Spells, Images, and Mandatas: Tracing the Evolution of Esoteric Buddhist Rituals.

• Author: Copp, Paul
• Position: Book review

Spells, Images, and Mandatas: Tracing the Evolution of Esoteric Buddhist Rituals. By KOICHI SHINOHARA. The Sheng Yen Series in Chinese Buddhist Studies. New York: COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY Press, 2014. Pp. xxii + 324. $55.

The Buddhist practices and traditions known as "Esoteric" or "Tantric" have, over the last fifteen years or so, become one of the most vital areas of inquiry in studies of the Buddhist histories of India, China, and Japan (leaving aside Tibet, where their study has been central much longer). This era was in some ways inaugurated by two landmark studies: first, Michel Strickmann's posthumously published 1996 book, Mantras et mandarins: Le Bouddhisme tantrique en Chine, and then Ryuichi Abe's 2000 study, The Weaving of Mantra: Kukai and the Construction of Esoteric Buddhist Discourse. But I think it is fair to say that it was the year 2002 that marked its true watershed. That year saw the publication not only of Ronald Davidson's Indian Esoteric Buddhism: A Social History of the Tantric Movement, a work that set the field on much firmer foundations than it had been before, but also Robert Sharf's Coming to Terms with Chinese Buddhism and its polemical appendix, "On Esoteric Buddhism in China," which set off a small but intense (and fruitful) argument in the field about the status of this "tradition" in premodern China, carried out in articles and conference panels. Since then the field has further solidified through a number of works, most notably Christian Wedemeyer's Making Sense of Tantric Buddhism: History, Semiology, and Transgression in the Indian Traditions, and in numerous articles by Robert Gimello, as well as in the chapters of the recent volume Esoteric Buddhism and the Tantras in East Asia, edited by Charles Orzech, Henrik Sorensen, and Richard Payne (but also, and importantly, in a range of recently completed doctoral dissertations that should soon see the lights of revision and publication).

Koichi Shinohara's book Spells, Images, and Mandatas: Tracing the Evolution of Esoteric Buddhist Rituals marks a welcome new stage in this field. It changes the subject, slightly, and thereby deepens it, considerably. Whereas previous studies have tended to examine the nature and history of Esoteric Buddhist traditions in a sense from the outside in--the shapes its elites have asserted for it, for example, or the terms by which it should be known and understood--Shinohara seeks, as he says, to "shift the focus from the terms...