Spells and the Ritual Imagination in Medieval Chinese Buddhism by Paul Copp

Author:Paul Copp
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REL007020, Religion/Buddhism/Rituals & Practice, HIS008000, History/Asia/China
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2014-09-08T16:00:00+00:00

[In a tale] passed on from the western nations, there was man who washed his hands in water before he read this scripture [that is, the Flower Garland]. The water drenched an ant. Because of this it relinquished its life and afterwards was reborn in a heaven. How much greater would the efficacy of receiving and keeping the text be! The merit from that would be inconceivable.122

It would be difficult, I think, to give a more vivid illustration of the infusing efficacies of sacred inscription, of its ability to transfer, contagion-like, through media rarely thought to carry the power of words, such as wash water, or shadow.123 Here, the spread of the power occurs before the reader has even touched the scripture. Given that there is no explicit discussion of how this happens—and there very rarely are such discussions—we have little to go on here other than what accounts of related phenomena imply: that nearness to, or possession of, sacred documents is enough to receive their benefits; that even seeing them, or thinking about them, is enough. The version of the crux of this story that occurs in the second Divākara translation of the Scripture of the Incantation of Glory, however, does not leave us in doubt as to the method of transmission. It is not in the form of a narrative, actually, that we find the parallel account of the power of the Uṣṇīṣavijaya-dhāraṇī, but as one item in a list of ways the spell can work. Just after the text describes the working of the spell through wind and shadow it goes on to tell of further ways the spell is active:

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