The Evolution of Fifteen Demon-Deity Cult in Pre-Modern East Asia: Demonology, Childcare, and Cultural Integration

Abstract

This thesis examines the historical evolution and cross-cultural transmission of the cult of the Fifteen Demon-Deities (Bāla-grahā), a group of demonic goddesses associated with childbirth and pediatric affliction and protection in Buddhist traditions, across pre-modern East Asia. While prior scholarship has traced the cult’s Indian origins and its circulation in medieval Dunhuang and Central Asia, this study focuses on how these figures were represented, ritualized, and reinterpreted across Chinese and Japanese contexts textually and visually from the sixth to seventeenth centuries. In the first part, I offer a close philological analysis of five Chinese Buddhist scriptures that mention the fifteen demon-deities, demonstrating how changes in demon taxonomy and ritual prescriptions reflect shifting theological and social concerns. The second chapter investigates how the cult echoed with Chinese medical knowledge and was incorporated into Daoist frameworks, revealing a dynamic interplay between Buddhist demonology and indigenous concepts of spirit-affliction and ritualistic healing. The third section analyzes how late Ming literati in the Jiangnan region reinterpreted the cult through a moralized and introspective lens, emphasizing spiritual cultivation and ethical allegory over ritual performance. The final section examines the localization of the cult in medieval Japan, focusing on the Jūgodōji ritual and its adaptation in performative manuals. Through an interdisciplinary approach that weaves together Buddhist studies, medical history, Daoist cosmology, and religious visual culture, this thesis contributes to broader discussions of gender, demonology, and the adaptive resilience of religious traditions across cultural and historical boundaries.