Pregnancy, Incantations, and Talismans in Early Medieval Japan: Chinese Influences on the Ritual Activities of Court Physicians

Alessandro Poletto

doi:10.3390/rel12110907

Abstract

Court physicians (ishi or kusushi 医師), officials in the Bureau of Medications, were responsible for the well-being of court aristocracy since the establishment of a centralized state on the Japanese archipelago in the eighth century. Despite an increasing interest in the therapeutic arena of premodern Japan, scholars have tended to emphasize an epistemic divide between physicians and technicians employing other healing modalities, such as Buddhist monks and onmyōji 陰陽師, so that the former would be concerned with the physical body while the latter would not. However, this study focuses on the ritual and hemerological dimensions of the activities of court physicians within the crucial context of pregnancy and childbirth. By the twelfth century, court physicians affixed land-leasing talismans (shakuchimon 借地文) in the birthing room, pacified the birthing bed through incantations, and partook in the adjudication of a pregnancy-related hemerological notion known as hanshi (Ch: fanzhi). These practices appear in Ishinpō 医心方, which is a compendium of Chinese classics on therapeutics, hygiene, divination, and ritual that was compiled by Tanba no Yasuyori and presented to the court in 984. Ishinpō incorporates elements from multiple continental traditions, and some of the ritual practices discussed in this paper have at times been framed as “Daoist”. Since Daoist texts and institutions were never systematically brought or established in Japan, this study will rather stress the necessity of examining how Chinese textual traditions and ritual regimes were transmitted and distributed among institutions and technical groups within the Japanese state, in particular physicians from the Bureau of Medications and onmyōji from the Bureau of Yin and Yang.

Highlights

Once the birthing area had been freed from the presence of deities who may abhor the defilement engendered by childbirth and its foul fluids through the use of land-leasing talismans, and once, after labor, hemerological adjudications had been made on the applicability of hanshi to the expected month and day of birth, it was time to and materially set up the birthing room, which consisted of mats surrounded by layers of folding scrolls, bamboo scrolls, and curtains
We have seen that the talismanic land lease of shakuchimon and the hemerological adjudications on hanshi were to some extent disputed—shakuchimon appears in a handful of onmyōdō texts, onmyōji do not appear, on the ground, to have been involved in its enactment; while in the case of hanshi, there was a shift from onmyōji to physicians in its handling, and hanshi appears in most major onmyōdō manuals and compilations throughout the medieval period
There are more episodes that could have been discussed in order to highlight the ritual dimension of the activities court physicians but for the sake of space, these had to be left out on this occasion: within the context of pregnancy, one sees physicians handling materia medica that is, not used for its medicinal properties, but rather as an apotropaic object that is empowered through kaji 加持, a Buddhist rite;35 or handing apotropaic objects to the expecting woman in case of difficult delivery (Katsuura 2008, p. 19)

Summary

Introduction

Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. I will focus my attention on three moments: shakuchi(no)hō or shakuchimon (land-leasing incantation or talisman; the two terms are used interchangeably in sources), a ritual carried out on the first day of the due month; the setting up of the birthing bed once the woman had entered labor and delivery was deemed imminent (we have seen examples of both above); and the adjudication on the hemerological notion of hanshi 反支 ( read henshi; Ch: fanzhi), or “reverse branch” These three moments are, as I mentioned, attested in numerous court journals from the early medieval period. It is in a sense similar to that defined by Salguero that I use the concept of ijutsu in this paper.

The Context of Pregnancy

Talismanic Land Leases: shakuchimon

Setting Up the Birthing Mat

Conclusions