12 + Health, Illness, and the Body in Buddhist and Daoist Self-Cultivation Joshua Capitanio I n this chapter, I seek to explore the role that concepts of health and illness played in the religious conceptions of the body held by medi- eval Chinese Buddhists and Daoists. I will argue that, though Buddhist and Daoist views of the body are often strongly contrasted (in medieval China as well as modem scholarship), both traditions display similarly ambivalent attitudes that carry certain implications for religious practice. My analysis will focus on the writings of the Daoist priest Sima Cheng- zhen (647-735) and the Buddhist monk Tiantai Zhiyi (538--597), both of whom devoted significant space in their works on self- cultivation to detailed discussions of illness and healing. In analyzing these authors' writings, I treat the medical concepts pre- sented therein as religious knowledge. States of health and illness, when discussed in the context of religious practice, are religiously significant- that is, they signify religious realities. Thus, rather than treat statements about medicine in religious literature simply in terms of their descriptive functions, I will instead consider the prescriptive, normative role that med- ical knowledge serves when deployed in religious discourse. From such a standpoint, discourses on sickness and treatment can be seen as religious "technologies of the self," which "permit individuals to effect by their own means, or with the help of others, a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, pu- rity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality" (Foucault 1997, 225). Regardless of their status as objective realities, "health" and "illness" are also highly 181