The Body Incantatory: Spells and the Ritual Imagination in Medieval Chinese Buddhism.

• Author: McBride, Richard D., II
• Position: Book review

The Body Incantatory: Spells and the Ritual Imagination in Medieval Chinese Buddhism. By PAUL Copp. Sheng Yan Series in Chinese Buddhist Studies. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Pp. xxx + 363. $55 (cloth).

In The Body Incantatory Paul Copp advances a bold approach to understanding the significance of spell literature and spell procedures (dharanis and mantras) in medieval Chinese Buddhism. It comprises several lively and stimulating assertions that should motivate vigorous debate among scholars in the field of East Asian Buddhism. The monograph introduces a prodigious amount of material evidence for the popularity of the two dharanis that are the primary foci of his research: the Incantation of Wish Fulfillment (Mahapratisara dharani) and the Incantation of the Glory of the Buddha's Crown (Usnlsavijana dharanl). Unlike Koichi Shinohara's Spells, Images, and Mandatas: Tracing the Evolution of Esoteric Buddhist Rituals (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2014), another recently published book in the same series, which advances a theory on the development of dharani literature and ritual practices from within the canonical approach to East Asian Buddhist history that favors an interpretation of the material foreshadowing and paralleling the rise of esoteric Buddhist traditions in Japan, Copp's method is to focus primarily on the material evidence. He does not attempt to make connections to the various Buddhist schools and traditions (Chan, Huayan, Tiantai, Pure Land, etc.) that the conventionally accepted theory of Chinese Buddhist history suggests comprised the foundation of the Chinese Buddhism between roughly the seventh to tenth centuries.

In two introductory chapters, the introduction, subtitled '"Dharanis and the Study of Buddhist Spells" (1-28), and "Scripture, Relic, Talisman, Spell" (29-57), the author defines his understanding of "dharani" and several of its many Chinese translations, engages with earlier scholarship to demarcate his space of operation, and outlines his own personal methodology. He correctly calls into question the conventional assumption that the dharani procedures introduced by Indian ritual masters commonly referred to as the so-called "Tantric or Esoteric masters" of the eighth century obliterated or overwrote the earlier widespread culture of ritual practices involving dharani, and gratifyingly seems to espouse the open-minded view that multiple layers of old and new practices probably existed...