Introduction

Summary

This book is a unique transdisciplinary study on animals and plants in medieval Chinese religions and science, especially in today’s critical era of environmental crisis. In recent years, environment historians have written intensively on China. Yet, the study of animals and plants in medieval China was less developed, not much about the role of religions, more precisely. This book aims to bridge the gaps between religious studies and environmental studies, the history of science and religious studies, and animal studies and plant studies. It examines the biological, cultural, and spiritual encounters of animals and plants with humans in the medieval period through the analysis of changing roles and images of animals and plants in the historical, psychological, and imaginative experiences of human life, which are often overlooked in conventional scholarship.

This book can be viewed as a sibling of my recent book, In the Land of Tigers and Snakes: Living with Animals in Medieval Chinese Religions (New York: Columbia University Press, 2023), and its discussions move beyond animals to cover plants. This new book will look at how religious agents responded to the challenges of animals and plants as material culture in the mundane world. It will also look at how religious writers developed their various discourses about animals and plants from state ideology, and how the spiritual and natural worlds mutually enriched each other in China’s medieval world. In particular, this book aims to analyze ordering nature and supernature in medieval China. This study has benefited tremendously from many historians of Chinese science and technology, such as Joseph Needham, Ho Peng Yoke, Nathan Sivin, and others on science and religions in China, and Berthold Laufer and Edward H. Schafer on plants and animals and material culture in medieval China along the Silk Road. In the meantime, this study attempts to raise new questions with the rise of animal and plant studies in contemporary scholarship. Many other readers in the domains of history of science and technology, Chinese history, Chinese literary culture, Chinese ideas and religions, animal studies, and material culture, in general, might find some interesting themes in my discussion.