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.

Daoism is the indigenous higher religion of traditional China. Growing from a philosophical root and developing through practices of longevity and immorality, it has found expression in communal organizations, ritual structures, and age-old lineages. A multifaceted tradition, Daoism in the 2,500 years of its history has related to women in a number of different ways matching the complexity of other religions, where the relationship to the female is often ambiguous and ambivalent. They commonly see motherhood, sexuality, fertility, esoteric knowledge, and secret powers as closely linked with the feminine and evaluate these aspects positively. But many religions also relegate women to inferior status, considering them of a lower nature, impure and irresponsible, and often suppressing them with greater or lesser severity. The complexity of women's positions is particularly poignant in the Daoist case, since the religion is caught between its ideal cosmological premise of the power of yin and the realities of a strongly patriarchal society following the Confucian model. That is to say, cosmologically Daoism sees women as expressions of the pure cosmic force of yin, necessary for the working of the universe, equal and for some schools even superior to yang. Daoism also links the Dao itself, the force of creation at the foundation of the cosmos, to the female and describes it as the mother of all beings. Within the religion there is a widespread attitude of veneration and respect for the feminine, honouring the cosmic connection as well as the productive and nurturing nature of women.