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This article investigates the origin and the earliest, formative period of one of the major concepts in post-classical Chinese medicine, the concept of phlegm, tan 痰. It is the first study that examines both Chinese- and Sanskrit-language sources in seeking to answer the question whether the development of the concept of phlegm in Chinese medicine is owed to Indic influences. Following traditional Chinese scholarship, it argues that the initial emergence of the substance tan 痰, which later was to become “phlegm,” should be understood as an indigenous development from the fluid yin 飲. The subsequent formation and development of the concept of phlegm in Chinese medicine, however, was influenced by Āyurveda. The influence hinges on the coincidence of Indic and Chinese intuitions about digestion. Previous scholarship on early Chinese Buddhist translations of Indic terms for phlegm and the tridoṣa has either claimed that variations in the terminology betrayed the Chinese translators’ poor understanding of Āyurvedic concepts or that the translators creatively manipulated the terminology with a view to the cultural background of their intended audiences. By contrast, this article argues that the early terminology the Chinese translators crafted was highly accurate and faithful to their Indic source texts. It shows, by going back to the Indic classics, that the variations in Chinese terminology reflect an ancient and long-forgotten temporal shift in the perception of humors in India itself.

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Mount Wutai: Visions of a Sacred Buddhist Mountain is a richly detailed and beautifully illustrated study of mid and late Qing representations of Wutai shan 五台山, a sacred mountain range in presentday Shanxi province, that has been venerated as the earthly abode of the bodhisattva Mañjuśrī since around the fifth century CE. Key for the transferral of Buddhism from India to China, and visited by pilgrims from all of East and Central Asia, Wutai shan has always been a meeting place for different cultures on Chinese soil. Yet it was not until the Qing dynasty that the mountain became "China's Tibet" (p. 7). The lavish patronage of the Qing emperors, Tibetan religious dignitaries, and countless Inner Asian Buddhists not only transformed the mountain into a flourishing center of Tibetan Buddhism, but also spurred the production of countless culturally hybrid artistic and literary reinventions of the site.Chou's study focuses squarely on these reinventions of Wutai shan. She argues that they are best understood as objects of translation. By this she means that they render Chinese accounts of Mañjuśrī's miraculous emanations at the mountain in the visual, literary, and religious languages of Mongolia and Tibet; they reimagine Wutai shan in terms of the tantric cosmology of Tibetan Buddhism; and they transfer the presence of Mañjuśrī from the mountain to artfully constructed simulacra in the capital of Beijing and the persona of the emperor himself. They are, in Chou's words, "permeable con ception[s] of the mountain" (p. 10)-objects that simultaneously speak in many visual idioms, and incorporate multiple perspectives and vantage points. Mount Wutai is not, strictly speaking, a book "about" a mountain, but rather about a set of objects that refer to and "translate" it.In the first chapter, "Imperial Replicas," Chou traces the translations of multiple replicas of Wutai monasteries and copies of a famous statue of Mañjuśrī housed in Wutai's Shuxiang temple 殊像寺. The Qianlong Emperor 乾隆帝 (1711-1799) commissioned these in order to transfer the presence of Mañjuśrī from the mountain to the imperial sum mer residence and the capital. During the process, an important court artist, Ding Guan peng 丁觀鵬 (fl. 18th century), created a replica of the Mañjuśrī statue as a painting, and a second, "perfected" copy of the replica. This perfected copy seems to depict Qianlong as an emanation of the bodhisattva Mañjuśrī, adding another genre of Qianlong-as-Mañjuśrī images to the famous series of thangkas that David Farquhar introduced to us in 1978. 1