University of Heidelberg

I. Outline

The intersection of medicine and religion has attracted increasing scholarly attention in recent years. In most Asian religious traditions, the human body is one of the principal arenas onto which ontological and epistemological discourses are mapped. In many instances, practitioners aiming to cure the physical ailments that plague their bodies and those seeking to rid themselves of spiritual ills follow the same path. This superposition of therapy and soteriology is often explained in cosmological terms, on the basis of the correpondence between macrocosm and microcosm. Indeed, correlative thought is among the chief theoretical systems to merge medicine and religion in pre-modern Asian traditions. In this respect, it constitutes evidence of a transcultural flows of knowledge between China, Korea, Japan, and India as well.
 With the pervasive influence of correlative thought, many of the religious traditions of East Asia heavily rely on the complementary pairing of yin and yang, female and male, earth and heaven, to express their world-view. In the context of these binary systems, femininity is sometimes regarded as undesirable, or something to be overcome, in opposition to the perceived agency and completion of masculinity. However, in other cases, the feminine is celebrated as an indispensable and paramount life-giving force in manifold cosmic, natural, and spiritual processes—the Daode jing, for example, describes the Dao as the “mother of all things,” while the Esoteric Buddhist tradition sometimes paints the cosmic Buddha Dainichi nyorai in a similar light.
 This international symposium will focus on the latter notion of femininity in religious economies of healing. It will consider how certain religious practices posit femininity as a generative, and ultimately curative force in both spiritual and physical refinement. Instead of  addressing  the socio-historical category of gender, this symposium will rather examine how concepts of femininity were expressed in medico-religious practices and, vice versa, how the practical concerns of womanhood shaped religious and medical discourses. Most importantly, this symposium will consider how certain concepts native to China were fused with Indian notions, then transferred to Korea and eventually to Japan, where they were reinterpreted against the backdrop of indigineous religious and medical discourses.
The symposium will unite renowned international scholars (from North America, Europe, and Asia) from numerous disciplines (History of Science, History of Religions, Intellectual History) and various fields (Chinese and Japanese Buddhism, Daoism, Kami cults, Onmyodo, Popular Religion, Shugendo) in an effort to trace the flow of ideas between the medico-religious traditions of China, Korea, Japan, and also India; it will discard previous models of sectarian insularity, lending more weight to the role of dialogue and interchange between seemingly heterogeneous traditions and cultures.
 A selection of the papers presented at this symposium will be incorporated in an edited volume to be published by a reputable European or North-American academic press. The papers should be submitted in March 2011. The volume will appear in early 2012.

II. Themes

Ideally the papers presented at the symposium will address, among others, issues related to one or more of the following themes:

1. The Female Body

This section will examine how the female body was conceptualized as ritual space in various therapeutic or apotropaic practices that were very often, but not exclusively, tailored to women.

2. Feminine Imagery and Reproductive Symbolism
 
This section will consider the “positive” use of feminine imagery (most of which falls under the rubric of yin in correlative thought) conjugated with generative or reproductive metaphors as they appear in exegetical, liturgical, or therapeutic materials. Rites of sexual congress will also be examined in this section.

3. Embryology

This section will explore ideas and practices tied to in utero or antepartum stages of development, whether literal or allegorical, as in foetal Buddha-hood or the generation of an inner embryo, for example.

4. Womb-worlds

This section will investigate the metaphor of the womb as cosmic egg and its application to sacred geography, cosmogony, cosmology, alchemy, or various rituals and meditative practices.

5. Childbirth and Motherhood

This section will focus on rituals pertaining to parturition and the rearing of children. In parallel, this section will also include studies of beliefs and prac-tices that adopt a more figurative understanding of childbirth and motherhood, such as Daoist meditations on the Infant, or Shugen rites of spiritual rebirth.