In “I Sing the Body Electric” (1855), Walt Whitman underscores how corporeality defines metaphysical experience. Paul Copp's The Body Incantatory promotes the parent notion that materiality has rich and typically overlooked religious ramifications. Copp's argument can be summed up as follows: in medieval Chinese Buddhism the adept's physical interactions with ritual objects such as dhāraṇī “spells” are just as significant in framing religious experience, if not more so, than reading or reciting texts. As a corollary, material culture is emphasized as an untapped source of data for our understanding of Buddhism. In the broader context of Chinese history, this may not appear as a particularly novel idea; scholars of early China, for instance, routinely combine textual study (of both received and excavated sources), archaeological analysis, and art historical perspectives in their work. But for Buddhist studies, in which early-modern biases toward philology and the primacy of “scripture” inexplicably persist, Copp's position is nothing short of revolutionary.
The Body Incantatory opens with a muscular preface that introduces many of the positions that undergird subsequent chapters. To begin with, Copp stresses that the dhāraṇī or “spells” that constitute the centerpiece of his book are not exclusively oral; they are also tangible ritual objects, worn as amulets, gazed upon as forms of iconography, and permeating the practitioners' body through the various media including dust and shadow. For Copp, the technical culture of “material incantations” inspires doctrinal developments in medieval Chinese Buddhism. Rather than text dictating practice, the on-the-ground physicality of practice leads while scripture attempts to keep up.
The book's introduction provides an overview of dhāraṇī as an object of scholarly inquiry. It contextualizes the academic partiality toward orality. On the basis of a variety of Buddhist textual sources, it also surveys multiple inflections the term acquires in China, revealing a spectrum of meaning that spans from dhāraṇī as a specific quality of the bodhisattva to dhāraṇī as “wholly grasping” or enlightenment.
The first chapter departs from the traditional text-centered Buddhist studies approach to dhāraṇī by focusing on written spells or “material incantations.” In his treatment of inscribed dhāraṇīs as generators of merit, enshrined relics, or worn amulets, Copp is careful to underscore their indebtedness to Indic religions, while also pointing to Chinese traditions. With respect to the latter, dhāraṇīs parallel the indigenous concept of fu (“talisman,” “amulet,” or “symbol”). Copp rightfully calls for a more inclusive view of the Chinese religious landscape in which repertoires of practice in their immediate local context would supersede stale binary constructs such as elite versus popular traditions or Daoism versus Buddhism. This chapter could benefit from an exploration of Chinese Buddhist fu and their related methods. This would illustrate Copp's arguments even more vividly, all the while shedding light on the extent to which material dhāraṇīs practices in China were shaped by specifically Chinese Buddhist applications of fu.
In chapter 2, Copp relies on Baosiwei's (d. 721) and Amoghavajra's (705–44) translations of the Incantation of Wish Fulfillment (T. 1154, 693 CE; and T. 1153, eighth century) to analyze adornment, the first of two modes of material incantations that constitute the body incantatory. This substantial chapter covers the wearing of spells as incantation cords and armlets. It scrutinizes some of the substances used in crafting the spells and provides a chronological typology on the basis of their physical and iconographic features. To summarize, dhāraṇīs transition from non- or half-xylographic personalized, episodic Indic trans-Asian objects to fully xylographic, depersonalized, purely iconic and standardized apotropaia. Adding to the dichotomy, Copp describes the former as more representative of individualized, local, and accessible network of practices, while the latter is emblematic of a prescriptive high tradition. Overall, The Body Incantatory decries the oppositional cleavages between Indic and Chinese cultures, for example, but in a number of instances, it also reifies them. This may be a necessary strategy in imparting the relevance of material culture to a Buddhological readership that is typically focused on scripture alone, but it runs the risk of merely changing the polarity of the dichotomies without overcoming them. Fortunately, Copp clarifies and contextualizes many of the categories that he uses.
Chapter 3 looks at “unction” or anointment, the second mode through which material incantations are made efficacious for the body incantatory. Again, this chapter centers on a textual source, the Incantation of Glory (T. 967, seventh century) translated by Buddhapālita, and its recommendations for transferring the powers of dhāraṇīs onto the body or other sites, including cadavers. Enchanted ash, soil, dust, oil, and most intriguingly, shadows figure prominently as vectors of transference. In this context, one of the chief material supports for spells is the dhāraṇī-pillar. Copp closely ties the unique practice of erecting these stone banners throughout Tang China to the translation and spread of the Incantation of Glory. The pillars were eloquent physical tokens of state consolidation and imperial expansion, but they also transferred the merit of the dhāraṇīs with which they were inscribed to all those who came in contact with their dust (through wind) or shadow, thereby anointing their bodies and dissolving their karmic debts. Copp candidly acknowledges some of the methodological wrinkles in his oppositional model of vernacular Indic (episodic) and elite Chinese (iconic) dhāraṇī logics. Yet, as he explains, there is still value in it when considering local developments of dhāraṇī culture and a complex transcontinental reception history.
The final chapter is devoted to Zanning's (920–1001) “Chuan mizang” (Transmission of the mystic store), a short essay on the history of dhāraṇī practice. In it, the Song-dynasty Buddhist scholar-official presents incantations as Buddha nature (xing) or the “mystic store” (mizang), two concepts that refer to the nature of reality itself. Copp explains that the significance of Zanning's nutshell treatise is that, through its history of elite incantation specialists, it provides a precious glimpse into the diffuse tradition of dhāraṇī practice that was distinct from that of high Esoteric Buddhism. Here, conventional polarities are resoundingly blurred. Zanning's essay, which is encased in the canonical ex cathedra Historical Digest of the Buddhist Order (T. 2126), is probed for a reading of dhāraṇī that is at odds with normative ones while nonetheless firmly resting on doctrinal notions, some of them indigenous and scholarly.
Rather than rehearsing the findings from individual chapters, the succinct coda retraces some of the key thematic threads that traverse the book. In this conclusion, Copp also defines the contours of his proposed approach to the study of medieval Chinese Buddhism: he prescribes balancing a consideration of local material practices to highlight Buddhism's trans-Asian aspects with a commitment to underlining indigenous conceptual developments so as to not overemphasize doctrinal or institutional continuities with India.
Copp is to be commended for his bid to redirect and reshape the study of medieval Chinese Buddhism in The Body Incantatory. It is a lofty aspiration for sure, but one that will succeed for two reasons. The first is that Copp is not alone in his endeavor. He stands shoulder to shoulder with a handful of scholars who through recent publications have been taking the field in stimulating new directions. The second is that he has more than convincingly argued his case. As Whitman conveys in his poem, the material and the corporeal are primary loci for experiencing life, including its religious dimensions; and “If any thing is sacred the human body is sacred.…” Copp has established the capital importance of bodily practice and material culture along with the necessity for a combination of methodologies or data in painting a complete picture of dhāraṇī practice in medieval China.
