Disease, Defilement, and the Dead: Buddhist Medicine and the Emergence of Corpse-Vector Disease

Although scholars have long taken for granted the notion that disease constituted a form of defilement in ancient and medieval Japan, to date this has only been shown to be true for a single case—leprosy. In this article, I propose that corpse-vector disease—a contagious and deadly affliction that first became known to aristocrats and Buddhist monks in the late Heian period—constituted another case of disease tied to defilement. Examining diary entries describing the illnesses of elite patients together with the texts for a healing ritual created to eradicate the demons responsible for the affliction, I trace the emergence of corpse-vector disease to pervasive anxieties over death defilement in a capital overflowing with dead bodies. In so doing, I suggest one way we might move beyond the existing assumption of a categorical relationship between pathology and pollution in order to better understand why and how certain diseases came to be entangled with defilement at particular moments in history.