Mibu Shamanism and the Early Chinese Wu: Cross-Cultural Parallels in Ritual Expertise and Spirit Mediation

Abstract

This article examines shared ritual features between the Mibu shamanism of the Mising tribe of Assam, Northeast India, and the early Chinese wu tradition, particularly in its pre-Han and proto-Daoist expressions. The comparison does not assume historical contact between the two traditions. It instead asks what can be learned when two unrelated bodies of evidence are read side by side, with full attention to their different archives, settings, and limits. Both the Mising Mibu and the early Chinese wu function as specialist intermediaries between human communities and spirit worlds, deploy oral performative traditions as primary therapeutic instruments, use plant and material substances with dual ritual-medicinal efficacy, and are characterized by cosmological systems in which illness represents a disruption of relational order. The article argues more cautiously that these shared patterns can help Daoist studies by clarifying the ritual grammar that early Daoist sources inherited, transformed, and sometimes theorized against. The Mising case is useful here because it keeps the comparison grounded in lived practice rather than in later reconstruction alone. The Mising case, drawn from ethnographic and ethnobotanical scholarship, provides a productive comparative lens for revisiting questions about the place of the wu in early Chinese religious history and the ongoing significance of shamanic logic in Daoist healing traditions...