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Book Notes: Meir Shahar, "Kings of Oxen and Horses"

Episode 11 • 1st February 2026 • The Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford • The Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford

[Prologue]

MILES OSGOOD: Welcome back to “The Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford” podcast. Come join us in the library.

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, flute and guitar]

In a farm shed in Guizhou Province, in rural southern China, there’s an unlikely tool to be found beside the plow and the baskets: a 33-page handwritten manual for the local Buddhist priest, titled The Ox King Ritual Petition.

The provenance of a manuscript like this one defies what we typically understand about the Buddhist clergy and its texts. Copied by local priests living among the laity and kept in private homes across Guizhou and Yunnan—or sold in the Beijing Panjiayuan, a flea market for antiques in the capital—these texts have been passed down through families of ritual masters. They reveal a lineage of rural priests who were not monastics, who did not shave their heads, and who evidently did not keep vows of celibacy.

Just as striking is the content of the manual itself. The ritual described here is not for the priest’s human neighbo rs, but for their beast of burden, the buffalo. Inside, praise and protection are devoted to the Ox King: a bovine deity residing in the Jetavana Garden, an incarnation of the Buddha Sākyamuni himself, reincarnated in turn into a sacred draft animal who must not be slaughtered. According to this manuscript, the living buffalo is nothing less than a bodhisattva.

MEIR SHAHAR: A bodhisattva is someone who, by definition, sacrifices themselves for others. And so then, it's so appropriate. You see how—how do I put it—how Buddhist theology was harnessed to express the peasant’s gratitude to the animal.

MILES OSGOOD: Today, in our second installment of “Book Notes,” we learn more about the cult worship of the Ox King and its equine counterpart, reading and discussing Meir Shahar’s Kings of Oxen and Horses: Draft Animals, Buddhism, and Chinese Rural Religion, published with Columbia University Press last year.

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, humming and guitar]

Meir Shahar is the Shoul N. Eisenberg Chair for East Asian Affairs at Tel Aviv University. A prolific writer, he is also the author of Crazy Ji: Chinese Religion and Popular Literature and The Shaolin Monastery: History, Religion, and the Chinese Martial Arts—both of which we will touch on in the conversation ahead. He’s also the author of Oedipal God: The Chinese Nezha and his Indian Origins, co-editor of volumes on Chinese gods and animals, and translator for introductory texts on Chinese religion and literature in Hebrew.

Shahar visited the Ho Center in April of twenty twenty-four, in the midst of writing the book at hand, to describe his field work in rural China and what it taught him about local Buddhist gods and rituals. We’ll start the conversation by touching on that talk, and we’ve included a link to its video in our show description if you want to see it for yourself.

For now, let’s open up Kings of Oxen and Horses.

[bell chime]

MILES OSGOOD: Hi, Meir. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. It's great to have you on the show.

MEIR SHAHAR: Thank you so much for having me.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, we're really excited about this and to talk about your new book, “Kings of Oxen and Horses,” especially because we saw a little bit of the genesis, or maybe the final stages, of you putting this book together when you visited The Ho Center in twenty twenty-four. And you know, when I looked back at that talk, and as I invite our viewers and listeners to do as well, I was struck first off by how you introduced the methodology of the work that you'd done behind this project. Because it wasn't just a matter, right, of going back through texts that had maybe been neglected. Well, it was, but we'll get into that in a second. But rather, you know, doing field work, being—being there in Southern China with a research team. And you showed these photographs of you and that team meeting Buddhist leaders, but not the kinds of Buddhist monastics we might expect: Buddhist leaders among the laity who were far from celibate, who had families, and who had their own collections of scriptures, were not relying on some grand library or some canon. So I just want to ask about that first, in terms of the background archival material, and field material of this project. Can you tell us where you went, who you met, and what you ultimately found?

MEIR SHAHAR: So, you are absolutely right. You got the gist of my lecture. Yes, you are right. Usually when people think about Buddhism, they think Buddhist monks. They think monks. But in fact, in rural China, we find another type of Buddhist cleric. In remote villages in South China, we find people who are married who have families, who do not shave their heads, and yet these people profess a Buddhist identity, and they make a living, or at least supplement their income from agricultural work...

MILES OSGOOD: Mm.

MEIR SHAHAR: ... as Buddhist ritualists. They conduct rituals on behalf of their rural neighbors, rituals for—to bless people, to bless animals, and also mortuary rituals, that is to say, saving the souls of departed people, the deceased. Now, from the perspective of Buddhist Studies, what is interesting about these people is that they attest to the presence of Buddhism even in the remotest communities. Even in the remotest rural areas, you will find the presence of Buddhism...

MILES OSGOOD: Mm.

MEIR SHAHAR: ... incarnated in these people. And they reveal to us the role that Buddhism plays in the lives of ordinary Chinese people. That is to say, of ordinary peasants. And the role is a liturgical role, as they perform rituals. There is a scholar in Hong Kong, Tam Wai Lun. He defines this as liturgical Buddhism: as this is not philosophy, this is not doctrine, this is not meditation; these are rituals. And because, you know, Chinese people like us, what do they want in life? (Miles laughs) They want to be happy, to be healthy, to have children, to have money. They hope that in the afterlife they won't suffer too much, and this is what these Buddhist priests take care of. This is what they are needed for. Now, what is interesting, and you mentioned this, is that they conduct the rituals in accordance with written manuscripts, manuscripts that have been transmitted from master to disciple over many generations, usually within the same families. Usually it is the father who transmitted the manuscripts to his son, yes, or to his nephew. And so, you know, even the humblest village priests possess an entire library of scriptures. They have dozens, sometimes hundreds of handwritten manuscripts, and they take them out of their—out of their tool sheds, you know? They lie there near their agricultural tools. So, it's a remarkable discovery. You arrive to a remote village, and there are manuscripts there. Now, the big question is, of course, how far back can we trace these manuscripts? The manuscripts have their dates, but these are the dates in which they were copied, not the dates in which they were originally written. So briefly, I would say that in my estimate, or as I see it, at least some elements in these scriptures—in these manuscripts that we find nowadays in remote Chinese villages—at least some elements in these manuscripts go all the way back to medieval China...

MILES OSGOOD: Mm.

MEIR SHAHAR: ... go all the way back 1,000 years, go all the way back to Dunhuang. So—but this is very, very interesting. For example, in these manuscripts, the buffalo, the ox is described as a god, a god who descended from heaven, sacrificed himself for the sake of the peasant. And this idea that the, the buffalo or the ox is a bodhisattva, is a Buddhist deity, is traceable all the way back to Dunhuang manuscripts. Now you've—I guess you ask me, how do I find these people, yes? (Miles laughs) How do we find them? And the answer is local contacts. Local contacts. If it were not for—I always tell my students, "You need to have Chinese friends. There's no other way." If it were not for my Chinese friends, my research would have been utterly impossible. So, the way it works usually is this. I have a friend. In recent years I've been working in Guizhou Province, which is a very poor and remote province in South China, and I have a friend called Hou Chong, who teaches at Shanghai Normal University. He's a renowned professor. He has students who teach in local schools in Guizhou, who teach in, you know, local colleges in Guizhou. So he asks his students to ask their students, who are natives of Guizhou, whether they happen to know a Buddhist ritual master, you know? And the student might say, "Oh, my uncle, I think my uncle is a Buddhist ritual master." And then the question is, would he agree to meet a foreign scholar, and would he agree to have his manuscripts scanned? I'm now managing a large project. I have graduate students, and we go there, and we scan these manuscripts. So by the time we arrive at the village, we are an entire delegation. There is me, there is Professor Hou Chong, there's his students, his students' students, my students, we come (as) a big group of people. We descend upon this ritual master, and we try to, you know, to work with him.

MILES OSGOOD: So I want to turn a little bit to the core of the project. So you mentioned just in passing that among all the other things that are maybe fascinating about this archive, finding texts that are specifically about an Ox King or an ox god. And so it just makes me want to ask, you know, as you were going through this, were you initially just interested in the ritual masters in and of themselves? Did you have in mind the idea that, “Oh, “I'm going to be looking at local deities specifically, and maybe agricultural deities?” Which came first?

MEIR SHAHAR: What came first, so, well, it's a convoluted story. What came first were actually the gods. I became interested in the Horse King, who protects donkeys and horses and mules, and the Ox King that protects oxen and buffaloes. I became interested in them, I guess, like, 10 years ago or something like that—also because of a textual discovery in a village that I can tell you about. discovery in a village that I can tell you about. discovery in a village that I can tell you about.

MILES OSGOOD: Mm-hmm.

MEIR SHAHAR: But this was a textual discovery in North China. And I can share it with you honestly. I gave a talk at Shanghai University about this Horse—this Horse King and Ox King, and then this Professor Hou Chong, who I just mentioned, he was in the audience, and he said, "Hey, do you know that there are such things as Ox King scriptures and Horse King scriptures in South China?" I said, "No, I had no idea." So he said, "Yes, there are such scriptures in Guizhou." So that's how my research turned to Guizhou, and then from these two specific gods, also more generally...

MILES OSGOOD: Mm-hmm.

MEIR SHAHAR: ... into the Buddhist ritual tradition in South China.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, so I just wanted to ask a little bit about sort of the construction of the book, then, because you—you divide it into these two discrete parts, where you're thinking about the Ox King and the Horse King. You know, at certain points, you're also thinking about—about other animals, about a fiery pig in a village festival, where we also think about, you know, taboos involving other animals. How do you decide to kind of play those two traditions off one another? Because part of your argument is that they are distinct. They have different origin points in terms of different Buddhist gods that they sort of descend from, or embody, or represent. They have different footholds in China, whether, you know, maybe more rural or more urban more south or more north. But you also seem to see the value of not just categorizing and separating, but having them occupy the same space in the same monograph. So could you tell us a little bit about both the selection process and the juxtaposition, and what that does for you? MEIR SHAHAR: Yeah. So thank you very much. I mean, thank you for reading the book so carefully. So... Okay, so I will go back to the—so there are two gods, you are right. There is the Horse King and the Ox King. Both of them, by the way, nowadays in China are largely forgotten, simply because their protégés are no longer in use.

MILES OSGOOD: Mm-hmm.

MEIR SHAHAR: People rely no more on horses to plow the field or buffaloes to plow the rice paddies. So people have no use for the animals,

and therefore the gods also became useless. But up until the nineteen fifties, up until the mechanization of agriculture in the mid—in the nineteen fifties, these two gods were amongst the most popular in China. I first became—and those gods, as you mentioned, both of them have Buddhist antecedents. Both of them descend—have Buddhist origins. The Horse King is a descendant of the horse-headed Avalokiteśvara, the horse-headed creature that came from India, the horse-headed Avalokiteśvara, or Guanyin in Chinese. And the Ox King is none other than the Buddha, the Buddha Śākyamuni, whose epitaph, “A bull of a man,” or “narārṣabha” in Sanskrit, was translated into Chinese as “Ox King.” So he's in fact the Buddha Śākyamuni. So both of them are animal-protecting deities. Both of them have Buddhist origins. But there are also differences between them. And one difference concerns state patronage or imperial patronage. So the Ox King was by and large a rural god worshiped by peasants. By contrast, the Horse King enjoyed the lavish support of the imperial Chinese state. And the reason is, of course, the enormous significance of the horse in pre-modern warfare. The imperial army—the cavalry was the backbone of the army. And the very lives of the cavalrymen depended upon the performance of their chargers in battle. And therefore, they all venerated the Horse King. So the Horse King was, in fact, a military god, was a military god. And beginning in the Ming period, that is to say in the, say, the 15th century, each and every military base in the Chinese empire featured a shrine for the Horse King. He was worshiped there alongside other military gods. The central god is called Guan Gong, he's a popular god, and other gods. So, this is one difference. The, the Horse King, was enjoyed—was in fact figured in state religion, whereas the Ox King was only an agricultural god. The other difference concerns, of course, the beef taboo.

MILES OSGOOD: Mm.

MEIR SHAHAR: The Ox King protected the animals, protected the oxen and the buffaloes not only from disease, but also from the very owners. That is to say, he made sure that their owners do not eat the animals. And as you know, if you ate beef, if you ate your ox, so of course, the appropriate punishment was to be born as an ox. So, those who ate beef were born as cattle, and it was the Horse—the Ox King, who made sure of that, of this punishment.

MILES OSGOOD: And as you point out, that's one of the—that’s one of the—then becomes part of the rationale for not eating beef going forward, right? That it might be a family member who is that cow, who is that ox. But then you also—you mentioned kind of the whole range of attitudes towards beef in Chinese religion. I mean, you've got, on the one hand, in Zhuangzi, Cook Ding being praised for being such a skillful butcher, and that having no problem whatsoever. On the other hand, there being really intense, terrifying karmic punishments for beef-eating that involve, you know, having to swallow caltrops and being torn apart from the inside as a sort of punishment.

MEIR SHAHAR: Yeah.

MILES OSGOOD: And then, and you know, and then you mention specifically, okay, well, we can understand this by—by way of saying, perhaps one version of karmic reincarnation is to be born as a field animal, as a cow or as an ox, as a result of beef-eating. But you also mentioned that the cow might be a god, right? And so you have these separate chapters where you think about “The Human Ox” case or “The Divine Ox” case. And so, you know, we're talking about various juxtapositions, the Horse God and the—and the Ox King, you know, or there's also this juxtaposition: of different ways of re—of reasoning why this animal should be protected. What is the comparative case, and how do specific practitioners or ritual masters, either choose between those two possibilities, or maintain both of them?

MEIR SHAHAR: I think that I always tell my students that when it comes to religion, you know—you know the human mind is very strange, as you know. Our mind is very strange. People can live with contradictions, yes? They don't try to solve. You don't try—I give you another example which is not related to the Ox King and the Horse King. I'm now reading texts—rituals for saving the souls of the dead. So, in China, there was this idea that after we die, all of us, we go down to the netherworld, and there are 10 kings, and they are judges, and they, you know, screen our life for us to see. They show us all the evil things that we did in our life. And in order to escape punishment, you have to—your kings, your remaining king, the kings—you have to make a sacrifice to these judges. Essentially, it's a bribe. They bribe the judges. So there are these elaborate rituals that are meant to help you in the netherworld to mitigate, yeah, or to redeem your sins. So, that's one thing. But on the other hand, there is also a belief that if before you die, you say the name of the Bodhisattva Amitābha, and you sort of concentrate, you really think about it, and you say, “Amitābha, Amitābha Buddha.” This in enough will atone for—this itself will atone for all your sins, and you will go straight to paradise. Now—now, the interesting thing, of course, is that people didn't rely only on this method or that method. They employed both. They didn't say, “Well, if I say ‘Amitābha,’ “then my relatives need not sacrifice to the kings of the netherworld.” They did both things. I don't know. So, you know, people don’t—they don't—they have no problem.

MILES OSGOOD: So we can understand—Yeah. We can understand them.

MEIR SHAHAR: They have no problem holding simultaneously to contradictory beliefs.

MILES OSGOOD: Mm.

MEIR SHAHAR: Yes? As long as it might be helpful to them.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

MEIR SHAHAR: Now, going back to the—to the Ox King, or to the conception of the ox, so it's true: Chinese literature, on the one hand—and in fact, when they say ox, what they think about is the buffalo. They think about the animal that was really the cornerstone of rice agriculture. They think about the buffalo that wades through the rice paddies. So, on the one hand, the buffalo is described in Chinese literature as human. You know, he's a human being. And on the other hand, he's described as a god who sacrificed himself for our sake. And both these conceptions, both these concepts of the buffalo, they mirror the gratitude of the peasant to his animal companion. That's how I see it. I wasn't aware of this before delving into—before going into this field, but the buffalo is apparently an incredible animal. You know, it can work for 30 or 40 years, meaning that a Chinese peasant, a Chinese rice farmer might have spent much of his own career toiling in the fields with the same animal, the same animal that he knew since childhood. So, you can imagine working together for 20 or 30 years, that the camaraderie emerged between the animal and its human master. They worked together in the fields. Yeah, I have a dog, yes. It's nothing like that. I don't work with it, but even the dog is part of the family.

MILES OSGOOD: Right.

MEIR SHAHAR: When we see—we think about it when we are planning a sabbatical for next year and our biggest worry is how to take the dog on the plane (Miles laughs) or how to—you know, it's like it's a member of the family. How much more so for a Chinese farmer who usually owned not more than one buffalo.

MILES OSGOOD: Mm-hmm.

MEIR SHAHAR: The buffalo was the—because they were very expensive, these animals.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

MEIR SHAHAR: So the animal was really the major—the principal asset, economic asset of the family.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

MEIR SHAHAR: So it was really, like, treated like a human. This is on the one hand.

MILES OSGOOD: Mm-hmm.

MEIR SHAHAR: And on the other hand, there is, of course—there emerged this beautiful legend that the animal is a god and a bodhisattva. The Buddhist term bodhisattva. And of course, for those of our listeners who are you know conversant with Buddhism, what is a bodhisattva? The very essence of a bodhisattva is self-sacrifice. A little bit like Jesus in Christianity.

MILES OSGOOD: Mm-hmm.

MEIR SHAHAR: Yes? A bodhisattva is someone who, by definition, sacrifices themselves for others. And so then, it's so appropriate. You see how—how do I put it—how Buddhist theology was harnessed to express the peasant's gratitude to the animal. So the animal was conceived of as a bodhisattva, a creature who descended from heaven for our sake, to help us plow the fields. He assumed animal form for our benefit. And because he's a god, then of course eating it is not only thankless, it is sacrilegious, it is a sin, a religious sin.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. Yeah, you can see. so much meaning laden onto this animal, along with the physical things that this animal has to bear, to be a family member, you know, an animal you grew up with, an animal you might well imagine as taking on family members past, a god who's doing the sacrificial work for you: all reasons to protect this animal from disease, to protect this animal from being slaughtered by nature of the debt that you have to it in the past, the need you have for it in the future. It makes sense. Well, in the—in the process of—of that beautiful description, you mention wonderful legends that surround these particular animals and that makes me want to ask you about a really just very enjoyable part of the book where, you know, throughout—throughout “Kings of Oxen and Horses,” you're talking about your personal adventures in kind of figuring out this story and finding these ritual masters. And that takes you from everywhere from using your network of friends, as you mentioned, to—to get into the notebooks of the Horse King Association in Shanxi Province, which is a great moment. Or in the epilogue, knocking on doors in France and Brittany to figure out how—how there is a French tradition of—of patron saints of horses and do a little bit of com—kind of comparative cultural work there. All of these are really lovely anecdotes. But the one that I thought I might ask you about is at the end of Part One where you talk about going to the Horse King Festival in Huanghuayu Village where you witness this elaborate performance in this remote agrarian community where we have—we—we have the story of maybe how—one story of how the Horse King came to be—came to be, came—and came to be deified and his alliance with a fiery pig god. And then in the final lines you say—and I can let you play out why this is. You know, I'll—I'll hand it over to you. But you say, "There's something here going on where village theater exhibits the anxieties of the scholarly elite," where we might think of those two separate worlds, and yet the dialogue that's happening in the shadow play actually totally speaks to doctrinal issues that were present to the recent empire. So tell us a little bit about that moment of epiphany and what you were watching and what went through your head.

MEIR SHAHAR: Yeah, thank you. I'm not sure it’s, you know, you know, a great discovery, but the thing is this: the funny thing about the Horse King—I'm trying to remember now this chapter that you asked me about. (Miles laughs) The funny thing is that the Horse King is called in Chinese “Ma Wang.” “Ma Wang” just means—“Ma” is “Horse” and “Wang” is “King.” But “Ma” in Chinese is also—happens to be a common surname of the Muslim minority. You know, there are many Muslim people in China and their surname, the Chinese surname, is usually “Ma.” So for this reason, over the centuries, the Buddhist origins of the Horse King were forgotten. This—this is my research. I discovered he has Buddhist origins but, you know, ordinary people forgot that he has Buddhist origins and instead people said that he's Muslim. It's a funny idea. The god is Muslim. So if the god is Muslim, so presumably he—he follows halal, you know? He follows—he follows Muslim kosher laws, and he doesn't eat pig. You know, like he can't consume pig. So this is in fact—this is a fact of the cult that all across China when they worship the Horse King they refrain from offering him pork. They offered him—when they offered meat, they offer lamb. But not pork.

Now—so now the play that you mentioned that I watched in that village—the play makes—the elaborate plot of the play has a pig, a kind of a fiery pig, a pig deity, assist the Horse King in his battles. Something like that. And then the play concludes with the comment that because the pig helped him, so the horse is grateful. Therefore, he shouldn't be offered pork in sacrifice. In other words, somehow, the play is a sort of scholarly attempt by the—by a Chinese scholar or writer to disassociate, to get rid of this folk belief that the god is Muslim.

MILES OSGOOD: Mm.

MEIR SHAHAR: Somehow, someone thought that this is sacrilegious, that this is ridiculous, that these are ignorant people and we should tell them better. So, “No, no, no. “Yes, you're not going to suffer for giving pork, but we will provide a different explanation.” And the play provides this explanation, the plot of the play.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, that's great. And I guess it just makes me wonder about your, you know, your methodology and your approach and, you know, going from this very particular field work and almost anthropological observational work to writing a monograph like this. What should be the dialogue between sort of rural practice and religious scholasticism? Like you're seeing a version of it in that play, but is this a way for you also to say, "We need to attend to the ways in which these doctrinal “issues which we think of as being the matter of kind of high “philosophy or sort of religious doctrine are also being played out in these other spheres?" And then that's a different way of understanding them? MEIR SHAHAR: Yes, yes, yes. And yeah, in a—yeah, absolutly yes. In fact, I will permit myself to say that from the very beginning of my career, I always—I always combined textual work with fieldwork. I always did it. I—I'm not—I'm not sure it's going to be of interest to your—to your audience—to our audience, but I did my PhD at Harvard many years ago under the guidance of a great scholar, Patrick Hanan, a scholar of Chinese literature, by the way, not of religion. A scholar of Chinese literature. And we were reading Chinese novels together. And well, my Chinese was not so great then, but—I'm not sure it's great now—but the teacher, Professor Hanan, was very generous, and he was a great scholar, by the way, Patrick—Patrick Hanan. And then after I remember, for example, we read a novel about a sort of a clownish Buddhist figure called the Ji Gong. Ji Gong or Ji Dian, which I later translated as Crazy Ji. He's a kind of a clownish monk who's also in fact a god in disguise. Anyway, so I read these novels at Harvard then I went to Taiwan to study Chinese, to improve my Chinese. And in Taiwan, I had Chinese friends and I told them about that I'm reading these novels or read these novels. And they told me, "You know, there are temples here he's worshiped. “There are temples in which this literary figure is worshiped as a god." And they took me to these temples, and they also introduced me to spirit mediums who are possessed by this god, are possessed—imagine it's as if you watch a Superman movie, and then you arrive somewhere, and it turns out that there are temples to Superman (Miles laughs) and are also people who are possessed by him, wear his uniform...

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

MEIR SHAHAR: ... and act his role. And act his role. So this was the discovery. So this was also my first book...

MILES OSGOOD: Right.

MEIR SHAHAR: ... titled “Crazy Ji: Chinese Religion and Popular Literature,” that is to say seeing the connection between literature and religion. But there are other examples. You know, it's always also very interesting how people understand ideas in ways that surprise you. I will give just one example...

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

MEIR SHAHAR: ... from the—from the realm of martial arts, of Chinese martial arts. There is in Buddhism, in Tantric Buddhism, there is a symbol of the diamond, the diamond. In Sanskrit it's “vajra,” “vajra,” which means “diamond,” and there is a god called Vajrapāṇi, who holds the diamond. And the diamond is a very important—this “vajra” is a very important symbol in a form of Buddhism called Tantric Buddhism...

MILES OSGOOD: Mm-hmm.

MEIR SHAHAR: ... or esoteric Buddhism. Now, what does it mean, this diamond? So I guess for—for a Buddhist philosopher, for highly educated Buddhist monks, it is a symbol of enlightenment, a symbol of Nirvana. It's the perfect knowledge. It's, you know, they take it as a symbol of what we are looking for: clarity, wisdom, enlightenment. You know, this is, you know, nirvana. This is the diamond.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

MEIR SHAHAR: But at the Shaolin Monastery, at the Shaolin Monastery—you might have heard about it. It's a center of the Chinese martial arts. At the Shaolin Monastery in China, they take it literally.

MILES OSGOOD: Mm-hmm.

MEIR SHAHAR: They think that if they practice the martial arts, they will obtain a diamond body.

MILES OSGOOD: Mm-hmm.

MEIR SHAHAR: They will obtain a body that is like a diamond, meaning a body that you can't—that is impenetrable...

MILES OSGOOD: Right.

MEIR SHAHAR: ... that it—that you can't—you will take—and this is a common act in Chinese martial arts. They come on stage, and they say, “Beat me." (Miles laughs) You know, "Beat me or stab me."

MILES OSGOOD: Right.

MEIR SHAHAR: "You know I can stand it. I can stand it." So—and they—the terminology they use is the terminology of the “vajra.” Now, of course, you know, not all of them take it so literally, but there is a clear connection.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

MEIR SHAHAR: There's a clear connection between the diamond as a mystical sort of a symbol of enlightenment and the diamond as the promise of an eternal body.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

MEIR SHAHAR: That I will practice, and I will get a body that will carry me to immortality. I will be invulnerable to disease, and I will also be invulnerable in battle...

MILES OSGOOD: Mm-hmm.

MEIR SHAHAR: ... in the battlefield.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

MEIR SHAHAR: So again, you know, you take it up, some symbol, but you understand it in a very concrete way and material way, yeah.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, that makes sense and it’s so germane to the current book and the argument that you've been making. That on the one hand, we can think of, you know, Ox Kings and Horse Kings as ethereal figures or figures from the ancient past, or as kind of symbolic conduits between an ancient Indian history and a contemporary or medieval Chinese history. But we also have to remember that these are beasts of burden and members of a living family and the lifeblood of work that happens in these worlds, so the literal matters as well.

MEIR SHAHAR: Yes.

MILES OSGOOD: You know, all this just makes—makes me wanna conclude by asking—and I'm sure my audience will be wondering this as well: where are you headed next? You mentioned you have a sabbatical coming. You know, presumably there's a project you've got. You’ve had all these fascinating travels that have led you to so many of, you know, curious discoveries already. What are you looking for now? MEIR SHAHAR: So, yeah. In fact we've been talking about this. We have already been talking about my coming project, which is... You know, in the book, “Kings of Oxen and Horses,” I discuss the kings of oxen and horses. It's not a book about the lay priesthood of South China. But I guess the lay priesthood of China, of South China, is going to be hopefully my next book. I'm leading this project now with the support of the Israel Science Foundation. I'm leading this project where we go, as I mentioned, to Chinese villages in Guizhou Province where we scan their writings. And we scanned already hundreds, many hundreds of scriptures.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

MEIR SHAHAR: So—and I have a team, and we hope to catalog them, perhaps put these scriptures online, so that people all over the world can read them, can read these scriptures. This would be one product, just a website where the scriptures are available...

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, wonderful.

MEIR SHAHAR: ... to other people. And perhaps I will also write a book about these people and their scriptures, perhaps. Who knows?

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. All right. Terrific. And can you—as this is an episode where we're sort of featuring recent books in Buddhist Studies—can I just also ask, are there things you're reading outside of these primary sources that you'd recommend, that you have on your own bookshelf?

MEIR SHAHAR: Yeah, I actually wrote the title of a book that I would like to mention. It's by—I don't know if you—she came up in your—in your interviews or in your book series: Susan Huang, Shih-shan Susan Huang. She teaches at, I think at Rice University, and she's a historian of Chinese art originally. But—but she wrote—first, she wrote a fantastic= book already, I guess, 10 years ago about Daoist art. It's called “Picturing the True Form.” “Picturing the True Form” because in Daoist art they sort of strive to find the true form of things. And for example, instead of going on a pilgrimage to a mountain, if the artist can paint the true form of the mountain, then you can visit it from your office. You can have the painting in your office. You don't have to go on a pilgrimage. So she wrote a book about Daoist art which is really about—a book about Daoism, and now she just completed an enormous book called “The Dynamic Spread of Buddhist Print Culture: Mapping Buddhist Book Roads in China and Its Neighbors.” It's an amazing book. First of all, it’s incredibly long. It's 1,000 pages.

MILES OSGOOD: Mm-hmm.

MEIR SHAHAR: And she starts by examining how illustrated—illustrations from Buddhist books traveled all across Asia. And then she goes on to describe—to discuss how books traveled and how publishing centers—Buddhist publishing centers emerged across Asia. So, it's a magnificent book, both in terms of Buddhism and in terms of print culture and in terms of international relations all across Asia through Buddhism.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

MEIR SHAHAR: I highly recommend it, by Susan Huang.

MILES OSGOOD: That's great. Thank you so much. And then, yeah, nice to have the recommendation and to have things in mind for, you know, yeah future guests and future episodes as you've suggested there. And to have something that is itself, you know, in an episode about books in Buddhist Studies, about Buddhists—about historical Buddhist print culture. So a very appropriate note to end on. Well thanks so much, Meir, for doing this, for talking to us, for sharing your work. You know, we'll be recommending your book to our readers, and and we hope to see you around The Ho Center for Buddhist Studies again some time for a talk on a future project.

MEIR SHAHAR: Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.

[Epilogue]

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, guitar and flute]

Thanks again to Meir Shahar for joining the show and talking about his work. You can get a copy of the book, Kings of Oxen and Horses, from the Columbia University Press website at cup.columbia.edu.

If you’d like to see images of Shahar’s research team with a rural priest, or a few of the Ox King ritual manuscripts, or illustrated punishments for beef-eaters, take a look at the video version of this interview on our YouTube channel.

As we sign off, here as always is Ani Choying Drolma performing at Stanford in twenty seventeen. Thanks for listening.

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, singing]

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11. Book Notes: Meir Shahar, "Kings of Oxen and Horses"