This edited volume presents the latest research on the intersection of religion and medicine in Asia. It features chapters by internationally known scholars, who bring to bear a range of methodological and geographic expertise on this topic. The book's central question is to what extent 'religion' and 'medicine' have overlapped or interrelated in various Asian societies. Collectively, the contributions explore a number of related issues, such as: which societies separated out religious from medical concerns, at which times and in what ways? Where have medicine and religion converged, and how has such knowledge been defined by scholars and cultural actors? Are 'religion' and 'medicine' the best terms by which scholars can grapple with knowledge about the sacred and the self, destiny and disease?

Foreword by Dagmar Schäfer
Acknowledgements
Introduction Michael Stanley-Baker

Part I East Asia
1 Religion and health care in middle-period China
Nathan Sivin
2 Religion and medicine in pre-modern Japan
Katja Triplett
3 Female alchemy in late imperial and modern China
Elena Valussi

Part II South Asia
4 Religion and medicine in Sanskrit literature: the Ramaya?a and the politics of an epic plant
Anthony Cerulli
5 From 'medical men' to 'local health traditions': the secularisation of medicine in portrayals of health care in India
Helen Lambert
6 Sound medicine: towards a nomadology of medical mantras in seventeenth to twentieth-century Bengal
Projit Bihari Mukharji

Part III Himalayas, Southeast Asia
7 Sowa Rigpa, Tibetan medicine, Tibetan healing
Geoffrey Samuel
8 Homeopathy and Islam in Malaysia: Encounters of religion and complementary medical traditions in a modern Asian multi-ethnic society
Constantin Canavas
9 Questioning the boundaries between medicine and religion in contemporary Myanmar
Céline Coderey

Index