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This chapter takes a look at the scope of mathematics in Ancient and Medieval China. Although the Chinese engaged in numerical calculation as early as the middle of the second millennium BCE, the earliest detailed written evidence of the solution of mathematical problems in China is the Suan shu shu (or Book of Numbers and Computation), a book discovered in a tomb dated to approximately 200 BCE. The Suan shu shu was part of the Chinese intellectual culture shaped in part by China's tempestuous political history. Within this history, Chinese mathematicians—who seemingly worked in isolation and in widely disparate parts of the country—gradually developed new methods for treating various problems that their works needed to contain. Here, the chapter discusses various mathematical explorations set out by Chinese scholars, such as the Chinese remainder problem.

This chapter discusses one of the most elaborate pictorial narratives on Buddha's nirvana from the medieval China of the Dayun Monastery in Yishin governed by Empress Wu. This stele was moved to the local Confucian temple and later to the provincial museum in Taiyuan. Its compositional program was labelled as niepan bian or literally “nirvana transformation.” The material and inscriptional evidence supports an interpretation of the pictorial nirvana narrative that decorated the stele as a localized response to the Wu Zhou regime, whose political ideology built on a particular understanding of Buddhist metaphysics prevalent in the seventh century. The pictorial narrative on the Shanxi stele tells the story of the transformation of the Buddha in three stages through the course of attaining nirvana. The story had its roots in scriptures, biographies, miracle tales, and prose compilations. This chapter also presents a narrative structure of Buddha's death.

This chapter discusses the appearance of the nirvana image in relic deposits of the tenth to twelfth centuries which marks the final episode in the account of the motif's development in medieval China. It examines the two important finds from the late tenth century in Dingzhou, Hebei. In addition to being a surface décor on some of the metal and stone containers in the deposit assemblage, the nirvana motif also figured prominently in the underground structures respectively at Jingzhi Monastery and Jingzhong Cloister in the form of painted murals. It discusses the viewership and the very act of seeing the nirvana image in the hidden space of relic deposits.

In this study, the early history of the calendrical animals is traced to the mapping of space, time, stars and constellations, the rise of correlative cosmology and the mantic arts in China. It draws attention to the representations of the calendrical animals as beasts, humans and hybrids, their internal as well as external sources of inspiration, and the differing perspectives on the relationship between humans and animals underlying such depictions. Archaeology provides the primary materials for the study of the belief in the calendrical animals as arbiters of human fate in medieval China. Today the calendrical animals continue to engage the religious imagination and beyond, as they also spark the discourse on national identity and global politics.

This concluding chapter summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. The examples of Buddho-Taoist exchange examined in the preceding chapters offer a new perspective on the religious situation in medieval China. These religious scriptures are not, by and large, representative of the highest religious scholasticism. Neither, however, do they emerge from an undistinguished religious background. They show, on the contrary, that their authors were keen to make their religious affiliations explicit and to affirm a strong commitment to their denominational identities. The diverse scriptural and ritual traditions studied also reveal the presence of a third party animating the religious marketplace in medieval China. This third class of specialists in recipes, working on the margins of the Taoist and Buddhist organizations, belonged to the milieux of astrologers, diviners, medicine men, and other experts in parareligious techniques.

Both archeological evidence and dynastic histories confirm the antiquity and virulence of sorcery in China. This chapter asks: How did Taoism and Buddhism envision sorcery? What were the strategies they adopted in seeking to combat it? Two sui generis works of the medieval period provide substantial material with which to respond to these questions: the Buddhist Sūtra for the Conjuration of Bewitchments, Preached by the Buddha and the Taoist Scripture for Unbinding Curses, Revealed by the Most High Lord Lao. Besides their opposition to sorcery, the two sūtras bear similarities that disclose their link. The question here is not one of plagiarism or appropriation in the strict sense, but a more subtle sort of textual exchange between the two religions, in fact an instance of delayed response in the relation of the Taoist scripture to the Buddhist sūtra. Before entering into exegetical considerations, however, the chapter outlines the religiocultural background of the texts.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book’s main themes. This book adds a new dimension to the study of Buddho-Taoist relationships. During mid-and late medieval times (from the end of the Six Dynasties through the Tang and Five Dynasties periods), religious life was far more confrontational than the considerable interpenetration of the two religions might at first appear. An amazing competition was taking place between the two communities, a fight for hegemony in the domains of scripture and ritual. Within the vast field of interaction between the two great Chinese traditions, some of the examples of apocryphal sūtras and Taoist “revealed” scriptures reveal not mere hybridization or passive borrowing, but a unique type of scriptural production, whereby the two traditions mirrored one another. The quest, for both religions, was not only achieving scriptural hegemony. Buddhism and Taoism also sought to strengthen their respective liturgical and evangelical monopolies. To integrate one another’s favored rituals was undoubtedly viewed as the best means to consolidate the status of their clerical organizations and to attract or keep faithful followers by providing them with the most fashionable religious trends, even if this meant borrowing conspicuously from the opposing camp’s heritage.

This chapter describes adepts in relation to their communities. Many practitioners of transcendence arts, for all their alleged secrecy and social disengagement, were visible, talked-about public figures. They attracted large audiences even, or especially, when they tried to remain secluded, just as other noted recluses in early medieval China drew attention by conspicuously vacating normal social relations and official roles. In addition, many self-cultivators, far from (or in alternation with) hiding in mountain caves or chambers of quietude, performed vivid wonders and told marvelous tales to crowds of onlookers. These actions showed that transcendence-seekers’ withdrawal from normal patterns of interaction did not constitute the absence of any relation to a society.

The principal objective of the talismanic tradition of the constellation of the Great Dipper, or Beidou, is to assure the prolongation and preservation of the lives of the faithful. More complex in its formation than the Yisuan jing, the tradition of the Beidou is deeply embedded within the millennial fabric of Chinese culture and religion, in which the diverse threads of astrology and soteriology are intimately intertwined. The text concerning the Beidou that has caused by far the most ink to flow among Occidental scholars is the Sūtra on Prolonging Life through Worship of the Seven Stars of the Northern Dipper, Preached by the Buddha. This chapter attempts to trace out the early development of the Chinese Great Dipper tradition by examining the history of the Sūtra of the Great Dipper, the medieval Taoist sources that inspired this apocryphon, and materials from Dunhuang testifying to the Beidou cult.

The bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara decisively entered China at the end of the third century with the translation of the most widely revered Buddhist scripture in East Asia, the Sūtra of the Lotus Flower of the Wonderful Law, or Lotus Sūtra. Its twenty-fifth chapter, the “Universal Gateway of Guanshiyin” would have a particularly remarkable legacy, for in Avalokiteśvara, the Pumen pin introduced a new type of deity to Chinese religious life. The compassionate Guanyin was glorified not only as a universal savior but also as a readily accessible miracle worker rescuing persons in need from impending dangers or critical circumstances. This chapter suggests that the Tang work entitled the Marvelous Scripture of the Great Unity, the Savior from Suffering and Protector of Life can be seen as a Taoist transposition of the Lotus Sūtra’s Pumen pin, created to promote to the level of Guanyin one of the most prestigious deities of the Taoist pantheon, the Heavenly Venerable Savior from Suffering, the Jiuku tianzun.

The tradition of the Heavenly Kitchens concerns neither culinary art, nor, strictly speaking, Chinese food. The recipes that it advocates aim at a total abstinence from food through meditational practice. This chapter examines two texts that deal with Heavenly Kitchens: the Buddhist Sūtra of the Three Kitchens, Preached by the Buddha and the Taoist Scripture of the Five Kitchens. The Sūtra of the Three Kitchens, which was discovered among the Dunhuang manuscripts, has been qualified as apocryphal by the canonical bibliographies since the eighth century, but it might be more accurately labeled a forgery. The Scripture of the Five Kitchens, as well as additional Taoist sources explicitly denouncing its Buddhist misappropriation, suggests that, more than just a Taoist text rewrapped in Buddhist packaging, we have here an unmistakable case of Buddhist plagiarism. In all events, the double emergence, Buddhist and Taoist, of the scriptures of the Kitchens, together with the diffusion of the apocryphal Sūtra of the Three Kitchens at Dunhuang and its exportation to Japan toward the end of the eighth century demonstrates the popularity attained by the Method of the Heavenly Kitchens during the Tang dynasty.

This chapter examines the talismans found in the Sūtra to Increase the Account (Yisuan jing), which has been labeled an apocryphal, or “suspect” sūtra in Buddhist catalogues since the end of the seventh century. It has continued to be classified as such by specialists down to the present day. One of two Taoist Yisuan jing printed in the Ming Taoist Canon evidently served as the model for the Buddhist sūt tra, which replicates it almost to perfection. More than a classic apocryphon, therefore, the Sūtra to Increase the Account may be rightly described as an appropriation, even an outright copy of a Taoist work. The Taoist Yisuan jing and its Buddhist “clone” consist in essence of an invocation of the Generals of the Six jia, a list of the stars and planets, a litany for personal protection, and fifteen talismans. The aim of all of this is to assure the health and welfare of the faithful so that they may surely reach, without adversity, the full term of existence, whose optimal span is estimated at 120 years.