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Confluences of Medicine in Medieval Japan: Buddhist Healing, Chinese Knowledge, Islamic Formulas, and Wounds of War (review)

Published by the Harvard-Yenching Institute HJAS 72.2 (2012): 402–407 follows this thread nor provides more details on the social functions of local or imperial ancestral shrines. Instead, he returns to his original metaphor of the tree as a symbol of both historical knowledge and the firmly built, well-maintained ancestral shrine (as represented in poetry and depicted in tomb art). Brashier prefers to explore the “hard-to-describe aesthetic, emotive moments” experienced by the descendant or sacrificer inside the shrine (p. 333) instead of actual surviving religious sites. Just as he unpacks the metaphors of light and darkness, he ends his book with an analysis of the multivalent nature of uncertainty. This leads him to a discussion of Han questions about sentience and the relationship of the body to the soul(s), man, and nature (p. 340). The only counter to doubt, he notes, was a well-defined religious practice and regular ritual performances (pp. 342–43). Brashier’s text is full of insights artfully interwoven throughout a book that transports us from court politics into the heart of an individual performing sacrifices to his ancestor. Yet, he never lets go of the thread of doubt. He warns us about the unreliability of evidence while also making brilliant use of it. In the end, he has provided us with the most sophisticated analysis to date of an ancient Chinese mortuary system.