Buddhist Magic: Divination, Healing, and Enchantment through the Ages.

• Author: Mcgrath, William A.

Buddhist Magic: Divination, Healing, and Enchantment through the Ages. By SAM VAN SCHAIK. Boulder, CO: SHAMBHALA PUBLICATIONS, 2020. Pp. xiv + 226. $18.95.

The causal models of Victorian anthropology still haunt us today, despite generations of dissenting anthropologists, theologians, and historians. More specifically, the primitive position that magic occupies compared to modern science has inspired religious representatives and sometimes even scholars of religion to shift their emphasis away from magic and toward science. In the construction of Buddhist modernism, for example, practitioners have often promoted meditation instead of (other) ritual practices, and emphasized rational philosophy at the expense of belief in the supernatural. As scholars of Buddhist Studies continue to explore the narratives and ritual practices that modernists continue to abandon, multiple and seemingly incompatible Buddhist worlds emerge. It was from these conflicts between the revisionary world of Buddhist modernism and the accretive worlds of Buddhist history and anthropology that van Schaik's Buddhist Magic was born.

In his preface, Sam van Schaik playfully explains that his Buddhist Magic is a book about magic, but it is not a book of magic (p. ix). That being said, the primary inspiration for Buddhist Magic is itself a book of magic. IOL Tib J 401, the "ritual collection of Bikkru Pradnya Praba." is a unique Tibetan-language book of spells that was probably composed around the turn of the tenth century (p. 95) and then sealed in a cave at Dunhuang in the early eleventh. The work is a handwritten codex of miscellaneous spells and ritual instructions that van Schaik organized into nine sections: 1. Healing mind and body; 2. The Bhrkuti cycle; 3. The Garuda cycle; 4. The Avalokitesvara cycle; 5. Controlling the weather; 6. Clairvoyance, fortune-telling, and invisibility; 7. Curing disease in animals; 8. Pregnancy rituals; and 9. Final spells and prayer (pp. 9-10, 129). Particularly in light of its length (29 folios), terse descriptions, and archaic terminology. 1 would like to congratulate van Schaik on his skillful translation and thoughtful analysis of this work. He has shared with the world an otherwise understudied source that exemplifies the ritual practices of tenth-century Tibet and Central Asia. Future studies of the so-called "dark age" (ca. 850-950) in Tibet can now consult van Schaik's consummate translation of Bikkru Pradnya Praba's ritual...