Materia Medica in Chinese Religious Sources: Towards a Critical Digital Philology for Modelling Knowledge Distribution in Early Chinese Texts

The circulation of medical knowledge extends far beyond recognized "medical" fields in all cultures, but can be difficult to trace outside of canonical sources. This paper models the distribution of medical knowledge in Buddhist, Daoist and medical source from the early medieval period (Six Dynasties-up to the year 589) by charting the distribution of materia medica terminology. Surviving Shangqing Daoist records appear to contain the most materia medica vocabulary, and indicate the relatively higher use of drugs within the sect. The paper argues that such search results and visualisations constitute "qualified historical hypotheses" about the distribution of medical knowledge across religious sects in the period, and the relative saturation of medical knowledge in each genre of writing and sect. It details how search results for the terms are grounded in philologically rich meta-data about the textual corpora. The paper describes how, using post-search classification, a key function of DocuSky's TermStats Tools, how search results were produced using the enriched metadata, and then further refined to generate a readable graph and reliable statistics. These refinements are the "qualifications" of the hypothesis, and the analysis of how they impact the search results constitute what the paper refers to as a "critical digital philology." The digital visualisations of DocuSky outputs allows researchers to model the distribution of knowledge and generate new research questions. Greater accuracy can be produced through semi-automatic markup and synonymy tables, i.e. name authority databases. The authors describe their current processes for producing a synonymy for Chinese materia medica, to account for the use of alternate names for specific materia medica. The relevant open access databases, metadata, term lists and name authority tables for the study of medicine across Daoist Buddhist and medical sources that the authors have published are all hyper-linked from the paper. The hypotheses of the paper can thus be reproduced, and the paper constitutes a full working model and datasets for the development of similar projects.