Books by Paul Copp
Refiguring East Asian Religious Art: Buddhist Devotion and Funerary Practice, 2019
Within the realm of Buddhist art, death is often portrayed not as the end but instead as a new be... more Within the realm of Buddhist art, death is often portrayed not as the end but instead as a new beginning. Examining how pre-modern East Asians related to death as a broad concept is often just as impactful in the study of their culture and artwork as is the study of how they lived from day to day. This volume of twelve chapters is divided into four sections titled "Death of the Buddha and Buddhist Icons," "Kinship and Commemoration," "Filial Piety and Politics," and "Constructing Ritual Space." These chapters explore the powerful transformations that took place within ancient Buddhist societies when the life an individual came to an end and took on new life in unique forms of religious art and architecture. Dealing with concrete historical examples, these essays not only delve deep into the tightly woven interpersonal relationships, loyalties, and intense devotion that led to the creation of these religious and societal practices, they also challenge both the modern scholar and general reader to see with fresh eyes and refigure how we experience, conceptualize, and understand East Asian religious art.
Contributions by: Phillip E. Bloom, Madeleine Boucher, Sun-ah Choi, Liu Cong, Youn-mi Kim, Winston Kyan, Seunghye Lee, Sonya S. Lee, Wei-Cheng Lin, Kate Lingley, Katherine Tsiang, and Akiko Walley.
The Body Incantatory: Spells and the Ritual Imagination in Medieval Chinese Buddhism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014)
Papers by Paul Copp
Multi-Religious Perspectives on a Global Ethic: In Search of a Common Morality , 2021
I'm grateful to have the chance to respond to Hsiao-Lan Hu. Thinking about it as I prepared these... more I'm grateful to have the chance to respond to Hsiao-Lan Hu. Thinking about it as I prepared these brief remarks, I realized it was the first time, if I'm honest, that I have had the chance to participate in an academic conversation that might actually mean something, given the state of our world, a world in which there can be no quote-unquote ivory tower apart from the world. That old image-like the idea of a "nature" apart from human culture-is tattered and spent and more than ready to be carted off to the recycling bin. I found Hu's essay stimulating. It clarified issues for me that feel important. I'll talk about two of them here. The first concerns, to use a Buddhist image, the true nature of Buddhism as a religion or a family of practices. The second is about what we might learn from this understanding of the nature of Buddhist practice as we think about improving our global beingtogether-in-the-world-which is what I understand the aims of the Global Ethic to be. I'll take the insight into the nature of Buddhist practice first. Buddhism is too often, especially here in what we call "the West," understood to "really" be, first, a philosophy, or a set of doctrines about the nature of the impermanence of things. That is, very simply put, that things, understood as separate and distinct from other things, are evanescent and ever changing. Yet we cling to them anyway, misunderstanding their nature. This causes all kinds of problems for us. The basic Buddhist insight here is that no thing, in fact, exists separately and distinctly from all other things; that what actually exists, is a web of ever shifting relationships that we construe in particular ways dependent on our psychological and cultural minds. On this same view of what Buddhism most basically is, Buddhism is said to be a set of contemplative techniques intended to clarify these insights, to make them real in one's own life. And this is true, to an extent. But thinking that this is really what Buddhism is, is, as Hu shows, on a Buddhist reading simply delusional. Just like my own standard thoughts about myself being separate from everyone else are delusional. The ideas and practices I just too-simply outlined only arise under social conditions-particular cultural and historical social conditions, from which they are in no sense separable. As if, here in Chicago where I live, particular waves (philosophy, contemplation, devotion) could arise independent of this area's history and culture. Here we get to one of the important insights into the nature of Buddhist practice-and I would say into the Global Ethic-offered in Hu's essay. This is the centrality of habit to the formation of worlds-and not merely personal habit but institutional and cultural habit. Buddhist texts sometimes speak of the ways we are as if smoked-through with predilections
International Journal of Buddhist Thought and Culture, 2020
Guest Editor's introduction to special issue on Dhāraṇī and Mantra. Issue 30.2 (2020) of the Inte... more Guest Editor's introduction to special issue on Dhāraṇī and Mantra. Issue 30.2 (2020) of the International Journal of Buddhist Thought and Culture
Refiguring East Asian Religious Art: Buddhist Devotion and Funerary Practice, 2019
Afterword to Refiguring East Asian Religious Art: Buddhist Devotion and Funerary Practice, edited... more Afterword to Refiguring East Asian Religious Art: Buddhist Devotion and Funerary Practice, edited by Wu Hung and Paul Copp
The Medieval Globe 4.1, 2018
AS ELSEWHERE IN the premodern world, seals — and, even more importantly,conceptions of seals, and... more AS ELSEWHERE IN the premodern world, seals — and, even more importantly,conceptions of seals, and of the human behaviors that featured them — were central to the practice of religion in premodern China. They are perhaps most famous in what are called the “ Esoteric, ” or Tantric, forms of Buddhism in China, which, as in India, feature hand gestures and bodily postures known as mudrās — literally “ seal ” in Sanskrit — a word that in Chinese is straightforwardly translated by the main word for seal (and stamp) in that language: yin 印 . Beyond ritual postures, and again following Indic conventions, seals in the Esoteric traditions also provided
central metaphors for a range of practices and ideas in the Esoteric traditions. Seals indeed — in part due to the infusion of Indic conceptions and practices — possessed a nearly unmatched richness of polysemy in Chinese religious discourse and practice. But they did more thanprovide metaphors for practice: actual seals (and stamps) also had their places in the hand of Chinese religious specialists of a range of traditions and
styles. Echoing both older Chinese and Indic techniques alike, seals in the period treated here (ca. 600 – 1000 CE, an age sometimes called “ late medieval ” ) were key tools of ritualists, employed either as adjuncts to spells or as the delivery mechanisms of inscribed spells or talismanic texts and images. These metaphors and physical practices, and the interplay between them, are the subject of this brief survey.
Language and Religion, edited by Robert A. Yelle, Courtney Handman, and Christopher I. Lehrich (Boston/Berlin: Walter de Gruyter), 2019
Focusing on rituals for the chanting of Buddhist scriptures and spells, this study attempts to an... more Focusing on rituals for the chanting of Buddhist scriptures and spells, this study attempts to answer the following question: What can the structures and contents of Chinese manuscript liturgies for such rites suggest about the nature of the ritual cultures in which they were produced? It examines three features of the liturgies: the natures of the frames by which texts were made the focuses of recitation rites, the borrowings and adaptations of existing materials of which those frames were made, and the understandings of the nature of scriptural language implicit in these practices.
Cahiers d'Extrême-Asie 20 (2011) : 193–226
Anointing Phrases and Narrative Power: A Tang Buddhist Poetics of Incantation
History of Religions, 2012
This article takes a case-study approach to an exploration of the potencies of Sanskrit
dhāraṇī ... more This article takes a case-study approach to an exploration of the potencies of Sanskrit
dhāraṇī incantations as they were construed in the discourses and practices of Buddhists in Tang China (618–907 CE), an age that saw both the rise of the newly imported Esoteric Buddhist traditions in the great monasteries of the capitals and new developments across the land in the by then already half-millennium-old history of
dhāraṇī practice in China.
Cahiers d’Extrême-Asie 17 (2008) : 239-264
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African …, Jan 1, 2008
in Orzech, Sorensen, Payne, eds., Esoteric Buddhism and the Tantras in East Asia
Voice, dust, shadow, stone: The makings of spells in medieval Chinese Buddhism
Ph.D. Dissertation, Princeton University Department of Religion, Jan 1, 2005
UMI, ProQuest ® Dissertations & Theses. The world's most comprehensive collectio... more UMI, ProQuest ® Dissertations & Theses. The world's most comprehensive collection of dissertations and theses. Learn more... ProQuest, Voice, dust, shadow, stone: The makings of spells in medieval Chinese Buddhism. by Copp ...
Book Reviews by Paul Copp
Journal of Chinese Religions, Volume 36, 2008, pp. 176-179, 2008
"Throughout, Mollier’s work is a fascinating and profound exploration, often of material that has... more "Throughout, Mollier’s work is a fascinating and profound exploration, often of material that has until now received little if any attention from scholars. Her study of “sorcery” as it was constructed in Daoist and Buddhist traditions, for example—which like other chapters makes ample use of
vivid pictorial and manuscript evidence—is a landmark study that delves deep into a concern whose pervasiveness in these traditions is easily overlooked, since its signs were often buried within long paragraphs or (as she reveals) tucked into small corners of paintings or manuscript illustrations. It can, along with the other rich veins of Buddho-Daoist, and Dao-Buddhist traditions she explores in the book, no longer be overlooked."
Journal of the American Oriental Society , Vol. 135, No. 4 (October–December 2015), pp. 859-861, 2015
"This is a landmark study that greatly advances our understanding of the history of Buddhist ritu... more "This is a landmark study that greatly advances our understanding of the history of Buddhist ritual practice in both India and East Asia. Scholars currently at work on Esoteric Buddhism and on the broader history of related practices can now gratefully build on the new foundation Shinohara has made."
Review of " From Mulberry Leaves to Silk Scrolls New Approaches to the Study of Asian Manuscript Traditions," edited by Justin Thomas Mcdaniel and Lynn Ransom
Research Cluster "Text-image Relations" (FROGBEAR) by Paul Copp
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Books by Paul Copp
Contributions by: Phillip E. Bloom, Madeleine Boucher, Sun-ah Choi, Liu Cong, Youn-mi Kim, Winston Kyan, Seunghye Lee, Sonya S. Lee, Wei-Cheng Lin, Kate Lingley, Katherine Tsiang, and Akiko Walley.
Papers by Paul Copp
central metaphors for a range of practices and ideas in the Esoteric traditions. Seals indeed — in part due to the infusion of Indic conceptions and practices — possessed a nearly unmatched richness of polysemy in Chinese religious discourse and practice. But they did more thanprovide metaphors for practice: actual seals (and stamps) also had their places in the hand of Chinese religious specialists of a range of traditions and
styles. Echoing both older Chinese and Indic techniques alike, seals in the period treated here (ca. 600 – 1000 CE, an age sometimes called “ late medieval ” ) were key tools of ritualists, employed either as adjuncts to spells or as the delivery mechanisms of inscribed spells or talismanic texts and images. These metaphors and physical practices, and the interplay between them, are the subject of this brief survey.
dhāraṇī incantations as they were construed in the discourses and practices of Buddhists in Tang China (618–907 CE), an age that saw both the rise of the newly imported Esoteric Buddhist traditions in the great monasteries of the capitals and new developments across the land in the by then already half-millennium-old history of
dhāraṇī practice in China.
Book Reviews by Paul Copp
vivid pictorial and manuscript evidence—is a landmark study that delves deep into a concern whose pervasiveness in these traditions is easily overlooked, since its signs were often buried within long paragraphs or (as she reveals) tucked into small corners of paintings or manuscript illustrations. It can, along with the other rich veins of Buddho-Daoist, and Dao-Buddhist traditions she explores in the book, no longer be overlooked."
Research Cluster "Text-image Relations" (FROGBEAR) by Paul Copp
Contributions by: Phillip E. Bloom, Madeleine Boucher, Sun-ah Choi, Liu Cong, Youn-mi Kim, Winston Kyan, Seunghye Lee, Sonya S. Lee, Wei-Cheng Lin, Kate Lingley, Katherine Tsiang, and Akiko Walley.
central metaphors for a range of practices and ideas in the Esoteric traditions. Seals indeed — in part due to the infusion of Indic conceptions and practices — possessed a nearly unmatched richness of polysemy in Chinese religious discourse and practice. But they did more thanprovide metaphors for practice: actual seals (and stamps) also had their places in the hand of Chinese religious specialists of a range of traditions and
styles. Echoing both older Chinese and Indic techniques alike, seals in the period treated here (ca. 600 – 1000 CE, an age sometimes called “ late medieval ” ) were key tools of ritualists, employed either as adjuncts to spells or as the delivery mechanisms of inscribed spells or talismanic texts and images. These metaphors and physical practices, and the interplay between them, are the subject of this brief survey.
dhāraṇī incantations as they were construed in the discourses and practices of Buddhists in Tang China (618–907 CE), an age that saw both the rise of the newly imported Esoteric Buddhist traditions in the great monasteries of the capitals and new developments across the land in the by then already half-millennium-old history of
dhāraṇī practice in China.
vivid pictorial and manuscript evidence—is a landmark study that delves deep into a concern whose pervasiveness in these traditions is easily overlooked, since its signs were often buried within long paragraphs or (as she reveals) tucked into small corners of paintings or manuscript illustrations. It can, along with the other rich veins of Buddho-Daoist, and Dao-Buddhist traditions she explores in the book, no longer be overlooked."