Nightmare-Touch: Visualizing Disease Demons in Tendai Buddhist Medical Manuscripts

Abstract

In this paper, I discuss the integration of visual narrative tropes within illustrations of disease-demons produced by Buddhist monks in medieval Japan. In particular, I examine On the Types of Corpse-vector Disease (Denshibyō shu no koto), a ritual and medical manuscript crafted by Tendai monks around the year 1300. Although On the Types has remained entirely unknown in research on art history, medical history, and Buddhism in Japan, this work made an outsized contribution in medieval Japan to the iconography of illness, supplying what would thereafter become the template for graphically representing demonic pathogens. What made On the Types so influential, I argue, was how its compilers depicted scenes of pathogenic horror inspired by narrative: the harrowing moment when disease-demons assault their human victims and induce a fatal affliction. This innovative strategy, I demonstrate, cannot be understood through genealogies of ritual and medical texts alone, but must be situated within the currents of narrative visual culture in medieval Japan, animated as they were with stories of encounters with recent epidemics.

Publication Date

5-21-2026

Department

East Asian Studies

Additional Department

Religion

Document Type

Other

Notes

Included in Panel 2. Buddhist Diagnostics.

Language

English

Format

text

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