddhist Dharma, gods, Nagas and deities. And they also include the recurring form, the returned form and as a reincarnation of the Buddha's own physician whom the Buddha was sent to the Buddha by one of the kings whom the Buddha preached to, that's Divaka, also shows up as a deity invoked in medieval Chinese Buddhist healing liturgies. So the process relies on divine assistance from a really wide range of figures. How does the process work? Well, I've been looking at the language of liturgical materials and this language, the words spoken are filled with very highly condensed allusions and metaphors, some of which are great potent in the sense of powerful, compressed notions of healing and well-being. So just to read, let's read just the first example from a liturgy. This is in the prayer part, so once the merit has been transferred to the beneficiary, what's the wish, the year-end one, for this particular person who was sick? May the crown of his head be anointed with ghee and the reign of the Dharma enriches body. May 10,000 fortunes gather like clouds and the 1,000 calamities roll away like fog. So the process is conveyed, not simply by saying, he'll get better and won't get sick again. It's conveyed through processes that are carried out, perhaps by deities, perhaps in an imaginary space, perhaps with substances that we can't all see right now, but they're really luscious kinds of figures, anoint shampooing with clarified butter, enriching the body with a fertile, warm rain. These are pretty potent images and there are plenty of other metaphors. I started to compile this here and stopped. These are strong, just from this section of the liturgy, the various liturgies for healing. Remember our sixth century informant, Galzushan, who said, first go to a doctor, people first go to a doctor, or they go to a Taoist, or they go to an exorcist, or they go to a Buddhist priest. We find throughout the literature that many therapies are considered. Few are ruled out in theory. The question is, are they effective? So here we see these are illustrations of the Baishaja Guru Sutra from Dunhuang and their examples of people pursuing other forms of healing that are not specifically Buddhist and some of them seem to be okay. Here's a poor man lying on his back and being fed with a long spoon, but this guy, this is the one of the nine forms of unfortunate death is you take medicine and it kills you. But of course, the other forms that can be practiced, this, my anthropologist friends disagree with me, but I found something like this illustration in four or five places, illustrations of what is secular exorcistic healing supposed to be like? What does it look like in the murals illustrating the Baishaja Guru Sutra? And it shows this group, perhaps a female, perhaps a woman, shamaness, and accompanied by a singer to heal this person. But the best methods, of course, are Buddhist and those are the ones displayed with most sumptuousness. So the ideal form for therapy is sponsor a Buddhist ritual, a Buddhist feast and the ideal form of that, of course, is for the Buddha and his monks. So we'll do the second best and we'll make it for the local monks, but you see the monks, you see people preparing a meal, you see banners, which are always supposed to be involved in healing rituals, and you see a seven tiered lamp here as well. So let's come back to London. Kersen Street, 1920s was when this church only the facade remains, was first, was built. Healing is but one part of a broader process. And if we were looking in detail at the inscription, heal the sick, cleanse the leper, raise the dead. They edited, of course, they're choosing here from the book of Matthew, they left out cast out the devils. But nevertheless, the same understanding of sickness, death, disease, and some kind of either resuscitation or ultimate rebirth, ultimate salvation is also part of the Buddhist world. And I think one really nice example with which I'll end in the Chinese Buddhist world for making that point is the depiction of what happens in the Pure Land. So if curing is simply the first step in the process, we would next think perhaps rebirth in the Pure Land is the final step, but it's not. It's the penultimate step. Curing and the liturgies, some of the liturgies will be reading, bear this out. They narrate a journey and it begins with curing of illness, it can extend to all beings. And then the next step is rebirth in the Pure Land here with Amitabha in the center, Bodhisattva's, Mahasattama, Praptava, Kiteshvara on each side, musicians, dancers, more Bodhisattvas, ornate, lovely three, four tiered architecture, and a pool here. And it's this pool I wanna look at. I wanna look at some of the lotus buds in that pool because they picture a being who is being born into the Pure Land. So you might think of this as a baby, but if we're lucky enough to be reborn in the Pure Land, this is exactly how we are reborn. This is a person being reborn into the Pure Land and this person enjoys several benefits that we don't. So we, in the Buddhist view, in the Buddhist view, birth is impure. So the Buddha had a pure birth. He was born from his mother's side magically. This human being, this being, I don't know, he's mostly human, not fully human, but mostly human. When he's reborn in the Pure Land, he also is born not through the usual impure method, but he is reborn in a flower where he has gestated for a number of years. But that's not the end of the story and the liturgies may clear. First, cure the illness to achieve longevity that those benefits can be shared with others, family, ruler, all sentient beings. Purify body, mind, and speech to prepare for death. That allows one to achieve this condition being reborn in the Pure Land. And once there, our liturgies continue, one is supposed to hear the Buddha preach and with one's own ears hearing directly from the mouth of the Buddha, one will achieve final enlightenment. That is the ultimate cure. I'm gonna stop here and I'm happy to take questions. Thank you very much. Interesting, very rich and insightful lecture. I think, especially the visual material is very telling of many stories actually. I think maybe I should forego my usual privilege of the chair and open up to the public. I'm sure there are lots of questions. So, or should I take my privilege? Maybe I should ask one question. The coast of healing, you're talking about donations and it makes me think that that is a very important part of the process as well. There is no healing without paying for it, or is there? Payment is always required, but payment can take different forms and often our sources revert to the importance in Buddhism of intention. So, if the intention is pure, even the smallest act of giving makes a difference, but it has to be a pure intention. The least costly act of healing I've seen thus far involving a donation to the Sangha is the nun's example that I showed and out of those 14 different liturgies, 12 of them were donations by nuns and it was clearly, it was their old clothing, a couple pieces of their old clothing. I am compiling a list based on Dunhuang materials because we have about 100 different records of donation for specific acts of healing and especially funerals. And of course, which of course funerals are the biggest business and the biggest concern, funerals and memorial rights, but healing comes second after that if we look at the numbers of liturgies that survive. And so, there are some records and they range from the quite humble to the quite ornate either from the local ruler or from non-Dunhuang sources we know, emperors often for their wives or empresses, constructed a new monastery and endowed it and made sure that monks were there around the clock to chant and perform rituals on behalf of their wives or their mothers. So it's a big range, it was a very adaptable. Yes, I do, they all follow that seven. So the ones, the liturgical handbooks I'm looking at use a fairly common in the sense that it's shared across and they use seven steps in the ritual, but for the funeral ritual, in place of praising the beneficiary, you would praise the deceased person according to their station in life. And other than that, they're very similar and the reason is they're both oriented towards that ultimate or towards that last step. And so you can include healing now in that step. That's just the step prior to when healing fails then we add the memorial part. So they are very similar. Now, this is not to say that a funeral is the same thing as a curing event. These are rituals performed by Buddhist monks. They're not at graveside. So they're different. The monks tended not to get involved with anything directly involved with the corpse, for instance, that was somebody else. That was another religious specialist. And we have evidence of that already from the medieval period. It's very common in China and other parts of Asia now that those duties are divided. They're corpse specialists who are considered to be polluted and have other kinds of specialist knowledge or human answers. And then there are people who take care of the memorial part. It could be except for, I mean, so the number seven has a lot to do with transition in general. And this claim is not original to me. So the Buddha's meditations are often thought to have proceeded through seven times seven. The world over transition is often bound up with a number seven. The Bhasharaja Guru text in particular says for healing rituals, use seven times seven. But it's clearly, it's involved with both with death and with healing. And they both involve very big transitions. Are there questions there, Professor Whitfield? I think I was very taken when you identified the scene of exorcism in cave 148 to relate the figure dancing with a peepa, providing music and dance, which of course are also acceptable offerings. If we turn to the silk painting in the British Museum with the 12 vows on one side on the Buddha's right and the nine forms of violent death on the other, there is, we wait until it comes on the screen. It's quite a way back. There we are. Yes, so you showed us the scene that's circled in the upper right there. But immediately above that is a female figure dancing with a peepa. She is dancing and in front of her is a canopy hanging from a tree. And beneath that canopy on the ground are two slabs, one smaller than the other like paving stones, placed to form a kind of mandala or altar. So I think this would be relevant to your study. Thank you, that's extremely helpful. I've already built, I came into this material through your thorough study of it. What do you think she's doing? What kind of figure do you think she is among these specialists? Well, I've never had a satisfactory answer to that because the other scenes that are below this all show the various unfortunate circumstances in which one might come to grief being pushed off a cliff or falling into a lake or into a fire or hunting is one where accidents can easily happen, I suppose. But anyway, there's a hunter there. So these are the circumstances. So above that, obviously this female figure dancing and playing music is not, well, I suppose you could interpret it as being excessive indulgence in these. But I think that it is a ritual that's some kind of a ritual. So that's, by the way, I think you can cross off 10th century, it's definitely 9th century or possibly even earlier in date. Thank you, thank you very much. Well, thank you very much for the wonderful lecture, Professor Tizer. You listed, first, as a simple healing method copying sutra. I can give you one of the quite interesting and excellent example from Korea. In the 15th century, Joseon king Sonjo had a terrible disease with his eye, eye disease. So it was very difficult to cure but he was a devout Buddhist, Buddhist monk and he asked his courtiers to bring the most expensive material for writing sutra. That is the sutra of, no, that is the dharani of complete overcome of eye disease. So it is now in Fukuoka and I think it is one of a very good actual examples. Some copying sutra is one of the methods of healing. Thank you. Wonderful, thank you. I look forward to finding the piece itself. I'll ask you later, thank you. Hi, thank you very much. I'm just wondering whether you see any evidence of the tension between monks, freedom to treat other monks in the Sangha and between treating the laity in any of the evidence that you've looked at. That's an important question and behind it, for those of you who don't know, Dr. Law is asking, is referring to the frequent prohibition by almost all official sources for monks to practice healing among the laity. And this is all across the Buddhist world, the vineas, all surviving vineas maintain this prohibition and prohibition on fortune telling, on healing, on exercising, on child, on assisting with, on serving as, nuns cannot serve as midwives, but the state agrees as well. And so in secular law in China, there's the same prohibition. And the answer is not really, that is do I see evidence among the Dunhuang materials? And the answer is not really. So why do I hedge a little bit? I hedge because there are many cases of monks performing these kinds of simple healing rituals for other monks. But there are also many examples of monks writing liturgies that they performed to heal lay people. But there are a lot more, there are more lay roles than there are monk roles in the surviving corpus. But there are a lot of surviving liturgies specifically for monks and nuns as well. But other than that, I don't see any difficulty, no reflection of those intradictions and no indication of that conflict. I wonder how did monks take over the role of healers in the first place and how did they come up quite high in the hierarchy of healers? Thank you. Thank you. This is an important question that the Dunhuang materials actually take us some distance toward answering because most monks did not perform rituals like this. Those monks who performed rituals in general for the laity at Dunhuang were a relative minority and were probably senior. And I say this based not on the research that I've done but drawing on the conclusions. Some of it statistically backed up and by my colleague Hal Chun-Wen, Professor Hao of Shoshida of Capitol Normal University and his first book on the social life of Buddhist monks and nuns at Dunhuang. He has a very nice description of and calculation of how much was paid for certain kinds of rituals. Who were the monks who performed them in relation to other monks and so on? Professor Stevan, thank you very much. I come from China. I am visiting Swana, just come here. Because my English is very poor, my speak in Chinese. You try it. Oh. You try it. Sometimes I can't understand. Oh. Thank you very much. Because my English is really very high. So I try to use Chinese to ask you a question. I have two questions. Actually, your speech today is very good. You have found a lot of ancient Chinese materials, such as wood-pulled materials and a lot of paintings. Some classic and so on are very good. I think compared to the study of the local scholars in China, they are still good. This is a very deep impression on me. When I heard your report just now, I think I have two questions. The first question is, when you talk about Chinese people performing extreme treatment, they will look for various methods. In these methods, you talk about a Buddhist treatment and a Taoist treatment. So in the traditional Chinese people, the treatment of Taoism and Buddhist treatment are more similar to the treatment of the people. This is the first question. The second question is, in the treatment of Buddhism, there is the talisman, the talisman. As far as I know, the talisman in the talisman is more about the treatment of the Taoism. The talisman is not the treatment of Buddhism. So I don't know where you got this information from. We need to talk about this question. I will ask you a question. Thank you, I am sorry. So the visiting professor asked, what was the mix of Buddhist Taoist and folk elements, or popular elements in this material? He was under the impression that practices of nourishing life, if I understood them correctly, were particularly pronounced in Taoism. I'll give one short answer. I will answer it in a short time. Because time is coming. That is that there is a lot of evidence from Dunhuang that shows that the lines between folk practice or local exorcistic practice and local healers and local doctors on the one hand, and monks on the other hand, that they were doing very similar things and providing versions of rituals without much conflict between them, and that they were working on behalf of a populace that did not draw very strict lines. There's much less evidence at Dunhuang about Taoism, but that largely had to do with the particularities of the history of Taoism at Dunhuang in far west China, because Dunhuang was once the An Lushan Rebellion happened in the middle of the 8th century, and the central state was weakened. The Taoist presence at Dunhuang declined rapidly, abetted by the fact that a very powerful Tibetan military regime ruled Dunhuang for the next 80 years, and so that really rang a death knell for the Taoist establishments. So it's just very hard to make a comparison. And then after that, Taoist institutional life was very slow to regrow on the period of independent rule from the 830s onward. The simple saying in Chinese is that Buddhism and the so-called religious customs are really not far away. They often come. I have to put an end to the discussion. I'm sorry for this, but we have to leave the room. However, we have a reception just outside here, so I invite you all to stay. And ask more questions in a more informal way. I'm sure there will be another good time to talk more, to get more of Professor Tizer's knowledge. But for now, let us thank him for a wonderful contribution. Thank you.