From the tenth to the thirteenth centuries, Japanese aristocrats attributed their afflictions to vengeful spirits of the deceased. But in the late twelfth century, a new and anomalous ailment, caused not by spirits but the material dead, crept into their consciousness. “Corpse-vector disease,” as it was called, emerged as a new form of “postmortem contagion”—diseases tethered to death that reanimated in pathogenic forms such as ghosts, noxious qi, corpse-worms, and disease-causing demons. In response, Tendai Buddhist monks of the Jimon branch at Onjōji temple engaged creatively with esoteric rites, medical texts, and Daoist scriptures to craft a healing ritual for their patients. Cadaverous is the first book-length work to examine this ritual and its extant manuscripts. Bridging religious studies and medical history, it analyzes Buddhist ritual healing in Japan through the lens of “ritual immunity”—the complex, experimental processes through which monks identified disease agents, demarcated boundaries between self and pathogen, and designed therapeutic interventions.

By exploring the social, moral, material, and ritual dynamics that shaped new disease concepts, Cadaverous reveals how corpse-vector disease reflected growing anxieties surrounding death and pollution in a capital increasingly crowded with corpses. The book offers an unprecedented tour of the therapeutic and ritual culture of early medieval Japan, illuminating how that culture was haunted by darker preoccupations with disease, death, and defilement.

• Andrew Macomber, Author

  Andrew Macomber is assistant professor of East Asian religions at Oberlin College.

• Cadaverous had me absolutely riveted. The book is engaging and provocative in its framing, asking questions that have not been asked before. Macomber's training and expertise open new avenues to understanding the role of religious ideas and practices in Japanese history.
  —Hank Glassman, Haverford College
• Cadaverous makes a major contribution to the field of Japanese religions as well as the history of medicine. Macomber has an impressive, almost encyclopedic knowledge of all of the relevant primary and secondary sources. Richly researched and compellingly argued, this book will establish him as not only the leading scholar of Japanese Buddhism and medicine, but also one of the most exciting new voices in the fields of Japanese religions and Buddhist studies more generally.
  —Bryan D. Lowe, Princeton University