Natural Miracles

Summary

Is my dad's healing real, and if it is, how do I make sense of it without simply translating it into mainstream medicine's terms? 

In this third episode, Kin recounts his father's most striking healing feats — restoring his grandmother's face after a paralyzing stroke, dissolving a neighbor's decades-old tumor, and developing an involuntary "sixth sense" that guides his hands to heal — and wrestles with how to understand them as a scholar of religion trained to be skeptical of both mainstream and religious explanations. Kin argues that his father's healings might best be understood not through translation into biomedical terms but through code-switching — holding qi, karma, and biomedicine as parallel languages rather than collapsing one into the other — setting up the next episode's turn to the placebo effect and what it reveals about the shaky boundary between mind and body.

See also:

• Cheung, K. “Miracle as Natural: A Contemporary Chinese American Religious Healer.” In Miracles: An Exercise in Comparative Philosophy of Religion, edited by Karen R. Zwier, David L. Weddle, and Timothy D. Knepper. Comparative Philosophy of Religion Series 3, 131-154. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2022.
• Klass, Morton (1995) - Ordered Universes: Approaches To The Anthropology Of Religion
• Sered, S. (2003). Afterword: Lexicons of the supernatural. Anthropological Forum, 13(2), 213–218.
• Campany, R. F. (2012). Signs from the unseen realm: Buddhist miracle tales from early Medieval China. University of Hawaiʻi Press.
• Kim 1999 - “The Racial Triangulation of Asian Americans”

Dr. Kin Cheung is Priscilla Payne Hurd Chair in the Arts and Humanities and Associate Professor of East and South Asian Religions at Moravian University, where he chairs the Religion and Society Department and Philosophy Department. His research investigates how contemporary agents use Buddhist doctrine and ritual practices in Chinese and American contexts as well as transnational networks. Topics include Buddhists in relationship with healing, meditation, ethical dilemmas, economics, capitalism, secularism, whiteness, masculinity, science, and technology. He is editor of Teaching Asia during a Resurgence of Anti-Asian Racism  (Association for Asian Studies, 2024) and co-editor of Buddhism and Healing in the Modern World  (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2024). 

Find Dr. Cheung at moravian.academia.edu/KinCheung and on X: x.com/ProfKinCheung  

Read his latest (open-access) article "A Chinese American Node of Healing: Taiji, Acupuncture, Qigong, and Buddhist Medical Arts" published in Transnational Asia here: transnationalasia.rice.edu/index.php/ta/article/view/127.

Brought to you by Axis Mundi Media, Between Qi and Science is a limited series from the Institute for Religion, Media, and Civic Engagement (IRMCE), in collaboration with the Asian Pacific American Religions Research Initiative (APARRI) through generous funding from the Henry Luce Foundation as part of the Under Gods project. 

Host: Dr. Kin Cheung

Executive Producer: Dr. Bradley Onishi

Producer: Andrew Gill

Original Music, Scoring, and Engineering: Scott Okamoto

Story Editor: Dr. Leah Payne

Production Assistance: Kari Onishi

Cover Art: Eric Zwierzynski