The Body Incantatory: Spells and the Ritual Imagination in Medieval Chinese Buddhism. By Paul Copp. Columbia University Press, 2014. 363 pages. ISBN: 9780231162708 (print) ISBN: 9780231537780 (e)
摘要
The Body Incantatory challenges a prevalent scholarly assumption that medieval dhāraṇī practice—magical Buddhist formulae—only involved verbal utterances. Paul Copp seeks to recover their use as “material incantations” and explore that materiality's logic, suggesting two such modes: adornment and anointment. The former logic understands dhāraṇī inscriptions as directly transferring power to their bearer, while in the latter power is imparted via a medium, much like blessing sacred water. The book's title cleverly encompasses both these modes: “the body incantatory” connotes both the body that receives incantation as well as that which is itself an incantation by being incanted. The scholar interested in Central Asia will be particularly interested in this book: Copp argues Central Asia is the epicenter of dhāraṇī's material use, relying throughout on archaeological evidence from that region. Overall, Copp's style and ample provision of background make his work readable for interested readers beyond area specialists. While a masterful study, The Body Incantatory suffers from some problematic theoretical assumptions. Copp seems to both fetishize and essentialize dhāraṇī practice in his attempt to demonstrate its continuity from the pre‐Tang until the Song. Throughout, the logics of adornment and anointment are left in an inaccessible past toward which “we must bracket modern assumptions about the nature of ‘things’ in order to understand.” Copp uses similarly broad assumptions when describing the origin of dhāraṇī practice as the product of Sinitic and Indic influences. Here Central Asia remains a passive locale where two greater cultures met, denying regional cultures and actors a constitutive role in the evolution of dhāraṇī practice. These considerations, however, hardly detract from the book achieving its ambitious aims.
