1. “A Flock of Ghosts Bursting Forth and Scattering”: Healing Narratives in a Sixth-Century Chinese Buddhist Hagiography

Abstract

His research focuses on the transmission of Buddhist medical knowledge from India to China, and the processes of cultural and linguistic translation that facilitated this crosscultural exchange. His dissertation, Buddhist Medicine in Medieval China: Disease, Healing, and the Body in Crosscultural Translation, is currently being revised for publication. He is also the author of several non-academic books on traditional medicine in Thailand.] * * * As Buddhism was transmitted to China in the first millennium BC, texts, doctrines, and narratives concerning Indian models of healing embedded in the Tripitaka were repackaged, reconceptualized, and recreated for Chinese audiences through a sustained project of literary and cultural translation. Like all translators, the Chinese interpreters of Buddhism defined and explained foreign ideas by placing them into relationship with familiar ideas from the indigenous context. They did not adhere to a single approach in this undertaking, however. Like all authors writing at the interface between cultures, their translation decisions were inseparable from their cultural contexts, social strategies, and individual historical 1 This paper was first presented at the Colloquium Series of the Johns Hopkins Program in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology in 2007. I would like to thank the participants in that discussion, as well as