ABSTRACT
This chapter compares the overlapping goals of classical Chinese medicine and practices used by Daoists for health, longevity and transcendence: namely, to prevent disease, ensure long life and stave off death. It argues that the conditions at the end of the Han dynasty influenced the emergence of the Daoist religion, as it first took shape in an institutionalised form, to produce a distinctively medicalised imagination of the workings of the cosmos and individual destiny. With no single solution to the complex problem of political and military chaos, famine and widespread epidemics of that time, Daoists produced composite ritual programmes that responded to the total situation. It was also from this period that religion and healing began to emerge as co-related, but increasingly distinct, domains of knowledge.
