Introduction—Asian Religions in the Covidian Age

Bacteria, viruses, ghosts, holy spirits.A number of invisible entities trespass and spill from nonhuman to human, betraying the precariousness and porousness of the boundaries separating them.The Covidian age has made us more aware of and yet also skeptical about such boundaries, as zoonotic diseases jump from animal to human, from human to human, and across international borders.Relations of "pandemicity" (Richardson 2020)-the social relationship of contagion across humankind and other species-have unsettled the purportedly discrete and self-contained individual, as they act at a global, interconnected, and interbodily scale.For scholars of religion, relations of pandemicity affect/infect not only humans and nonhuman animals but also a wide range of other-thanhuman beings that participate in the cosmos-be it ancestral spirits, sacred plants, immanent energies, or supernatural monotheistic gods.Asian communities have mobilized diverse cultural tropes, narratives, and artifacts, including their repertoires of gods and demons, to make sense of the Covid pandemic. 2A painting by the Bangladeshi artist Shambhu Acharya, discussed in the first essay of this volume and reproduced on the book cover, represents the slaying of the Corona demon (coronasurer bodh).The virus is here portrayed as a mythological villain, an embodiment of evil featuring the traditional iconographic traits of Indic demons: long fangs, sharp claws, bull-like horns, bulging eyeballs, and a remarkable mustache.The arrows that pierce the virus-demon bear the names of the weapons that Bangladeshi citizens have wielded to counter the disease, including Dettol soap, vitamin C, cardamom, cinnamon, holy basil leaves, face masks, and hand gloves.Some of the other arrows suggest Bengali culture, courage, dharma, and love for one's nation as antidotes to the virus-demon.This arsenal emblematically reflects the eclectic ways in which Asian communities have deployed various kinds of knowledge and authority to understand the coronavirus: their theologies, indigenous medicines, ethical values, biomedical narratives, but also nationalist sentiments.The values evoked in this artwork establish boundaries of exclusion and enclosure.The

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