Epidemics and plague in premodern Chinese Buddhism

Abstract

Buddhist scriptures describe the rise of epidemics as a cosmological inevitability and prescribe a variety of methods for preventing and treating epidemic diseases, which focus mainly on purifying negative karma and exorcizing the supernatural beings responsible for their spread. As these ideas were transmitted to China, Chinese Buddhists assimilated them to indigenous beliefs that also portrayed epidemics as retribution for nonvirtuous behavior, enacted by ghostly agents.