Abstract

The great majority of the Chinese population depended on religious ritual, which often incorporated materia medica, for its health care. Of the therapeutic rituals available, those of popular religion—popular in the sense of participation by all social strata—were most accessible. Its priests were usually neighbors, farmers or craftsmen who performed their liturgical duties as they were needed, often qualified by their ability to be possessed by spirits. Here too the government shaped popular religion, partly by registering temples whose deities its functionaries judged morally orthodox and effective, and in part by periodically persecuting those it did not register. People at every level of society believed that the gods were a bureaucracy, which supervised the operations of sky and earth. Laymen measured the efficacy of individual deities by their ability to meet people’s needs, the curing of ailments prominent among them. The gods enforced conventional morality, rewarding what the community valued and preventing or punishing what it feared. This chapter studies popular ritual therapies, examines their role in curing medical disorders, and explains why and how many medical authors adapted them