In medieval China, talismans (fu) and sacred diagrams (tu) were ubiquitous elements in religious texts. Since they were composed of divine illegible esoteric patterns, meaning was not produced by the markings talismans and diagrams bore; it was, rather, displaced onto the objects themselves, whether they were two-dimensionally represented in scriptures and ritual manuals or externalized and materialized onto physical supports. In this respect, the objecthood and palpable materiality of talismans and diagrams made them shorthand tokens for direct access to the supernatural. Drawing on emblematic yet understudied scriptures of medieval Daoism and esoteric Buddhist, the present study considers talismans and diagrams as paratextual objects, bringing to light the fact that they not only passively frame the reading of a text but in many instances also constitute the primary and determining level of “text” that is read. In this way, sources in which talismans and diagrams featured prominently were approached first and foremost through their material aspects, namely paratexts. What is more, the talismans and diagrams that appeared in texts were often meant to be externalized and materialized, in some cases onto the bodies of adepts or visualized in their mind’s eye, thereby conflating paratextuality, materiality, and corporeality. In a pair of striking examples, practitioners are instructed to embody and become actual ritual objects, blurring the boundaries between text, object, and body in one single divine locus.
This article examines how discursive frames modify forms of knowledge and practice. More precisely, it considers the problem of categories in early and medieval Chinese sources through the lens of recipes designed to facilitate intercourse. In pre-Buddhist Chinese sources, such prescriptions traditionally fell either under the rubric of ‘nourishing life’ (yangsheng 養生) longevity practices or spellbinding (zhuzu 祝詛). While recipes that appear in the former bracket—referred to in this study as ‘aphrodisiacs’—were couched in a discourse of healing and classified as a medical undertaking, those associated with spellbinding—referred to as ‘love philters’—were filed under the heading of mantic arts and divination in bibliographic treatises. With the arrival of Āyurvedic medicine in China via Buddhist sources, this partition grew increasingly blurred. Āyurvedic medical taxonomy in general, and its discipline of potency therapy (vājīkarana) in particular, did not distinguish between aphrodisiacs and love philters since both ultimately facilitate intercourse, albeit through different means. The imprint of Āyurvedic categories in China can be ascertained in Buddhist manuscript sources from Dunhuang, but also, more surprisingly, in widely circulated medieval non-Buddhist medical treatises. However, in contrast to the emblematic medical treatises of the middle period and surveyed manuscript Buddhist materials, canonical Buddhist texts appear to have shied away from the topic of aphrodisiacs and upheld the indigenous Chinese understanding of love philters as spellbinding and mantic art.
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