Recipe and Ritual: Material Substances for Supramundane Abilities in Medieval China

This dissertation interrogates the deployment of material substances (yao 藥) for supramundane abilities in middle-period China and the Eastern Silk Roads (600–1000 C.E.). I foreground recipe and ritual texts found in the Dunhuang manuscript corpus and analyze these sources together with canonically transmitted materials from the Buddhist, Daoist, and medical traditions. These texts arguably reflect the everyday concerns and desires of people in the Tang and Five Dynasties. In doing so, I excavate on-the-ground instantiations of users drawing on vernacular and technical expertise to use material substances, i.e., vegetal, animal, and/or mineral things, to achieve special powers beyond the functions of an average person and that lie outside our contemporary understanding of physical laws.  

In this study, recipe and ritual texts outline particularized assemblages of actions and ingredients for the alteration of a person’s body, and potentially, mind. Focusing on three groups of such abilities—invisibility, or more precisely, undetectability; elimination of hunger and thirst; and control over people to elicit attraction and uncover infidelity—I undertake analyses of texts purporting to produce extraordinary changes in the body. My examination of these methods and techniques emphasizes the significant and transformative role of material substances. Depending on the practice, users perform a series of ritualized acts to process, manipulate, and convert substances into a form deemed suitable for deployment. The corporeal form of the text’s user or the user’s intended target absorbs the perceived qualities of the finalized product through a variety of means such as ingestion, topical application, or external placement. To obtain efficacious results from the product, the human body then invariably becomes the site for any given transformation. 

Attending to the internal logics of the recipes and rituals that form the core of this study, I disentangle prescriptions that either comprise of complex programs or pithy—yet no less cryptic—instructions. I query how and why people in middle-period China collected, prepared, and utilized a wide range of material substances for the achievement of supramundane powers. By tracing the social, cultural, and historical contours of these substances, my investigation not only reveals their preconceived material primacy but also a cultural imaginaire undergirding and guiding their reception and eventual deployment. And through inspecting the ways in which practitioners of such vernacular and technical practices—Buddhist, Daoist, medical, or otherwise—approached the assembling and deploying of material substances for such specific means, we better understand human actors and their relationships with the natural environment, their responses to personal challenges and larger societal changes, and the enduring and incessant drive to overcome and transcend the physical limitations of their corporeal forms.