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

Perhaps most famously, dhāraṇīs were central elements of the ceremonies of Esoteric, or Tantric, Buddhism, by which for the purposes of this book I mean in particular the systems of ritual-philosophical practice that in mid and late Tang China centered on the Mahāvairocana, Susiddhikara, and Vajraśekhara (a.k.a. Sarvatathāgatatattvasamgraha) scriptures as explicated and elaborated by the priests Śubhakarasiṃha, Vajrabodhi, Amoghavajra, and their disciples, lineages that in the Tang flourished most importantly in the Qianfu, Daxingshan, and Qinglong monasteries of the capital Chang’an and the Jin’ge monastery of Mt. Wutai.1 In later centuries, these Chinese ritual dispensations took root (and grew) most successfully in Japan, while later Indic forms of Esoteric Buddhism established themselves most importantly in Tibetan cultural spheres. In both cases, the traditions are often considered to form a separate “vehicle” of Buddhist practice: the Vajrayāna. In such contexts, dhāraṇīs were often the main event of a rite; indeed, certain examples, such as the Zunsheng zhou, the Incantation of Glory (the Chinese version of the Uṣṇīṣavijaya)—one of the spells whose Tang history of practice this book takes as a focus—became the centers of Esoteric subtraditions of their own, particularly in Tibetan religious spheres. As this book will explore, however, older dhāraṇī traditions—perhaps especially in medieval China, in the centuries before the distinctive dhāraṇī-deity cults become widespread around the turn of the second millennium CE—constituted a vibrant heritage of their own, with its own logics and histories quite apart from those of the high Esoteric traditions. Indeed, a principal goal of this book is to explore relatively neglected elements in the history of Buddhist incantation practice in China, practices that have been considered poor relations of those of the more glamorous lineages of high Esoteric Buddhism preeminent in the imperial capitals of the middle and late period of the Tang Dynasty.

My interest in this topic, and in my particular approach to it, grew out of the observation that in a wide range of Buddhist writings the transformative speech of the Buddha—including dhāraṇīs—was at times said itself to undergo uncanny transformations, to become something entirely unlike speech that yet retained its potency as an agent of ultimate spiritual transformation. In the case of dhāraṇīs it could, to take an example that will require all of chapter 3 to fully explore, become dust, shadow, or stone imbued with the same saving power as a sūtra or spell. This discovery proved to be but the first hint that the usual definitions of dhāraṇīs and other similar incantations, which claim they are potent only as accurately reproduced Sanskrit sounds, were too thin to account for the richness of the ways these incantations were imagined and used in medieval Chinese Buddhism. Dhāraṇīs in this period, in short, were not what we have been told they were. What follows in this book is an attempt to begin to give a better account of the plastic and contingent nature of spells as Chinese of the latter centuries of the first millennium CE understood them—that is, as they wrote about them, put them into practice, and constructed them in material forms. The study is organized around the broad question of what kinds of things dhāraṇīs were seen to be, and made into, by the people of this age. This question, as I hope the above example suggests, is neither as trivial nor its answers as self-evident as they might at first seem. Answering the question, in fact, reveals aspects of Buddhist practice that have remained obscure in part because these spells have seemed relatively trivial (or worse) when compared with the philosophical systems and literary monuments of the religion, and because their natures and forms have seemed self-evident and thus unworthy of sustained investigation. This book argues, very much to the contrary, that Chinese traditions of dhāraṇī practice richly reward sustained attention. Understood within their various contexts, dhāraṇīs are much more than simply the strings of Sanskrit syllables rendered awkwardly into Chinese that are their most basic, and widely known, forms. For Chinese Buddhists of the late centuries of the first millennium CE, spells entailed ways of imagining—writing, building, and acting—that are far more complex, and surprising, than their usual scholarly conceptions reveal.

One of the basic assumptions of this book is that these wider sets of practices and images are not meaningfully separate from the incantations themselves. Just as when one considers an object of practical use one is not simply thinking about an object of a certain shape and heft but, at least implicitly, the range of practices of which it is part, so spells must not be seen merely as strings of awkward syllables but also as the ways they were imagined, received, reproduced, and interpreted. Borrowing the phrasings of two scholars of mysticism, spells were both a “topic and its interpretation; the interpretation is part of the topography.”2 My attempt to broaden our conception of these Buddhist incantations to include their interpretations, structuring contexts, and the modes of their enactments and depictions is also a tactic intended to make clear the degree to which dhāraṇīs have a synecdochic relationship (a trope itself central to classical understandings of dhāraṇīs) with larger Buddhist and Chinese traditions. The relationship between Buddhist spells and Buddhism, for example, is not at all that between “magic” and “religion” as this dyad has commonly been understood in Western scholarly discourse—that is, as practices based in mutually exclusive logics. The magic of Buddhist spells (the dazzling and mysterious potencies attributed to them) is simply that of Buddhism itself. Attention to the details of Chinese Buddhist spell craft, in fact, reveals veins in the Buddhist tradition—as well as commonalities among traditions—that are otherwise difficult to see. Despite their near invisibility in modern scholarship on Chinese Buddhism, Chinese Buddhists of the period treated in this book used (chanted, read, touched) dhāraṇīs and mantras nearly every day. Taking this fact seriously allows us to cut across conceptual terrain shaped in part by the tradition of seeing Chinese Buddhism principally in terms of doctrines, schools, festivals, deity cults, sacred locales, and the other guiding frames of contemporary scholarship.³ Spell practices offer their own maps.

This is especially true of the practices and forms of two dhāraṇīs, the incantations known as the Dasuiqiu tuoluoni, the Incantation of Wish Fulfillment (Chinese versions of the Mahāpratisarā dhāraṇī) and the Foding zunsheng tuoluoni, the Incantation of the Glorious Buddha’s Crown (Chinese versions of the Uṣṇīṣavijayā dhāraṇī, often called by its abbreviated name, the Incantation of Glory). The material practices that featured these two dhāraṇīs, which achieved great popularity in China in the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries, lie at the heart of this book. Though both were, importantly, incantations—that is, texts chanted aloud in elaborate monastic ceremonies and in smaller personal rites—they were most famous in this period as what in this book I will call “material incantations”: spells active in physical form as inscriptions. But the full range of their reproductions is important to keep close in mind; each of their modes will be featured at various points in this book. In the late medieval period these (and other) Buddhist incantations were written, stamped, and printed on amulets worn on the body; they were carved on pillars, written on funerary jars and coffins, and embedded in literary texts. They were analyzed in extensive and densely philosophical commentaries and praised in miracle tales and poems. Stories about them (or images from those stories) were painted on cave-shrine walls, and the spells themselves were personified and then painted, sculpted, visualized, and contemplated. This startling range of reception and production eases our passage across the boundaries of the conceptual terrain mentioned before. Attention to the full range of Buddhist spell practice allows a more complete grasp of the practices of Tang Buddhism than is possible through the study of most other single components of the religion.

This brings us to one of the book’s main methodological points. A full accounting of dhāraṇīs shows that some of the most striking philosophical claims of medieval Chinese Buddhism had material life in the community, not simply in the minds and commentaries of the monastic literati. In something like a mutually enriching causal loop, in fact, doctrinal conceptions were at times partly shaped by material practice, from which many of their metaphors for what was potent and true were drawn; in turn, material practice was in part shaped by doctrine (and on and on). We can see this in the case of seals in medieval Chinese Buddhism, ritual objects with close connections to material incantation practice. It is clear in the interplay of seal metaphors and material practices, in what the art historian Eugene Wang has noted as the “oscillation” the term “Buddha seal” displays “between an abstraction and a material object.”4 A Chinese description of the nature of the practice engaged in by a Buddhist monk at Nālanda, the great Indian monastic university, states that the monk “held in his palm the secret key to meditation and wore at his sash the mystic seal of the Thus-Come One.”⁵ At the most basic level, in its context this means simply that he was skilled at meditation and at the ritual practices of Esoteric Buddhism (we encounter this statement within the biography of Śubhakarasimha, one of the three chief Esoteric masters of early eighth century China). In the immediate context of the account one need not linger over the metaphors or read them too closely; the images themselves are clear and potent. In a study that takes seriously the imaginative and bodily character of ritual practice, however, immediate rhetorical contexts are only one piece in a much larger cultural realm in which the particular characters of certain bodily practices, here including styles of dress and adornment that were very much current in Tang China, provided metaphors for Buddhist virtues and practices.

As a host of philosophers and social theorists have noted, this is, in general terms, simply a standard feature of human social life. In the words of Jonathan Lear, “as we put ourselves forward in one way or another [or, here, as we put another forward], we tend to do so in terms of established social understandings and practices.”6 In the case of the Chinese account of the monk at Nālanda, socially potent styles of dress provided figures of the (officially) inconceivable nature of the Buddha’s cosmic wisdom and skill and the monk’s mastery of it. What is the ungraspable interfusion of mind and world, the inconceivable unity that is irreconcilable difference, the mystic quiddity of no-thing? It is, here, the wearing of a seal (of the Buddha figured as king), a common sight and action with its own bodily particularities: robes of authority, a cord weighted with a seal hanging down. The “mystic seal” of the Awakened One—the truth of Buddhism—was understandable and in some sense enactable as a particular bodily form and disposition. The metaphor was also a material reality. This was the case, as here, even when a practice-derived metaphor had had a long history in Chinese religious discourse and grown common there, as seal metaphors had by the time the account appeared. Yet seals continued to be worn in religious practice and, more to the point here, during the age with which this book is concerned, and in which the passage quoted appeared, seal uses and forms were undergoing important transformations and were very much a living part of Tang Buddhist culture. The material reality was also a metaphor. Attention to ritual practice in history can reveal vitalities in linguistic usage and conception that are otherwise difficult to see. The reverse is also true: once an image derived from practice took on power in the tradition, the practice itself, if still a live option, was in turn enriched and intensified by the life of that image in language and thought. The domains of thought and bodily practice were interwoven. The mind was in the body, in ornaments and clothing, and those ornaments were in the mind.⁷

Ideas such as these inform some of the most interesting recent work on material culture and constitute part of a scholarly conversation to which I hope this book can contribute. In terms of work in this vein on premodern Chinese material (and visual) culture, Martin J. Powers’s Pattern and Person: Ornament, Society, and Self in Classical China stands out for me as especially insightful, particularly in its exploration of “graphic paradigms … [that framed] social and political thought.”8 Powers examines the ways that the classical Chinese “physical understanding of fluid behavior” may have shaped early understandings of the nature of the Dao such as those found in the Huainanzi, and that, as the epigraph to this preface quotes him, bronze pots may have shaped modes of thought as much as the other way around.⁹ He credits David Keightley’s work on “archaeology and mentality” as inspiration, particularly his discussions of the “relationship between the technology of a culture and its conception of the world and man himself.”¹⁰ This book will not attempt to advance any theories of material culture and cognition, but takes from works such as those of Martin Powers, Richard Sennett, and Webb Keane a basic methodological orientation toward its subject. To study Buddhist doctrine, for example, shorn of the particular bodily practices of particular historical moments is to denature it, to erase the specific character of the images that in part make it up. This book, alongside the body of work that has inspired it, highlights the profound interrelationship of conceptual thought and bodily practice characteristic of Buddhism (and perhaps all other human activities).

The material culture of Buddhism in medieval China was central to the practice of the religion, not at all the secondary aspect that too many modern studies have made it out to be (when they treat it at all). Buddhism was a thing of architectural structures and images and words on stone, silk, and the walls of caves perhaps even more than it was of words inked on paper to be read, chanted aloud, or analyzed in commentaries. Among the chief ways, after all, that most Buddhists of this period would have engaged the religion most often were in forms such as spell pillars, sūtra paintings on silk and on temple walls, and the monumental presences of cliff-carved images and temples. These forms of engagement shaped the understandings of Buddhism for medieval Chinese. The towering majesty of the cliff-sculpted Longmen Mahāvairocana Buddha imposing upon those standing beneath it their inescapable insignificance within the awful grandeur of the Buddhist cosmos (and, in its original context, the Chinese imperium); an armlet on one’s upper right arm, in visual and bodily mimesis of the bodhisattvas portrayed on temple walls, bearing potent phrases promising release from the prison created by eons of deluded or evil acts—bodily practices such as these did not merely illustrate doctrines, they made them part of human bodily mortal life. More than this, centered on material objects whose particular bundles of forms, materials, and physical surrounds inevitably encouraged understandings and modes of engagement that escaped those narrowly prescribed in religious doctrine, material practice (and culture) has its own ungovernable social power, to which the writers of normative scripture must at times react.¹¹ At least to the extent that they were part of actual practice, the material and the intellectual were fully intertwined in medieval Chinese Buddhism.

Yet, though objects inscribed with Buddhist incantations lie at its heart, this is neither a work of art history nor (at least primarily) a study of Buddhist material culture; it focuses instead on practices—discursive, ritual, and conceptual—and in the main it does so through analyses of texts. (Chapter 2, a study of amulets of the Incantation of Wish-Fulfillment, is an exception). The book has two principal goals. In terms of the history of Buddhist incantation practice in China, it shows that contrary to the prevailing model of the singular and all-encompassing evolution of Esoteric Buddhism, an evolution usually said to have subsumed and erased the older traditions of incantation practice that had in part given rise to it, dhāraṇī practices in late medieval China were instead part of a far more open and wide-ranging technical culture—one connecting medieval China with the cultures to its west and south—that carried forward, among other things, an ancient heritage of protective magic. Dhāraṇīs and dhāraṇī practices were important parts of Buddhism in China for at least five hundred years before proponents of the “Esoteric synthesis” began to establish their lineages there in the early eighth century; during that half-millennium this history shaped religious practice in China in ways that have only recently begun to be appreciated.¹² This history, the book argues, in no way came to an end after the Esoteric lineages were established in the Tang capitals. After an introduction and first chapter that lay out some of the background (historical and theoretical) necessary to an exploration of these Chinese histories of practice, the two central chapters of the book—chapters 2 and 3—explore two histories of material incantation in the late medieval period, those centering on the incantations of Wish Fulfillment and Glory. Chapter 4, “Mystic Store and Wizards’ Basket,” then steps back from a focus on individual practical traditions and considers the broader history of Chinese Buddhist incantation practice of which the two incantatory traditions, as well as that of the Esoteric lineages, were part.

Centering an exploration of incantation practices in evidence such as that contained in Chinese tombs of the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries, as I do in this book, rather than in the texts of the high ceremonial traditions of the great monasteries of the capitals, makes clear that the older and simpler practices remained a vital option for Chinese of the late Tang, Five Dynasties, and early Song periods, quite apart from their syntheses within the burgeoning tradition of Buddhist Tantra.¹³ That is, even as eminent monks such as Yuanzhao (d. 778) and Kūkai (774–835) were training in the imperial monasteries of Chang’an, immersing themselves in the doctrines and learned dispositions of high Esoteric ritual practice and spreading its texts and lineages across East Asia, new forms of ancient dhāraṇī practices were spreading among the people, inculcating their own ideas and bodily ways—spreading, in fact, among a diverse swathe of medieval Chinese, from little-known monks and local Buddhist organizations and traveling merchants to emperors such as Tang Suzong (711–762; r. 756–762) and high-ranking ministers such as the poet Bai Juyi (772–846). The book is thus not a study of Esoteric Buddhism in the strict sense (though it will at times touch on the subject) but of other traditions of Buddhist practice within the wider heritage of which the high Esoteric tradition was but one exemplar. It is intended in part to begin a study of this wider heritage in China and to begin the elucidation of a better model for its place in the history of Chinese Buddhism.

The second goal of this book is, once again, more simply to explore the ritual logics of material incantations and the understandings of their nature implied within those logics. As noted earlier, dhāraṇīs—and especially those dhāraṇīs said to be active in inscribed forms and often discovered in those forms in contexts of talismanic use—were not what most canonical accounts (both traditional and modern) have made them out to be. Discovering what they were requires attention not only to the pronouncements of scholastic commentaries and other explicitly normative writings but also and especially to small and ordinary details found in a range of writings and in a range of ritual practices and their excavated instrumenta. In giving close attention to descriptions of material incantations and their proper enactments, and to what those descriptions entailed about how the natures of both were imagined, this book will seek to elucidate what we might think of as some of the structuring images in medieval Chinese Buddhism: metaphors and concepts that, along with others, conditioned the ways one could write, pray, or move.

The book centers the two metaphors that, it argues, were at the heart of material dhāraṇī practice in late medieval China—that were in fact in large part what made certain inscribed spells spells, and not relics or merely parts of scriptures. These were the tropes of adornment and anointment, which chapter 1 shows were derived from ancient Indic techniques for enchanting bodies with spoken incantations, whether to heal or otherwise empower them. Though they were originally simply small ritual modes, two among a great many, each came to be the primary governing logic of an individual dhāraṇī tradition. The ritual/conceptual figure of adornment, as chapter 2 shows, underlay the practices of the Mahāpratisarā dhāraṇī, the Incantation of Wish Fulfillment; while that of anointment structured the most basic understandings of the Uṣṇīṣavijayā dhāraṇī, the Incantation of Glory—and was, indeed, encoded within the very words of the spell, as chapter 3 shows. Indic figures of the imagination were not the only ones in play in the traditions, however. Chapter 1 explores how material Buddhist incantations in China absorbed, particularly in their textual descriptions, tropes derived from ancient Sinitic amulet practices, especially those of seals and talismans (fu); it also examines the extent to which medieval Chinese seal and talisman practitioners, in turn, absorbed some of the conventions of Buddhist spell practice into their own techniques. Finally, the introduction and chapter 4 both discuss ways in which Buddhist philosophical doctrines were enacted in dhāraṇī practices over a period stretching nearly a thousand years.

I hope that this book can advance our understanding of what John Kieschnick has discussed in terms of the material culture of “sacred power” in Chinese Buddhism.14 As a general point, that numinous things were important in Buddhism and in Chinese religion is well known—relics and images, especially, have in the last decade or so received a great deal of attention, partly as an antidote for what some have seen as earlier Buddhology’s overemphasis on the purely philosophical aspects of the religion. My own focus here is on spell-inscribed objects, but it is important to keep in mind the fact that they are, in one regard, simply a subset of the much larger category of magical objects. We must be careful, however, not to overstate this relation, given that such a frame tends to flatten out important distinctions among objects like relics, images, and inscribed bells, and among structuring ideas of efficacy such as adornment and anointment, which as I try to show in this book run deep within Buddhism. The failure to make these distinctions seems to me a weakness of Kieschnick’s otherwise impeccable and profound study of sacred objects, in that he too often discusses all such things as if they were imbued with a homogenous “sacred power” that differs only in the forms of its manifestations.¹⁵ In his defense, it should be noted that the tendency of Chinese texts to describe the natures and workings of these objects in terms of the same vocabulary—particularly of ling and ganying—makes his recourse to a unifying idiom of “sacred power” understandable. It is difficult indeed to avoid at least an implicit distinction between “the words” and “the power”—understood as that between container and content—and to write as if the latter were cleanly detachable from the former. Once the idea of “power” arises, the distinction between it and its carrier seems unavoidable, but this way of speaking must not be allowed to slip into a rigid ontological distinction that can lead one to posit unhelpful equivalences between very different sorts of objects and the practices that featured them. The sometimes small differences in the ways numinous objects are described and used reveal subtle complexities that are best preserved in our own accounts. This position, in regards to the present subject, is clarified by John Strong’s work on relics of the Buddha, in which he calls attention to the fact that scholars’ tendencies to group relics and images together as if they were basically the same is not reflected in traditional accounts, which treat them as separate classes of things, with different logics.¹⁶ Material incantations, too, have their own logics; I treat them in this book with only bare reference to things like relics and images of the Buddha as a tactic to avoid this flattening of the complex terrain.

The imaginative power of medieval dhāraṇī practice is perhaps clearest in the ways its logics construed the human body. Though chanted spells were often directed at the physical person, material incantations, especially, were targeted at bodies that they might transform them—from painful into easeful, and more fundamentally from gross mortal stuff into the pure luminous substance of the truly real. For this reason—and also for the simple fact that material incantations were material objects—they were engaged bodily: touched, rubbed into skin, worn, approached, lived near, and sited close to bodies of the dead. These practices were elements in a vision of perfectible human being that, inspired by Walt Whitman’s “body electric,” I call in this book the “body incantatory”: the body adorned or infused with the stuff of a spell and transformed into it.17 The “uncanny transformations” noted earlier, the ways the speech of the Buddha could become purifying dust or shadow, were said in the tradition to have included comparable transformations of human bodies. One version of the marvelous bodies produced by dhāraṇī practice is strikingly evoked in a passage that I will consider at length in chapter 3, but which can here at the outset suggest something of what is to come. It describes the incantatory body resulting not from a material spell but from a chanted one.

If any man or god chants this dhāraṇī and then bathes other beings within a river or within the great sea, the water that is used to bathe these persons will infuse them and condense on their bodies, where it will dissipate all the heavy sins of their evil deeds. These people will be reborn in pure lands. They will be born as emanations on lotus flowers and will not receive birth through wombs, moisture, or eggs. How much greater is the power manifested while one is chanting [the spell]! If one walks down a road while chanting it and a great wind comes and blows the body hair, hair, and clothes [of the chanter], the wind that continues on, passing any of the classes of beings, blowing them and sticking to their bodies, will dissipate utterly all the heavy sins of their evil actions. These beings will not receive evil rebirths and will ever be born before buddhas.¹⁸

Though they are especially vivid, these claims are in many ways typical examples of the bodily transmutations featured in exhortations to Buddhist spell craft. Other accounts, as we will see, stress the new buddha-like luminosity and “diamond” (jin’gang; vajra) substance of spell-transformed bodies, as well as their healing properties—all, famously, properties of buddhas and bodhisattvas, as well as of the incantations that stood in for them. In fact, depictions of buddhas and bodhisattvas in late medieval paintings, for example, those in the Mogao caves near Dunhuang (a site of key importance in this study), present spectacular views of the bodies also promised in incantation scriptures. These figures radiate physical and spiritual ease. They are, nearly always, literally radiant: they shine, and in the case of buddhas in incantation scriptures, the luminosity they emit is at times said to be the very spells they speak.19 The author of the only surviving commentary on the Incantation of Glory devotes a great deal of time to the identity of incantation and light and on the power that inheres in this incantatory light; as well, other dhāraṇī scriptures report that the light spreading out from the body of the Buddha proclaims itself to be the very spell he is about to speak.²⁰ Buddhist scriptures and commentaries, in fact, dwell on the purifying power of this radiance; more, the tradition is in part structured around claims about the transformative flesh of the bodies of these divine beings—both their actual corporeal meat and bone, potent as relic or charm or even meal, and those special objects that are so closely associated with such beings that they are considered parts of their divine bodies: scriptures, images, objects, and spells. These too were said to be luminous, perfecting those who see or hear them, who think on them, who touch them, who wear them. Material incantations were in this way exemplars of a much wider set of objects construed as powerful within a continuum understood to link body and person. It is crucial when reading these accounts to keep in mind that what was true for the body was true for the person, for if in some styles of Buddhism the body is said really to be mind, in dhāraṇī practice the mind is, at least in part, really body: the bodily person—extending across lifetimes and worlds—alterable in its essence from something sinful, hell bound, and suffering into the very luminous purity of the buddhas.