Manuscripts surviving from the eastern Silk Road site of Dunhuang make possible, among many studies, close explorations of the ways Chinese Buddhists of the ninth and tenth centuries constructed ritual programs. This talk will examine three features of those constructions: the natures of the frames by which Buddhist cultic texts and objects--narrative scriptures, incantations, and talismanic seals--were made the focuses of devotional and therapeutic 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.
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Paul Copp is the author of The Body Incantatory: Spells and the Ritual Imagination in Medieval Chinese Buddhism (Columbia University Press, 2014). He received his PhD from Princeton University and is currently associate professor of Chinese religion and thought at the University of Chicago, where he is active in the group in Buddhist studies and the Committee on Central Eurasian Studies. His presentations at UCLA are part of an ongoing book project tentatively titled "Seal and Scroll: Buddhism, Manuscript Culture, and the Ritualist's Craft."