The Body Incantatory

Spells and the Ritual Imagination in Medieval Chinese Buddhism

Paul Copp

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN:
  9780231537780
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Asian Art

Whether chanted as devotional prayers, intoned against the dangers of the wilds, or invoked to heal the sick and bring ease to the dead, incantations were pervasive features of Buddhist practice in late medieval China (600–1000 C.E.). Material incantations, in forms such as spell-inscribed amulets and stone pillars, were also central to the spiritual lives of both monks and laypeople. In centering its analysis on the Chinese material culture of these deeply embodied forms of Buddhist ritual, The Body Incantatory reveals histories of practice—and logics of practice—that have until now remained hidden.

Paul Copp examines inscribed stones, urns, and other objects unearthed from anonymous tombs; spells carved into pillars near mountain temples; and manuscripts and prints from both tombs and the Dunhuang cache. Focusing on two major Buddhist spells, or dh?ra??, and their embodiment of the incantatory logics of adornment and unction, he makes breakthrough claims about the significance of Buddhist incantation practice not only in medieval China but also in Central Asia and India. Copp's work vividly captures the diversity of Buddhist practice among medieval monks, ritual healers, and other individuals lost to history, offering a corrective to accounts that have overemphasized elite, canonical materials.

1. SCRIPTURE, RELIC, TALISMAN, SPELL: MATERIAL INCANTATIONS AND THEIR SOURCES

“WRITE THIS DHĀRAṆĪ DOWN”

For the reader of the literature on Buddhist spells—both traditional and modern—what is most arresting about written spells is not the natures or workings of the potencies attributed to them or their sometimes intricate and beautiful forms. It is the simple fact that they were to be written down at all. Buddhist spells, as one scholar has quipped, “unlike children, were to be heard but not seen; that is, they were to be spoken but not read.”¹ The writing of incantations, however, despite oft-repeated claims for the essential orality of these “utterances,” turns out to have constituted an important and complex part of medieval Buddhism. An examination of spell writing practices evidenced both in dhāraṇī-sūtras rendered into Chinese from the fifth through the eighth century and in the later material record reveals a set of profoundly rich traditions rooted in both Indian Buddhist and traditional Chinese cultural ground. The continuity of these practical traditions, including their discursive practices, within (at least) the area ranging from the Indian subcontinent in the West to the Japanese archipelago in the East will become clear, beginning in this chapter and then more fully in the next two. Part of this continuity was due simply to the spread of Buddhism, the fact that Asians of this period took up its practices and interpretive styles throughout a far-flung region. But that spread was not the only important vector in the growth of East Asian Buddhist traditions of material incantation. Another was constituted by the spread and elaboration—according to logics at times quite different from those of Buddhism—of native Chinese incantation and amulet techniques.² The extensive Chinese cultural resonances of, and perhaps in some cases sources of, certain of these techniques become clear when we examine them alongside closely related native talismanic and medical arts involving charms, seals, medicines, and elixirs. Simply looking to Buddhism’s spread, and to the accounts in its scriptures, is not enough to grasp the complexities of this strand of medieval Chinese religious life.

But, beginning with those scriptural accounts, what becomes clear after even a brief survey is that the functions and roles of written spells, not surprisingly, changed over time. Chinese translations dating from the seventh century,³ contemporary with or slightly earlier than the Indic scriptures of the incantations of Wish Fulfillment and Glory, the two incantations that are the main exemplars in this study, reflect pictures of dhāraṇīs consonant with those of these two spells. That is, like talismans or medicines, written dhāraṇīs were powerful in their own right and in their own ways, quite apart from any oral performance, or, in the case of native Chinese talismans and seals, the spells that would often accompany them. If we can take the texts preserved in the Chinese Buddhist canon to have been typical of their respective ages (an assumption that should not go unquestioned),⁴ this seems to have been a new development. I have not found many prescriptions for spell writing in either Chinese versions of Indic sūtras or in native Chinese Buddhist sūtras dating from before the seventh century that take the inscription to be potent in this way. In earlier texts, dhāraṇīs were to be written down as part of the kinds of contemplative practices discussed in the introduction, or because they were included in scriptures to be copied according to the logics of the “cult of the book” in Mahāyāna Buddhism. No special potency is attributed to the act of writing or to the particular natures of objects inscribed with spells; writing is for the most part either taken for granted or put in a position secondary to vocal enactment and auditory reception. Yet by the seventh century things had changed dramatically. Spell writing changed from an incidental practice to a central one, and descriptions of dhāraṇīs transformed correspondingly. Over its history in the medieval period, conceptions of and bodily engagements with written dhāraṇīs (what in this book I will often simply call their “imagination”) follow three models: written dhāraṇīs as simply the recorded speech of the Buddha, as textual relics of the Buddha, and finally, imagined in line with their spoken counterparts, as inscribed charms.⁵

These changes can be mapped according to two distinct historical trajectories. The first includes the earlier two categories of spell writing just mentioned: written spells as simply parts of Buddhist scriptures and as relics. The close relationship between these two forms is quite well known. The second basic trajectory resulted in the third set of practices: those that treat written spells as potent in ways that resemble their spoken counterparts. In terms of its appearance in Chinese versions of Buddhist scriptures, this model of written spells seems to have been a product of two parallel trends in Buddhist ritual practice. The first includes the practices in which inscribed dhāraṇīs were employed in ways that echo ancient Indic uses of spoken incantations to enchant bodies for healing or protection: spells were applied to the body directly or through media such as ash, oil, or dirt; or, alternatively, objects that had been enchanted were worn on the body as amulets. Beginning in Chinese translations of the late seventh century, we find the same prescriptions for the use of written spells. Though in these sources I have found no instances of inscribing spells directly onto the body, in the case of the Incantation of Glory and others of its kind, objects that had been inscribed with the dhāraṇī were said to be able to impart their efficacies physically, whether directly or via media such as dust, shadow, or wind. Likewise, objects inscribed with other dhāraṇīs, most notably for my purposes the Incantation of Wish Fulfillment, were worn as amulets in forms directly traceable to earlier practices centering on spoken incantations. The second trend that shaped the imagination of inscribed incantations was the assimilation of spell writing practices to those involving amulets, medicines, and seals—practices that, by the seventh century, when talismanic spell writing seems to have appeared, had already had long and prominent histories in India, Central Asia, and China.

This chapter offers an overview of these three modes of Buddhist spell writing, moving quickly through the first two, which are both better covered in previous (and current) scholarship and of less importance to my project in this book. I explore the practical and metaphorical background for the third form of spell writing in more detail here to set the scene for the two chapters on individual traditions of dhāraṇī practice that follow.

COPYING SŪTRAS AND THEIR DHĀRAṆĪS

The earliest clear scriptural statement about the writing of dhāraṇī incantations⁶ that I have found is in the Qifo bapusa suoshuo da tuoluoni shenzhou jing, the Great Dhāraṇī Spirit-Spell Scripture Spoken by the Seven Buddhas and Eight Bodhisattvas, a large compendium of spell rites that dates from sometime between 317 and 420.⁷ The text does not draw special attention to the inclusion of writing as a proper form of dhāraṇī reception;⁸ it treats its spells simply as normal examples of Mahāyāna scripture, which are to be reproduced as often and in as many forms as possible, in order both to spread the doctrines they contain and to instantiate the great spiritual power, or “merit,” they embody. From their earliest days, Mahāyāna texts contained passages asserting that their realization in material form as inscriptions produced tremendous spiritual power, phenomena that scholars, following Gregory Schopen, have identified as features of a cult of the book in the tradition.⁹ Passages noted by Schopen include one from the Aṣṭasāhasrikā, one of the earliest of all Mahāyāna scriptures, asserting that “where this perfection of wisdom has been written down in a book, and has been put up and worshipped, there men and ghosts can do no harm, except as punishment for past deeds.”¹⁰ A sūtra’s incantations, in these contexts, appear to have been included simply because they were parts of these scriptures.

A typical example of a passage in the Scripture of Seven Buddhas and Eight Bodhisattvas mentioning the writing of spells runs as follows: “If practitioners copy (shuxie) or recite (dusong) this dhāraṇī they will earn the protection of thousands of buddhas in this very lifetime. Such a person at the end of his life will not fall into any of the evil paths of rebirth but will be reborn into Tuśita Heaven and see with his own eyes Maitreya.”¹¹ Sometimes the further verb “practice” (xiuxing) is added to the set of modes of reproduction listed above.¹² Since these verbs are also commonly used to describe what one should do with sūtras, dhāraṇīs do not seem to be special classes of text or utterance in these passages.

Another early passage that mentions the writing of dhāraṇīs—in a text roughly contemporary to the Seven Buddhas and Eight Bodhisattvas—treats the practice in a similar way, including it among a group of other modes of practice but not calling special attention to it. Here, however, writing is set slightly apart: it is not mentioned in the same breath as the others. This gives us a better view of the way the practice is seen in the text. The passage in question, from Dharmakṣema’s (Tanwuchen, 385–433) translation of the *Karuṇāpuṇḍarīkasūtra, the Scripture of the Lotus of Compassion (Beihua jing),¹³ i...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations
• Preface: The Body Incantatory
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Dhāranīs and the Study of Buddhist Spells
• 1. Scripture, Relic, Talisman, Spell
• 2. Amulets of the Incantation of Wish Fulfillment
• 3. Dust, Shadow, and the Incantation of Glory
• 4. Mystic Store and Wizards’ Basket
• Coda: Material Incantations and the Study of Medieval Chinese Buddhism
• Appendix 1. Suiqiu Amulets Discovered in China
• Appendix 2. Stein no. 4690: Four Spells
• Notes
• Glossary
• Sources
• Index