For thousands of years in China, silk producers have developed ritual technologies and pantheons of deities intended to ensure healthy silkworms and abundant silk crops. Buddhist rites and deities have likewise long served the commercial interests of Chinese religionists, but so far we have little understanding of the relationships between the Buddhist institution and the ubiquitous sericulture industry. This essay represents the initial stages of a larger effort to investigate these relationships in premodern China. Here I examine a specific instance in which Buddhism was promoted as integral to silk production—as the true origin of the sericulture process, as the proper moral and soteriological framework within which to understand silkworm rearing (and killing), and as the ritual tradition most efficacious for sericulturists. These claims were advanced in medieval Chinese sources depicting the ancient Indian Buddhist patriarch Aśvaghoṣa as a local god of silk. Through this figure in particular, whose equine associations linked him with age-old Chinese silkworm myths, Buddhist authors aimed to transform sericulture into an ancient Indian innovation that was fully accordant with traditional Buddhist norms and thus best served by the Chinese Buddhist institution.
