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Chinese Magical Medicine
Michel Strickmann
A landmark study of how healing, exorcism, and ritual therapy actually worked in medieval Chinese religion, drawn from close readings of Taoist and Buddhist liturgical texts. Michel Strickmann argues that Buddhism's deepest mark on Chinese culture was left not in doctrine but in practice — in the spells, seals, and possession rites developed to cure disease, expel demons, and reverse bad luck — and that these techniques passed into and reshaped Taoist ritual. Chapters range across demonology and epidemiology, the literature of spells, the sealing technique called ensigillation, and the tangled history of spirit possession, foxes, and shamans. Assembled and edited by Bernard Faure after Strickmann's death, it is dense, erudite, and often startling — a serious work of scholarship that treats "magic" as a real and consequential dimension of religious life rather than a curiosity.
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The author
Michel Strickmann (1942–1994) was an American-born scholar of Chinese religion who taught at the University of California, Berkeley, and was among the pioneers of the Western academic study of Taoism. He died prematurely in 1994, leaving three book-length manuscripts unpublished; his colleague Bernard Faure edited this one into print.
The book
Published by Stanford University Press in 2002, Chinese Magical Medicine is built on primary liturgical sources in classical Chinese — mostly from the Han through the Song — which Strickmann translates, dissects, and sets against non-liturgical evidence. Its central thesis is that Buddhist ritual technique profoundly reshaped Chinese Taoist practice around disease and demons.
How it reads
Demanding and specialist, but rewarding. Scholars have praised it as foundational for the study of ritual healing, even while noting the seams inevitable in a posthumously assembled book.
For more context
Stanford's edition and reviews in the field situate the work within Strickmann's larger project on Taoism and Tantra.
Sources - Chinese Magical Medicine — Stanford University Press - Chinese Magical Medicine — Google Books
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Michel Strickmann
- Publisher
- Stanford University Press
- Place of publication
- Stanford, California
- Year
- 2002
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Spirituality & Philosophy
- Location
- Colorado
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